Early morning swim

I woke up early this morning my regular 4:30am swim in the overly warm 2 lane health club pool and was shocked to find it nearly full.  Given the large variation in speeds that exist in non-swim club scenarios, circle swimming is awkward at best and usually avoided.  The usual mode is for swimmers to take half a lane so that maximum number of swimmers is only 4 in a two lane pool.  I jumped in to occupy the 4th and last available slot.  Minutes after I started, another swimmer shows up and has to wait.  I am pretty sure I was the only one in the pool that was motivated to swim that early in the morning by the fear of being in shape for an eventual English Channel crossing, why were the rest up that early?  Am I in a town occupied by a bunch of insomniacs?  During my brief hour of swimming , two people had to wait for a lane to open before another swimmer finished their workout.  When I left shortly after 5:30am, the pool was empty. What is the world coming to that the "rush hour" of swimming is between 4:30 to 5:30am in the morning?

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.

Rough Training Timeline

Now that I had a date, it was time to work out the details of the training timeline.  I still had to train and finish the Ironman I had signed up for in July of 2008.  My swim training was reasonably anemic (2 times a week for about 3000 yards a workout) to allow my limited training time to focus on biking and running.  As soon as I got back from the Ironman, I started ramping up my training. the goal was to quickly jump to 2.5 to 3 hours a workout and then start slowly building the length of the long swim by about 15 minutes every other week.  The goal was to get to a 6 hour swim by April 2010.  We signed up for SwimTrek's Long Distance Swim Camp in Malta the week of April 11, 2009.  The swim camp has a 6 hour English Channel qualifying swim scheduled during the week.  Our hope was to get the qualifying swim under our belt in the spring of 2009, back off and mentally recover for a few months before we start the more serious ramp up for the English Channel in summer of 2010.  If we have any problems during the qualifying swim, we can make another attempt in the fall of 2009.

Some issues with preparing for an April open water swim.  We live in Colorado where most outside bodies of water are more suitable for ice skating then swimming during the winter months.  The water won't be reaching the 50F (10C) range until April.  All of our training approaching swim will be in nice warm pools.   To complicate things, the local swim teams dominate the public pools so there is not a long multi-hour block that we can swim our long swims.  We solved this problem by joining a fitness club that is open 24 hours a day and typically start our long swims from 3-4am in the morning.  The downside is the fitness club main clientale are non-swimmers that want the pool temperature to be warm, 84F (29C).  This is not the best training for a cold water swim at 60F (15C).  We have discussed solutions to this including some flights to the coasts but that can get expensive.    So far, we have no solid solution but hopefully we will come up with one.