Smoke and Mirrors

Amazing…. and humbling. Today I did an open water swim practice at Lake Crabtree in preparation for Triangle Sprint Distance Triathlon.

To start off with, my training has had a couple of gaps in the last 3 weeks from a trip to Vegas at eBay live, as well as getting strep throat. But even so, I know that wouldn’t have mattered.

So I’ve never done anything like this before, right, and while I was on the “out” part of the “out and back”, I was wondering why I would ever want to do this.

I did a quick open water swim at Falls Lake a couple of weeks ago but it was along the shore. This is much different because you are swimming straight out away from the shore, and then back in to another point, like a triangle. The swim course is supposed to be like this, but it was setup a little differently for this practice.

Going out:
I started off way too fast. I didn’t realize it at first, but after about 40 strokes I had a pretty good idea I couldn’t keep going at the pace I was going. The problem was, I didn’t know what to do about it. It seemed obvious later, but my mind was racing a little. I ran into people, sometimes the same person, several times. Some people ran into me. No big deal. I think the biggest thing that was bothering me on the “out” part of the course was the fact that I was winded, and I was feeling a litle bit claustrophobic from not being able to see anything in the water. In case you don’t know anything about Lake Crabtree, it’s not setting any EPA records for water quality standards. We’re not talking Love Canal here, but it’s NOT SAFE for normal swimming. From what I can tlel, you can pretty much only swim at this lake once a year for this event. Whah?
During this part of the course, I stopped and floated on my back once, or maybe twice just to catch my breath. A sunfish marked the halfway point, or a little before it, and swimming up to it I was tired enough that I convinced myself I needed to stop and catch my breath.

Pit Stop:
Ok, so I definitely didn’t swim the whole way non-stop. I stopped in the middle for what to me seemed like 3 minutes or so, just to catch my breath. This turned out to be a great idea. I got myself together a little bit, and made a plan for pacing the rest of the way back in.

Coming back:
So what was my plan? Swim as slow as I possibly could. At this point, I was humbled by the distance. Going up to the event, you have this picture in your mind of how easily you are going to just keep swimming forever. Then you get in the water and once you are winded, it is hard as heck to catch your breath again unless you stop. Taking bigger breaths to the side only does so much.

This turned out great. About every 10-20 strokes I would look up to make sure I was still going in the right direction. Several times I remember thinking “surely it should be closer by now”, but I was never panicked or tired on the way back in like I was on the way out.

At any rate, my time was 19:41 for the approximately 750m. This includes all the breaks, stops, etc.

Thoughts:
Definitely better to pace yourself and go slow as possible. 750m seems like a short distance, especially when there are folks going a mile at the same time we were, but for the race you just want to finish.

Getting out of the water, my legs were wobbly as heck. As soon as I got out of the water, I started jogging a couple of steps just to get a sense of what it might be like…. Hah.

For people that wanted to do it again, they let people do another half mile. I wisely sat and watched this one and was just amazed I finished. It’s a pretty cool feeling, actually.

One of the things you learn quickly training for a triathlon is how many different training plans are out there.

One of my favorite tri books, The Triathlete’s Training Bible, provides templates (at least in text) and a methodology you can use to develop your own customized yearly training plan.

The reason why training plans have to be somewhat customized for each person is that everyone has races at different times, different durations of races, etc.

Joe suggests printing out copies of his templates and using pencil to fill them out. Ha! No offense to Joe, but I’m an Excel guy. Very easy to manipulate, etc. Judging from the posts on some of the triathlon forums, there are a lot of data-heads out there as well.

So I went through the trouble of creating pretty close replicas of those templates in Excel. For the Yearly Training Plan, I even made it so you can type in the year at the top and it will fill out the rest of the rest of the dates for you — an improv

Here is a link to my triathlon yearly training plan Excel template. With all credit due to Joe Friel for the original version.

You want to enable macros as there are formulas which build these documents.

If you haven’t bought Joe’s book yet (heck, all of them — they are all great) please do! Support the original author!

As I mentioned before I visit at least once a day to BeginnerTriathlete.com. There is just so much info on that site.

I even shifted my paper-based log to their training log and got a subscription to the site just to support them.

Here’s my online training log. I’m still maintaining my paper journal as well just in case…

Here’s my “planned” schedule for the next month or so until July 9th. A couple of trips in there will cost me a couple of workouts but even while traveling I hope to be able to get in at least some workouts.

I swear I must have a library about 5-6 books about training in various aspects so far: swimming, biking, running, triathlons, etc. Any questions just ask… I’ve only been doing this a couple of months so I could probably learn a lot from others.