One Thousand Eight Hundred Yards of Glory

This past weekend I swam my contraband set, the secret setlist that a Master's swimmer had inadvertently left behind at the pool last Friday. All day Saturday I made sure I got enough rest and Sunday I had a good breakfast to get ready.

Sunday afternoon, I headed up to the pool and got to work. I brought the setlist with me and pasted it to a kickboard by the wall like I'd seen others do it. I even looked official.

As I started up I realized that the warmup set intervals were kind of lame so I chopped 30 seconds off of them knowing that when I got to the 100s, I'd need those 30 seconds back. And, I did, I used up all four 30 second credits in the first four 100 sets.

Then I got to the mysteriously titled set where I was to swim some stroke known as "other than free". Since I realized that this was a made-up fantasyland stroke probably designed to confuse the competition if the setlist ever got into enemy hands, I decided just to skip those 200 yards. I figured that if I still had energy left after the sprints, I'd do those 200 with a real stroke.

But then I got into the sprints and found out I really enjoyed that part. The intervals gave plenty of rest and I even found that my times were getting faster as I went along. The only problem was my calves were cramping since I rarely kicked that hard (as an aside I had a banana before going up there so this should *not* have happened). I have to admit that I love the feeling of hitting the wall at full speed and having a wave catch up to me as I pull up. I need to do more of that.

But after the sprinting, I knew that I wasn't going to make up the "other than freestyle" set but felt pretty darned satisfied with my 1800 yards, the most I'd ever done, and with sprinting to boot.

With some slight modifications I think I can do this insane 6AM master's workout. If I get an alarm clock that is.

As an aside, there didn't seem to be any "missing" master's swimmers at the pool this morning; word may not have gotten out that one of them didn't shred the setlist. I'm not saying anything.