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.