Swimming progress - a little

I haven't been swimming quite as much as I had hoped in terms of volume, but I have been putting in the quality as of the past 3-4 weeks. After asking a lot of questions on the beginner triathlete forums, it became clear that swimming requires a very different approach to training than running.

Most of the strong swimmers recommended doing ONLY swim intervals, and short ones with short rest, at that. Meaning that long swims (like long runs) were not a cornerstone of the training. This is in stark opposition to running, in which I feel that the long easy run is absolutely fundamental for continued improvement. As surprised as I am by this revelation, my experience would have to bear this out thus far, as my slow distance swimming has not yielded any substantive improvements in my race placements.

The only catch is that intervals are HARD. A typical workout for me in the pool is a warmup followed by 12-16 x 100m sets (they take me about 1:50ish each), with only 10-15 seconds rest between them. And I go hard enough to get myself out of breath after the first set. Doing this type of workout once is bad enough, but when you have to do it every time you show up at the pool, you start to dread going there altogether! Fortunately, I've been also swimming an open water swim on Sunday that is one mile, and I use that swim as a platform to gauge my swimming improvement from my tortured swim intervals.

Thus far, things seem to be looking up. In the open water, I'm no longer afraid to go fairly hard (for me) from the get-go, which is making a huge difference in my speed. I'm still far from fast, and likely still BOP, but this past weekend, I swam with my friend who is a clear MOP swimmer, and I was a fair ways ahead of him by the end. So that's encouraging.

I've got to say though, that I really dislike swimming. I'm so much worse than it than I ever imagined possible for someone of my aerobic ability. I don't know if I'll ever "love" it, but I'm going to stay determined for now at least, to get it under my control.

On a funny note, I was about to take off for my swim today, when I noticed that my swimsuit had a 3-inch tear right down the back. I have no idea how long it's been there, but odds are good that I both swam for nearly an hour AND ran for 3 miles on a treadmill with plenty of people laughing hysterically at my exposed backside! (I didn't notice during my last workout, though!)

I'm hoping that I didn't shine too many family jewels through this rip!

I just bought a new set of "jammers" today, and I'll also rant about how I feel that sports stores mislead new swimmers into buying the wrong set of swim trunks. For training, the only way to go is with 100% polyester shorts. The polyester is completely chlorine-resistant, and any suit you get made of this costs marginally more, yet lasts over 5x as long as a lycra racing suit. Yet when I went to two separate sports stores today, 99% of the suits were lycra. You had to dig like crazy to find the polyester ones, and even those were polyester blends, so they are unlikely to last as long in the pool. And for all you doubters who think lycra holds up fine in the pool, consider than my first swim jammers ($55 Nike racing lycra jammers) lasted me a grand total of 5 weeks before nearly disintegrating due to the chlorine. These sports stores should clearly be carrying mostly 100% polyester products for all the training-type swimmers out there, but because they wish to profit, they carry all "racing" type gear, which means that you'll be buying 8-12 suits per year if that's what you use (at $40+ each!)