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 :)

Sorry the blog has been a little light recently! I’ve been on the road quite a bit. Tuesday night I was in Mountain View for a trip to Google, but I did manage to sneak in a quick visit with some folks from Finis which was pretty cool. After finishing up Wednesday at Google I drove home to basically take nap, and then this morning I was back in the car en route to Thousand Oaks.

I drove down early so that I could work out with my adopted team, the Conejo Valley Multisport Masters. I was worried about my shoulder failing on me during the swim like it’s been prone to do recently, but I actually ended up having one of the best workout swims that I’ve had in quite a while. We had a pretty good contingent of swimmers in the pool for lunchtime. If your team does lunchtime workouts, especially outdoor lunchtime workouts, go do one! It really is the best way to break up your day.

Anyways… Here’s what I remember from the workout:

400 swim
100 kick
6 x 25 drill odd, swim even

6 x 150 pull
5 x 300 swim

8 x 25 IM order

200 cool down

3650 yards total

Not bad for an hour at lunch! Afterwards I went out to lunch with Peter from my team and now I’m just hanging out waiting to go to the SPMA annual in person board meeting. I should have some exciting news from that later :)

Since I needed to be down in the general LA area tonight anyways, I left work a little early today so that I could get down to Thousand Oaks early enough to swim the 7pm workout with the Conejo Valley Masters. Tonight we were in the big pool at CLU which is awesome because I really dig that pool. Coach Nancy had me and Peter do a more mellow meet warm up workout. After about 1200 yards of swimming kicking and drilling we switched to short sprints. I got to practice my starts and get in a few sprint 25s.

While I was there she coerced me to try out a snorkel which I’ve never done. I damn near drowned! She had me try again with a nose clip and that sort of solved it. Swimming with a snorkel is going to take some work for me to get figured out. It really fixes my head position though so it wil be worth the trouble.

Tomorrow I’m going to swim at the new pool UCLA just opened in the Bruins Masters SCM Meet. If you want in on the action you can still deck enter tomorrow morning at the pool! You can download the meet info here.