Surviving a lonely long pool swim

After the boring history stuff, I will start doing some real time updates with some scattering of background information. Today I had the fun of a 5.5 hour pool swim all by myself. Usually, I have been doing the long swims with my fellow English Channel wanna-be, Eliz. Unfortunately, she had to work this weekend. This left me all by my lonesome to study the line at the bottom of the pool. For those that are open water swimmers, you are aware that it is much easier from a boredom perspective to swim the long swims outside in open water then in a pool. Unfortunately, living in Colorado, all the outside bodies of water are either frozen or just a degree or two above freezing. This makes swimming outside challenging. My normal joke is it is great hypoxic training, you break the ice on one end of the lake and have to swim across and back with no breaths.

Since I am limited to a pool, I have the additional challenge of finding a pool where there is a 5.5 hour window without some activity such as swim teams or aqua aerobics. The only pool in town that I could find is a 24 hour fitness that as you can guess from the name is open 24 hours a day. They have aqua aerobics (which we fondly call the aqua bunnies) at 9:30am. Giving some buffer to finish before they start converting the pool, I aim to hit the water at 3:30am. I set my alarm for 2:30am, grab breakfast and head for the pool. I find it amusing to see our neighbors house unloading from a night of partying as I start my day. When I get to the pool, I am once again surprised with the fact that someone else is already in the water. I don't think I have arrived at the pool early enough to beat everyone in the water. There must be a lot of insomniacs in the city. So at 3:30am on the nose, I turn on my SwimMP3 player (yes, for the purist, I use an MP3 player for the long pool swims) and start my steady strokes.

Eliz and I have fallen into a pattern where our long works are a series of 30 minute swims. We choose this interval to allow for a regular feeding interval of 30 minutes to train ourselves to feed at this rate for the Channel swim. At our long swim pace, this basically makes it a set of 11 x 2K except for the time we take for feeding and bio breaks. Sometimes I count to see how far we go during the 30 minutes but usually I avoid that and let my mind wonder. My estimate is we actually only average about 1900 yards per 30 minutes. As the hours go by, we have a tendency to slow down. With two of us, one usually has the energy to pick the pace back up. Occasionally, one of us will get frisky and pick up the pace on one of the 30 minute segments to a more aggressive pace. Today, I was alone so it was going to be difficult to keep the pace up.

For the first 2 hours, I was able to keep a reasonably good pace. At the two hour mark, I was getting stiffer and I could feel the pace slow down. At the 2.5 hour mark, I had a gel with my Infinit/hot chocolate drink mix. I was pleasantly surprised that about 10-15 minutes later, I felt perky again and picked the pace up. I know most people get that reaction from gels but I rarely do. This perkiness held for a little more then an hour so by the 4 hour mark, I was back to slugging through water. I held off on my second gel until the 4.5 hour mark. This gel did not give me the perky pick me up. I am not sure why the difference. At the 5 hour feeding, I could see the end in sight and decided to try to descend the last 30 minutes. It took what seemed forever to get the muscles to pick up the pace but by the last 10 minutes, I was able to go about 10 seconds per 100 yards quicker then my slugging pace. Even though I was glad it was done, I was surprised to feel reasonably energetic at the end of the swim. I definitely felt I could go another 30 minutes and hit the magical 6 hour mark. The time when I finished was 9am. I climbed out of the water, went home and grabbed a couple hour nap before joining the world for the rest of the days activities.