You can get meet info here and you can sign up online here
Normally I swim in Santa Maria on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but I have a meeting on Tuesday and no time on Thursday so I moved one of my swim days to Monday instead. I was a little late getting to the pool because of the school’s out parking situation and I missed the warm up.
I swam just over 2700 yards which put me over 20 miles for the month. This is my best month so far in Go The Distance. Next month I want to step it up to 25 miles. By the way if you’re haven’t checked out the GTD Fitness Logs, you really should.
Here’s today’s swim:
Repeat x 3
200 kick
3 x 100 drill
4 x 50 descending
12 x 50 w/ fins, 6 dolphins off each wall
50 cool down
2750 yards total
Sinsheimer pool in San Luis Obispo was where it’s at today! The place was packed this afternoon. It was just one of those days where you can’t blame everyone for coming out. It’s in the mid 80′s, clear skies and bright sunshine.
Unfortunately on Sundays they do a mixed lap swim/rec swim and there was only 5 or 6 lanes for lap swimming. I hung out in the bleachers for a while hoping for a lane to open up but instead they started filling 2 people deep so I figured I needed to pick a lane with someone that was at least swimming not aqua jogging or something like that. During the course of my swim I churned through about 4 different lane mates but they were all cool with splitting the lane so it was never an issue.
I got a workout in my email from Coach Nancy last week that I modified for a solo workout. Her’s was like 4500 yards, but I can really only stay focused for 3k by myself. Here’s what I ended swimming:
300 swim
200 kick
200 drill (fist/catch up by 50)
3 x 100 descending
3 x 100 fly/free by 25
3 x 100 back/free by 25
3 x 100 breast/free by 25
6 x 50 free alt. easy/fast
3 x 100 kick w/ fins
3 x 100 pull
300 cool down
3000 yards total
It’s days like this that make me wish I were independantly wealthy so I could do this every day! Maybe I need to switch my workday to start at like 2PM and get off at 11PM so I can have early afternoons to swim and ride bikes… hmmm
The ’09 Santa Barbara Masters Reg Richardson Memorial LCM meet is coming up on July 11th and I just finished picking out my events and filling out my entry form. You can get the meet information sheet here and download an SPMA entry form here. Mail in entries need to be post-marked by July 2nd (this coming Thursday). Unfortunately there is no online entry available but you can deck enter if you miss the mail in deadline.
Here’s the schedule of events:
Warm-up at 8:00 a.m.
1500 m Freestyle starts at 9:00 a.m.
1. 1500 m FreestyleAdditional warm-up after 1500 m Freestyle
Event #2 starts at 11:00 a.m.
2. 100 m Freestyle
3. 100 m Breaststroke
4. 200 m Individual Medley
5. 50 m Freestyle
6. 200 m Butterfly
7. 50 m Breaststroke
8. 100 m Backstroke
9. 200 m Freestyle
10. 100 m Butterfly
11. 50 m Backstroke
12. 200 m Breaststroke
13. 50 m Butterfly
14. 200 m Backstroke
15. 200 m Freestyle Relay (men, women, or mixed; deck enter)
My coach has been encouraging me to swim some out of the ordinary events for me so I mixed in some events I don’t do real often. I’m keeping the 50 free and 50 fly which I almost always do, but I am adding the 200 IM, and the 50 and 100 backstroke. I’m also hoping for a relay at the end.
I’m pretty stoked for this meet for a few reasons… 1 – It’s only 90 minutes from my place which is pretty close for a swim meet for me. 2 – It will have been over a month since I’ve raced anywhere! I’m getting antsy!
I realize for a lot of the rest of you in South Pacific Masters this might be a bit of a drive, but it is your last shot at an LCM meet before our championships in Thousand Oaks on the 24th-26th. The Thousand Oaks meet is both the Regional and Zone Championships btw. Anyways, there are worse places you could be on a Saturday afternoon than a 50m pool right next to the beach in Santa Barbara. Hopefully I see a lot of you there!
So this is what I cart all over the place with me when I go to swim practice. Apparently I am hording goggles, that’s not even the whole collection… and I have 3 more pairs en route as we speak. I have problems :) I’ll only race in one type of goggles but I try out new ones all the time in workout just because.
So here’s what I have in the bag:
1. Speedo Speed Training Fins
2. Nike Pool Buoy
3. H20 Audio Interval (for solo swims only)
4. Swim Cap (to hold down the MP3 player)
5. Gatorade (I have a preference for purple flavored)
6. TYR Socket Rockets, smoked and metallic (for workouts)
7. Mesh blueseventy swim bag (came with my B70 wetsuit)
8. blueseventy Element Goggles (a freebie with my B70 Nero Comp)
9. Speedo Sengar Goggles, smoked and metallic (for racing)
10. Spray-on Sunscreen
11. Lock
So what am I missing? I don’t carry paddles on purpose, they don’t jive well with my shoulder. Anybody playing with any cool new pool toys that I should check out?
I put in a solid 3000 yards at the pool in Santa Maria this afternoon. I must have done a good job because I’m way more sore than usual after a swim. Our workout group was a little light today, I ended up with my own lane which was nice. There wasn’t a prepared workout for us so here’s what the group came up with…
500 mixed warm up (free down, choice back)
5 x 100 kick @2:00
5 x 100 IM odd drill, even swim @1:45
4 x 100 breath control (3,5,7,9) @1:30
100 easy
Repeat x 2
3 x 100 free descending @1:30
200 easy
I really wish I could go do this everyday. It would be magical if the high school pool like 2 miles from my office had a masters group, but sneaking off 2 days a week to swim in Santa Maria will have to do. At least the people down there are super cool. And for pretty much the first time I actually have a tan which is exciting for me :)
In other news… TYR is on the verge of some legal action over the way FINA flubbed the whole suit thing. They got shafted in the retest process because they didn’t bring their own scientist. So other suits that are incredibly similar got back in while the Titan was left out. Check out the full deal here and a little more here.
In response to all of this Roland Schoeman (South African Olympic swimmer) has started to stir up interest for an International Swimmers Association. Kind of like a lobbying group for swimmers. You can read more about it on Facebook where in just a few days the group has grown to more than 1200 members.
I came across some excellent paintings today by a guy name Eric Zener. I posted a few examples for you all to check out, but there are a lot more on his site that are outstanding. If you see anything you like it looks like it’s a contact the artist to see which paintings are available type of thing.
I went to Santa Maria to do my lunch time swim today and I was greeted with an odd problem… no parking. This was a first. I went and found a spot on the street for my truck and when I finally got myself to the pool it was loaded with kids. Like hundreds of kids. I’m still trying to not think about what the urine content of the pool is at now…
Anyways, the lap area was adults only and our masters group had 4 of them. There was no workout in place so we made it up on the fly. Here’s what my lane did today:
200 swim
200 kick
200 pull
12 x 100 alt free @1:30/choice @1:45
(I swam fly, IM, back, IM, IM, breast)
Repeat x 3
4 x 50 fartlek (fast/slow, slow/fast, slow, fast)
100 cool down
2500 yards total
I got a workout in my email from Coach Nancy at Conejo Simi for me to try out… it’s big enough that it might take me a few days! It’s about 4700 lcm, yikes. We’ll see how that goes!
It’s been in the works for a long time, but the Fitness Logs are finally live on the USMS website. The Fitness Logs are available through your MyUSMS profile. If you’re not already signed up with MyUSMS I highly suggest you do it.
The cool thing about these fitness logs is that you can track your workouts online now instead of in a spreadsheet that you have to extract data from and send monthly to Mary who runs the program. When we first talked to Mary back in December the program had about 600 participants, now we’re up over 900! I’m guessing that she is very excited about this development, I think she just got the first week of each month back.
Tracking your workout via the USMS website is totally easy. First you have to sign into your MyUSMS profile and click the “My Fitness Log” link. This brings you to the calender. On the days that you have recorded a workout you’ll see a little icon in the corner of the date. To add a workout, click on a date.
On the next page choose what kind of workout you did, we’re sticking with swimming for this example.
On the final screen choose the course you swam, enter the distance, enter the time spent swimming, and you can enter any workout notes that you want in the big box on the bottom. When your done just click the “Add Workout” button and you’re good to go.
Here’s the new FINA approved suit list via Swimming World Magazine:
You may notice that blueseventy who was suspiciously absent from the first list is back in the mix along with other suits that were shut out from that list. Here’s a note I recieved from blueseventy earlier today on the topic:
22 June 2009
blueseventy body suits back in the water
blueseventy’s high-tech swimming body suits are back in the pool after the sport’s governing body, FINA, reversed its decision to ban them on the grounds of possible air trapping.This decision means that swimmers are free to wear them at the forthcoming World Championships in Rome, and all other competitions, at all levels around the world.
Ceo, Steve Nicholls, commented: “We were confident in the scientific evidence that our suit could not trap air and are grateful for the support of Huub Touissant of the University of Amsterdam in presenting our case to FINA. We felt strongly that we would not need to make any alterations to it and we’re delighted that the right decision has been made without any form of bias.
“The last few weeks have certainly hurt us, with minimal sales in the period of not being on the list. However, we have been continuing with production to ensure availability for when the decision was reversed.
We now look forward to the World Championships, where we will have suits available for any swimmers wanting to try them out. We have been in continuous communication with swimmers throughout this period and this announcement now confirms their suit choice for Rome. They can now continue their preparation without this distraction.
“Prior to the latest announcement by FINA, blueseventy had consulted Lawyers to get an injunction against the decision. On consultation with FINA they encouraged us to instead go through their own review process which we have done.” Nicholls added.
“The most important thing is that swimmers now know where they stand and have a choice about what suit they can wear. We will do everything we can to ensure that our suits are available and that all swimmers have access to them from all of our global distributors and subsidiaries.
For those of you like me that are mainly focused on what’s going on in the Master’s pool, everything remains the same. All suits previously allowed are still fair game. Looks like USMS made the right call and saved their members a lot of grief and money by holding steady while FINA spent months flip flopping. What suits are going to be legal in 2010 is still a mystery, but at least it looks like the suit debacle should mellow out for a few months so we can all get back to focusing on swimming as opposed to swimsuits.
