All kinds of random stuff for you today… first a swimming commercial for candy… I love both those things!
Next up… I got my award for hitting 50 miles in USMS’ Go the Distance! Not that this bald dude gets a lot of use out of swim caps, but it’s always cool to get swim stuff in the mail :)
And lastly… my buddies over at LiveSwim have posted video from Saturday’s Santa Clarita Masters Meet! Go check it out here.
I was a man on a mission today. I finished yesterday with about 37 miles for the month and I really wanted to break 40 for January. So I did the math last night and figured out that I needed about 4400 meters to make it happen. I ended up doing 5000 just to make sure I really made it in case I was mathematically deficient.
Repeat x 5
800 swim
200 kick
5000 meters total
I’m ending the month with 40.37 miles swam! That translates into just shy of 65,000 meters or a little more than 71,000 yards if you prefer your measurements in a more imperial fashion. It’s my best month ever in Go the Distance, I’m hoping I can push it a little further in February!
That’s my friend Helene up there with her personal USMS Go the Distance (GTD) progress chart that she has up in her Classroom… how cool is that? Helene, like myself, participated in GTD all last year and we’re both big fans! Here’s a snippet of a note she sent me about it:
“Setting a goal, and watching it become a reality (I guess more than just sitting back and watching!) has been an awesome experience. GTD has been wonderfully inspiring.”
This is one of the things I like best about GTD is that you can set your own goals and get to them in your own way. Helene decided she wanted to swim 100 big miles in 2009, she tracked her distance with GTD, and hit her target late in December! High five Helene! My only question now is what’s the target for 2010?
As of this moment there are 945 participants across all of USMS in GTD… seeing as USMS is 50,000 members deep I think that number should be way bigger! You can read more about the program and get signed up here.
A few bonus pieces of GTD news have come to my attention since the last time I wrote about it. First off, it’s sponsored this year and there are prizes! Check it out:
Secondly, you can now get daily results! I am super geeked out on this! There’s been a few days that I’ve gone to the pool just to ensure I stay at the top of my age group in GTD. If we were still in once a month mode on the results side I wouldn’t have that push.
If you’re using GTD right now, go here to see where you stack up in the daily results!
One of my favorite programs for USMS members is Go the Distance. The concept is really easy, how far can you go? It doesn’t matter how fast you do it or what type of pool you swim in, actually you don’t even need to swim in a pool… as long as you’re in water and moving forward you’re good to go. Like other USMS events it’s broken down by age group, but unlike other events it’s free.
In the summer of 2009 GTD started offering an online fitness log, or FLOG, for you to track your workouts. I really like this feature because it lets me update it from wherever I happen to be at the moment. You can access the FLOG feature via MyUSMS and you can check out this old post of mine that shows you how to log a workout.
Last year I swam just short of 220 miles, I was aiming for 250 but life has a tendency of getting in the way of the pool sometimes. In 2010 I want to go 365 miles. It’s just a mile a day, easy right?
If you haven’t tried Go The Distance before I really recommend it… it’s very easy to use and you’ll get hooked on tracking your progress through the year. Even though monthly results are published it’s not competitive, it’s all about challenging and motivating yourself.
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.
Everyone’s GTD Pal, Mary Sweat, sent out an e-mail today to everyone in the Go the Distance program and I just wanted to share a few fun facts with you guys…
Go the Distance started in 2007 with 364 swimmers. When we last talked to Mary in her swimmer profile here on the blog back in December, GTD had 604 swimmers. Today it’s up to 780+ swimmers!!!
In January GTD swimmers amassed 19,125 miles. To put that in perspective, the Earth is 24,900 miles around. Cumulatively we’ve almost done one lap around the planet. Per swimmer the average comes out to 24.52 miles. One swimmer did an epic 179.58 miles! That’s the equivalent of swimming from my house to Hollywood. Me… I did… um, not that many miles… but I have plenty of excuses, most of them legitimate even. February should be a much better month for me.
If you haven’t looked into Go the Distance I recommend you check it out. It’s a pretty cool USMS program plus it’s free! You can read more here or on USMS.org
February looks like it’s going to be a busy month for me. Depending on a few decisions I make in the next couple days I could hit upwards of 4 swim meets. As it stands right now I am a lock for the UC Irvine meet on February 8th and the FAST meet in Fullerton on the 22nd. Beyond that I may go to the Rosebowl meet on the 7th and the Mission Valley YMCA Pancake Pentathlon down in San Diego. If I do all of them it will be a lot of traveling and a lot of money for hotels and stuff. I think it’s worth it though, I like going to meets and I’m glad I have access to a lot of them living here in California.
It looks like I’m going to need to find places to stay in Pasadena, Irvine and San Diego this month. Anybody have any recommendations for me?
Otherwise in February I’m hoping to stay healthy during the month. I started tracking my swims with USMS’ Go the Distance program at the beginning of the year and in reviewing my number I realized that I really lost a lot of days to being sick. I swam about 13 miles in January and I’m hoping to increase that number substantially in February. If you haven’t signed up for Go the Distance I recommend it. It’s an easy way to track your distance month to month and it’s a free program. To learn more about how it works and what you need to do to sign up click here.
One of the things I’ve been working on is writing a workout and sticking to it. During SCM season I would write some really ambitious workouts and as I went through them they would magically modify themselves until they were easier. I’ve been really good so far this month with doing every yard I have decided to do. Tonight I wrote myself a set that looked really easy on paper (8 x 50 fly), but about half way through I was really tempted to make a mid stride modification. After 4 50′s of butterfly my upper arms were getting really tight and I was breathing pretty hard. In my head I was thinking “…maybe if I just did 6, that’s still 300 yards right…” It took some convincing but I managed to talk myself into getting all the way through it. I’m glad I did. I feel really good now that I’m done. It’s really easy to get away with cheating when you don’t have a coach or workout partner to keep you on track. I think doing the blog keeps me going to the pool and tracking my yardage with Go The Distance is really helping me stay on track with my yardage.
I went to the gym with Heidi tonight so I didn’t ride the bike, I just swam. Here’s my workout:
Warm Up
400 free
100 kick
8 x 50 fly
100 kick
4 x 200 free
100 kick
100 IM
200 IM
200 Cool down
2400 yards total
Go the Distance (GTD) is a USMS fitness program that asks the question – how far can you swim in one year? Each time you go swimming you can enter the time you spent swimming and the distance covered into a special GTD spreadsheet that helps you track your mileage throughout the year. It does all the conversion math from yards or meters into miles which is a must for the mathematically challenged such as myself. The spreadsheet also let’s you declare a goal and it will calculate how far you are from completing it. At the end of each month you send in your results to the GTD coordinator and she publishes the results. Currently there are over 600 participants in the GTD program and it continues to grow each month. I became a new participant at the start of this year!
I first learned about the program from Linda who was one of our first masters swimmer profiles. She got me in touch with Mary who runs the GTD program and she was also nice enough to do a swimmer profile. Mary told us even more about the program, how it works, where the idea came from, and how to join up. You can read about GTD in Mary’s own words in her swimmer profile and you can read even more on the USMS website.
Basically all it takes is an e-mail and you’re in! GTD is free! To join USMS’ Go the Distance Program e-mail the following to Mary at usmsgtd@yahoo.com
Name:
Age as of 12/31/09:
2009 USMS ID #:
Your E-mail Address:
Too easy. I recommend giving it a shot. Worst case scenario is you’re out $0… I’m pretty sure most of you can afford that :)
If you have any questions about GTD you can send them straight to Mary at usmsgtd@yahoo.com or you can leave them in the comments section and I’ll find out what I can for you!
