28 August 2022
After my positive-feeling negative split on my bike race on Saturday, I executed a disastrously negative-feeling POSITIVE split on my 5K open water swim on Sunday morning. To say that my body fell apart is an understatement. I went from averaging 1:26 high per 100 meters on my first half, to 1:42/100 over the last half … with the last 500 being an abysmal (for me) 1:55/100.
Somewhere around the 2500 meter mark, it felt like my left hip almost fully locked up (no doubt from Saturday’s bike race). My normal snap kick sets off the kinetic chain through my hip rotation, my core and my outstretched arm; it’s the source of power in my stroke and I totally lost it. Over the rest of the race, I swam flatter and flatter, both of my hips got tighter and tighter, and I got slower and slower. I tried breaststroke periodically for a bit to see if that would unlock my hip, but nothing doing. If one can limp in the water, that’s what the second half of the race felt like. If I had verbalized my emotions at the end, it would have been a whimper … for I had no energy to rage, to complain, to berate my own gall at thinking I could do both of these events in one weekend.
The moral of the story for this 55 year old is this: don’t do back-to-back endurance races on a single weekend!
The one saving grace of this race was that, according to my watch, each lap was 900 meters instead of 1,000 meters … so I ended up with 4,500 meters total. Had I had to do another 500 meters, who knows what would have happened?!?
Still, I am glad I did it. And I met a potential periodic swim training partner in the Barrie area … so it was GREAT for that