I drove down to Thousand Oaks after work and got in a swim with my team at the Cal Lutheran pool. It was kind of weird to be there for a Friday workout with the sun still up! I mainly stuck with the given workout but strayed occasionally in the name of meet preparation.

Here’s what I swam, Coach Wade’s workout was a little meatier…

400 swim
100 kick

6 x 25 alt slow and fast @:30
6 x 50 kick with fins @ :50

2 x 200 with fins

50 fly hard
50 free hard

easy 100 free
3 x 50 (fly, free, breast)

easy 50

1650 yards total

I feel all good and warmed up now. Tomorrow I’ll drive the rest of the way down to Mission Viejo and get in some racing. I’ll be in the 200 fly and a 50 of some sort.

Just one more thing... a fast 500!

In the course of my day I managed to swim in both the Cal Lutheran pool in Thousand Oaks and the Rancho Simi Pool over in Simi Valley with the Conejo Valley Multisport Masters. I’m a little sore but happy :)

I got to the pool for my first swim around 6:45 and caught up with my buddy Peter in the parking lot. A few minutes later Jinxi showed up which was really cool because we’re both far away CVMM satellite swimmers who just happened to decided to show up to a practice on the same day. Inside the pool area we had all kinds of swimmers. I was one of the more crowded workouts I’ve seen there. Everybody was in a pretty good mood and Coach Jeff, also know as the “King of Pain,” was officiating over the workout.

We got in some pretty serious yardage this morning. There were a lot of 300′s in the mix, but he mixed in other sets between chunks of 300′s to keep it interesting. Normally I write out the workouts I do here in the blog, but honestly I can’t remember the whole thing… by my math we came in over 5000, I’m just not sure by how much.

After workout me and Jinxi went and hung out for a while at breakfast to kill some time until the Backstroke clinic got going at 11 out in Simi Valley. It was fun to hang out and talk outside of the pool for a bit!

Jinxi is all smiles mid-workout

At 11 we were on deck at the Rancho Simi Pool where coach Ahelee was giving some instruction on backstroke. Between Ahelee and her 200 backstroke world record and Coach Nancy’s experience as a national team backstroker backing her up you really couldn’t have asked for a better group of coaches to lead the clinic.

Today’s clinic was a 101 clinic meant for beginners, but we had a fair number of more experienced swimmers in the water to work on their fundamentals as well. The clinic was mainly made up of CVMM swimmers but we did have a couple of visitors from other teams in attendance. My friends Helene from a yet to be named masters team and Mike from Rose Bowl were both in the pool today with us. After about 45 minutes of classroom instruction on the finer points of backstroke we hopped in and started to apply it there in the water. Even though I would consider myself a pretty solid swimmer, backstroke is not my forte! I picked up a lot from today’s class and hopefully I can use some of this stuff to shave another second off of my 100IM!

Ahelee giving us some instruction

putting it all to work in the pool

After workout number two I went and hung out with Nancy, Ahelee and Jeff for a while. After misplacing a few hours I figured I should actually go home before it got to late! I had a really good day with my team and I’m glad I made the excursion! I’ve posted up a few pictures here on the blog, but I’ll probably have more over on the Rob Aquatics Facebook Fan Page later. It’s like 1am at my house and it’s time to go to bed!

Ahelee giving the warm up set

I came down to Thousand Oaks last night and I swam with CVMM this morning out at the Rancho Simi pool in Simi Valley. This was the first time I’ve swam at this pool (I usually do the CLU workouts when I’m in town), and I really liked it. We swam SCY today but they do LCM workouts here too.

Thursday was Coach Ahelee’s birthday and a group of swimmers that she’s worked with in Orange County came up to swim with us today. So mixed in with the regular CVMM crowd we had Novas and Nadadores! After having us all warm up together she split us into 3 groups… those of us racing tomorrow, and then the rest of the group was broken up by speed. After hearing their workout I’m glad I have a meet tomorrow! It was a tough one!

My group did a bunch of shorter swims of all different strokes since tomorrow’s pentathlon is a 50 of each stroke plus a 100 IM. We finished up by doing a whole bunch of practice starts. I don’t really get to practice ever so this was nice for me and I took advantage of it. I got a lot of feedback from Ahelee on my start and what we can do to make it faster. She even had me try a few track starts just to get used to it so I can start working them into my races in the future.

After workout we hung out in the rain and ate birthday cake! Rancho Simi was the place to be this morning… swimmers from all over SPMA, diving and cake… what’s not to like :) Tomorrow I’m off to the races… in the meantime I’m just having a lazy day in Thousand Oaks.

Ahelee giving instruction on deck while Coach Nancy gives it from in the water

obligatory underwater self portraiture

pre dive

airborn!

that first kick upon entry

dolphin kicking away... that looks like way too much knee bend to me... hmmm

birthday cake!

Ahelee and Jeff (our USMS president) on deck; Nancy, Heidi and Jason in the water

Got out of work a little bit early today to get to Thousand Oaks in time to get in a quick workout before my meet tomorrow. I was still a bit sore from that workout in Santa Maria yesterday so I needed to get wet and stretch it out today. I decided to do the majority of the workout but I did skip about half of the 50′s towards the end, I didn’t want to over do it.

200 swim
200 kick/swim
200 drill

4 x 50 @:50 descending

32 x 25 IM order @ :30

8 x 50 @ 1:15 alternating slow/fast by 50 (16 for eveyone else… I have a meet tomorrow)

8 x 25 warm down

2200 yards total

If you want to see parts of the Rose Bowl meet tomorrow check out the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center’s web cam, it updates every minute. Not exactly live streaming but it’ll do! There’s also a site to follow along with splits and things like that as they happen over here. Bear in mind that this is in beta and may not be perfect just yet!

Here’s a couple of pictures from tonight! I have some video too but you’ll have to wait for that… I’m crashing at my coach’s place tonight and I didn’t bring my laptop to edit it.

I stayed up late Friday night drinking beer and eating ice cream… not sure that was the best prep for an early morning swim with my adopted team :) Saturdays at CVMM are a 90 minute workout which is 30 minutes longer than what I normally do. I need to find my way into more longer practices like this, they’re good for me!

Even though I was kind of outclassed on the end of the pool I was swimming in I’m glad I got in with the faster kids. I always do better when I have people to chase. I split a lane with my buddy Peter and we had some real fast college age kids in the lane next to us who really laid it down today. Later in the workout Coach Nancy came down and joined us in the water on my end of the pool which was cool.

The workout itself was fun, hard, but fun. Even though we had a big range of abilities in the pool we were able to do a lot of the main set on the same intervals so that everyone was swimming together. We had a really good vibe in the pool today.

Here’s what I remember of today’s workout

400 (100 drill, 200 free, 100 swim)
12 x 50 free 1-6 drill/swim, 6-12 swim

Repeat x 3 (round 1 pull, round 2 swim, round 3 fast)
6 x 150
3 x 50

100 easy

4250 yards total

After workout I went to breakfast with some teammates and I spent the rest of the day hanging out with the coaches talking about the direction and future of the team, keep and eye out for them there’s some good stuff coming! I took the train home this afternoon and I’m debating whether a frosty ocean swim is in my future for tomorrow, I’m pretty tired. We’ll see what goes down!

I drove down to the city for work and figured it out where I could stay a night to hang out with my Conejo Valley Multisport Masters friends. My friend Ahelee has joined the team as a coach and I’m really excited about it! We’ve been hanging out all evening and she coached the Friday night workout. It was a Fast Friday sort of deal, and even though we didn’t do a ton of yardage we worked it pretty hard!

400 warm up (200 free, 100 back, 100 breast)
500 every 4th 25 stroke

12 x 25 descending in groups of 3 (alternating 3 fly, 3 free)

Repeat x 4
3 x 50 descending @ 1:00
100 fly – FAST (repeat 2-4 were w/ fins, 2 & 3 were a fast 50 followed by a 50 fly drill)
50 easy

6 x 25 2 fast, 2 medium, 2 easy

2400 yards total

Ahelee has been one of my unofficial coaches for a long time so it’s really great to finally be on the same team! I think I named her as the coach of the imaginary RobAquatics National team a long time ago :) She took a lot of time helping me try to fix my catch… it’s really hard to change that part of your stroke but it’s definitely something I need to do, I’m glad I have someone on deck looking after my progression with that. I’m getting there, it just needs some more time.

I should be back in the pool with CVMM tomorrow morning!

CVMM’s lunchtime workout crew

I’m down in SoCal today and I took the opportunity to drop in with my adopted team the Conejo Valley Multisport Masters at the pool in CLU. You could hardly tell that it’s December, it was gorgeous out there today. This was the first hard workout I’ve done in a while, I’m still feeling it a little bit! I posted the workout below, personally I missed a little bit of it because I was working on a quirk in my stroke with Coach Nancy for a while.

400 swim
200 kick
200 drill/swim by 50
50 easy
6×25 build

5 x 200 kick/swim by 50 w/fins, 1-4 free, 5 fly

5 x 200 pull

6 x 100 1-5 free, 6 fly

100 cool down

3700 yards total

The cool part is that I got a bunch of pictures from the workout! I put a few of them up here, and you can see the rest over on the Rob Aquatics Facebook page.

getting the warm up… check out that sweet tan line!

trying to fix my catch on the left side

Coach Nancy deconstructing my butterfly

floating between sets

done :)