Good news! Results are in for the 5K I did right before departing for Bishkek. Even greater news: I got first place in my age group! How about those apples. I was also the oldest there, so boo-yah!
Now, before you get all impressed, know that my time, according to the website, was 2:15. I think it was more like 2:00; the race started late, so I wonder. Oh well, I knew it wouldn’t be a speedy race with little to no training before it. But wow, what a slow time.
This’ll be a quick after-action report on my 5K yesterday in the waters of the Potomac at National Harbor, MD. BLUF: A great time was had by Iron Mike!
I signed up for this swim in the hopes I’d get one more swim in before departing for Kyrgyzstan AND it would spur me on to swim more. You see, I intended on following the ChickenOSea training plan of 2x per week. I did swim more, at first. Then training began for this assignment, not to mention all the crap that comes with moving a household of six 6500+ miles, and my morning swims at the Y disappeared. So I switched to the “just be active” plan. And I decided the 5K would be purely a training, fun swim.
And it was! It took me forever. I forgot my Garmin and didn’t wear a watch, and the race organizers didn’t tell me my time (granted, I forgot to ask), but I’m thinking somewhere around 2:00. It was 5 laps of 1K each. The first lap hurt, but through it I figured I am always sore the first 1000-1500 of any long workout. Then laps 2-5 felt incredible! No pain, and my navigation was incredible. Way better than ever before. Maybe I should always taper 1-2 months prior to a swim?!
Re: Navigation. Here’s my SOP: I start out by sighting every 6-8 strokes, taking a quick “alligator eyes” glance to ensure I am lined up on the far buoy or landscape feature I’ve pegged as close enough (for the first buoy in National Harbor, you aim for the MacDonald’s). Then, if I’m dead on 3 glances in a row, I extend it to 10 strokes. If those 3 are good, then 12, and so on to 16. No matter how straight I’m swimming, I stick to 16 because if I go farther my brain starts yelling at me (“You know you’re slicing so you better take a peek!”). For this race, I was incredibly straight! Each time I looked up I was on target. It was an incredible feeling, especially with my right-side only breathing style (despite my coaching and training bilateral, once I’m “in the zone” I’m a unilateral breather. “Do as I say, dammit, not as I do!”).
So, bottom line, I had a great time. I’m sore as hell today, but that’s to be expected. Boy am I gonna miss open water!
I read a lot about marathon swimming, mostly in the online community called the Marathon Swimmers Forum and H2Open magazine. There is so much information available there for current and aspiring marathon swimmers. Really, it is worth a great deal of your time, especially if you’re considering venturing out into this obscure, addictive, weirdly-communal-yet-individual sport. Hell, if you’ve got a loved one or friend who needs your help as crew, you should read the Forum. Consider it your handbook.
There is no absence of opinion, either on MSF or on the Internets themselves, on the definition of a marathon swim. Some stick to the current, FINA-approved definition of 10K. Talk to some very experienced swimmers, present at the time FINA, USS (?) and Olympics-interested swimming authorities were talking about it, and you’ll hear 25K as the distance that should be considered a marathon swim.
And so far we’re only talking about distances. There are those, me among them, who believe that a marathon swim means you’re wearing no more than a cap (not neoprene), goggles and suit (porous and not a wetsuit). Oh, and don’t you dare purposefully touch that kayak! Or any of your crew. Or that seal, while you’re at it! (Rules are important in any sport.)
That’s all well and good, IronMike, but what the hell’s that got to do with your blog post?
Absolutely right! I’ll get back on topic now. But you’ll see the above is very relative to what I’m asking. Let’s start with me. I’ve got some DNFs. I learned a lot from them and I’m getting over them, slowly but…surely slowly. In due time I’ll forget about them. (Right?) I’ve swum a couple races (10K and 10 miles, both with current) that meet one of the distance definitions of a marathon swim, but not the other. I haven’t swum a race longer than 3K in the last two years.
Am I a marathon swimmer?
I’ve got nothing on tap, unlike several of my colleagues. I’m training for nothing right now, despite having a race in a little over a week. (I’m taking a page from my triathletes on this one. Who needs practice anyway? It’s just a 5K! Right?) I’ve got the swim blues something fierce, and I’m having a very hard time getting out of the funk.
So am I a marathon swimmer?
If I never again swim anything near 10K (or farther, for that matter), can I call myself a marathon swimmer? If I never save the money, train tirelessly for two years, spend two weeks getting acclimated to the water in __(fill in location here)__, attempt to swim across a channel or huge lake, can I call myself a marathon swimmer?
What if you’ve devoted two years of your life to swimming The Channel. Many hours swimming tens (hundreds?) of thousands of yards, including many multi-hour straight swims. Your kids don’t know what you look like in the morning because you’re never home when they wake up. But you haven’t done any competitions of any “significant” distance. You do a six-hour, cold water swim, no problem. You dive in the Channel and swim for four or five hours, but you get sick and can’t finish your swim. Are you a marathon swimmer? For that matter, were you a marathon swimmer once you finished your six-hour EC qualifying swim?
I don’t know the answer to these questions. Do you?
A few of you know that we’re moving to Kyrgyzstan. We’ll live in Bishkek, the capital city of the Kyrgyz Republic. It’ll be a great opportunity for the kids, for speaking Russian again, for exploring the Silk Road, for more swimming anthropology. We’re looking forward to it.
But swimming? Will I be able to keep swimming, or will I have to find another hobby? A basic search around Bishkek reveals there are pools there. Who knows. Open water? In Central Asia? We’ll see.
Kyrgyzstan just happens to be the one country on earth that is farthest away from any ocean. So there will not be ocean swim conditioning for me there! But, Kyrgyzstan also just happens to be home to the second largest alpine lake (defined as lakes usually at 5000 feet elevation or higher) in the world, after Lake Titicaca. The lake is called Issyk Kul. It is also a saline lake, the second largest in the world after the Caspian Sea. Finally, interesting factoid #4: the lake never freezes, even though Central Asia gets wicked cold in the winter.
Issyk Kul is one of almost 2000 lakes in Kyrgyzstan. Recently one of my Kyrgyzstan blogs highlighted the 5 most beautiful lakes in the republic. Issyk Kul is of course one of them. The others aren’t too shabby, either.
So, here’s my grand plan. Probably won’t happen. But it’s nice to dream. I’d like to swim in these five lakes. Perhaps do a crossing of one or more of them. Maybe I’ll call it Besh Kul, or Five Lakes. Below are pictures of these five lakes, with a little bit about each one, thanks to the guys at the blog Trip to Kyrgyzstan.
Who knows, dear reader(s), you might read about Iron Mike in a year or so swimming in some strange lake in some obscure country in an historical region of the world! Anyone want to come visit and crew for me?
OK, I probably just jinxed myself. So prepare for a later blog entry entitled something like Dammit, I jinxed myself. But just in case my saying I jinxed myself unjinxes the jinx, I’ll tell you what the hell I’m talking about.
I signed up for a race! Yee-haw! Haven’t raced (outside) since last year. I had signed up for a couple for the start of summer, but I ended up going temporarily to Moscow to help out the embassy there, so I had to drop out of the races that I signed up for (Nanticoke, Jim McDonnell) as well as a POW class with WaveOne. And with our impending move overseas, I didn’t want to sign up for any because pretty much our weekends are full with getting the house and kids ready to move 6578 miles away. But I found a close race that’ll be over and done by noon on a Sunday. It’s only 5 miles away and starts at 8:30.
The race is the HarborFest Tri Swims, Tri because the race distances are triathlete-friendly, with a 750-meter swim along with a half-IM and IM distances thrown in. Even better, last year a couple swimmers swam a 5K. The organizer, Denis Crean of WaveOne, is hoping to have a 5K this year, too. I had to sign up for the 2.4 miler and wait for the day of to find out if the 5K will be swum, but that’s fine by me. I’m swimming in open water before moving to Kyrgyzstan. That’s what’s important! Race report to follow shortly after 3 August.
Well, on Wednesday I did my CSS test. First time in a long time. My new CSS is 1:39 per 100 yards.
How, you ask dear reader(s), did I come up with that time? Simple really. It just takes some math:
CSS (y/sec) = (400 – 200) / (T400 – T200)
then 100/CSS = time per 100 yards
Where T400 and T200 equal your times in the 400 and 200 time trials in seconds. (My 400 was at 6:28 and my 200 at 3:11.) Or, you could simply use the calculator at Swim Smooth’s website here.
As you know, dear reader(s), I’m a big fan of using the CSS. Now I’ll use this CSS on my quality days or what the Pyramid calls base training. Or, further confusing the issue, what Swim Smooth, in their workout books, calls Fresh and Fruity Threshold sets. One such threshold set might be 20 x 100 at CSS. That’s a lot of 100s at 1:39. But does that mean no rest? Or does that mean beat 1:39 so I can get rest?
The answer is Neither. A threshold set, or a pace awareness set (yet another name for it), is designed so that you learn how to maintain a constant pace over a set distance. So you can know, while swimming, what a 1:39/100 yards feels like. Thus, I’ll need to swim each of those 100s on 1:39, hitting each wall at around 24 or 25 seconds. Well, how the hell do I do that?
I use a tempo trainer. Or a watch. As I’ve not had a lot of luck with watches over the last three years, I’m sticking with Finis’s Tempo Trainer Pro, one of the few electronics by Finis that actually doesn’t break easily. You set the TTP to beep when you’re supposed to hit the wall, then you swim, working on hitting the wall exactly when it beeps. So for my 1:39, I’ll set my TTP to beep every 24.63 seconds. Then I’ll chase the beep. With respect to the above workout, once I’ve hit the wall on the fourth beep, I’ll stop and wait for another beep to start. Thus, I’ll be doing 20 x 100 with :24.63 sec rest. It sounds counter-intuitive, but swimming a set like this once a week will lead you to improve your speed. My CSS last year kept getting better, by a second to 1.5 seconds, every 4 weeks when I’d retest. Strange but true.
For now, as I’m not training toward anything, I’ll stick to my CSS for the threshold sets. But I could use the CSS if I were working for something longer, like perhaps a 30K race in a Swiss lake. In that case I might start doing CSS + :20. Who knows.
Wow. Had no idea it has been so long since my last post. Been awhile.
Tomorrow I’ll be updating my CSS. It has been way too long since I did my last CSS test. If you don’t know the CSS, click on the link. I’m sold on using the CSS as a way to prepare for marathon swims.
CSS is a measure of your fitness with respect to a 1500m race. What you get out of doing a CSS test is a pace for 100m (or yards, if you do your tests in a yard pool) that you can use as a basis for your training. If you’re training for a 1500 race, you can expect that your 1500 time will be close to your CSS x 15. If you’re going to swim the English Channel, you could expect your 100 average to be around CSS + :30-:40, possibly even CSS + :60.
A good 3/week workout plan, according to Swim Smooth (and approved by IronMike) is 1x technique session, 1x endurance session with long sets and 1x “quality session working on your threshold speed.”
I’ve combined Swim Smooth’s recommendations for workouts from their book with Steve Munatones’ Pyramid of Open Water Success. If you don’t know the pyramid, it is a very good guide to what’s important, dependent upon your level of expertise. As I’m a perpetual beginner, I’m worrying over the base-level of the pyramid. This includes Base Training, Speed Training and Distance Tolerance.
An example of a distance tolerance day for me is: 10 x 800 at CSS +:10-:20 (depending upon what I’m working toward, which right now is nothing) plus 200 hard after each 800 for a total of 10K. A speed training day would be nice and short, about 3K. Perhaps a main set of 8×50 as 25 fast, 25 easy; :20 rest after each 50. Then 16×25 odds fast, evens easy with :10 rest after each 25. Finally, a base day main set would be 2000 (descend each 500), then 3×500, 3×100, 4×50.
Now, just to get off my ass and actually get in the pool!
Was so proud of myself. Monday night, right after work, I prepped my swim bag. Got the requisite number of undergarments and (?) overgarments for the next day of work into the bag. Got all my swim stuff in the bag. Got shower stuff in the bag. All packed and ready for morning swim.
The base pool opened Memorial Day weekend. That means morning swim. They have lap swim from 0600-0800, plenty of time to get a good 5K workout in and a shower and still get to work early enough. Drove into work early enough on Tuesday to avoid the CrossFitters (see this post), getting there around 0645. To an empty parking lot. Uh-oh.
Sure enough, there were white stickers covering the 0600-0800 hours. Dammit. I went into work and logged into my computer. I went to JBAB‘s fitness page. Sure enough, hours for lap swim are 0600-0800.
WTF? I called the fitness manager, and she told me they don’t have the lifeguards. They hope to get some hired in a month or so. When I brought up the website, her response blew me away.
Oh jeez, I didn’t even think about marketing. I guess I have to call someone to remove that from the website.
Uh, yeah, you think?
N.B., The image I captured above was from Wednesday night and the website is still not updated.
The Marathon Swimmers Federation has its own logo now!
How’s that for professional-looking, dear reader(s)? Pretty nice, eh? I love it, and look forward to getting one about 4 or 5 inches in diameter for the back of my rad Rav4. That’ll look pretty nice embroidered on a navy blue polo, too. And as a patch on my swim bag. Or on a license plate.
Well, that didn’t last long. The Thursday evening happy hour swims (called officially by the organizers “Thursday Open Water Sunset Swims”) are back! As my dear reader(s) know from a few blog posts back, the National Harbor folks denied WaveOne permission to hold the evening swim practices. But that denial lasted all of two weeks.
WaveOne’s founder Denis Crean sent out an email to his distro list yesterday stating unequivocally that the swims “resume June 5 at 7:15pm.” Period. Dot. Simple. Wonderful. Seems the local community came together on this one:
We extend our sincerest thanks to the community of open water swimmers, triathletes and paddlers who stood behind WaveOne and voiced their support for the importance of safe open water swimming in the Washington, DC area. We welcome you back to the Thursday night Sunset Swims and look forward to sharing your continued growth and successes as open water swimmers and triathletes.
Thank you to all the locals here who helped bring this wonderful event back. Bravi!