breakthrough workouts

I'm not really used to participating in sports where the only thing I'm racing is the clock. In softball, racquetball, hockey and every other sport I've played, the goal is to beat the other team. In triathlon, my goal is to beat my previous best time. During the winter months, that got pretty tedious, because it's tough to measure goals when all I'm doing is looking at my watch every time I'm done with a set in the pool.

However, when you hit your goal times, it feels absolutely amazing. I happened to have hit my 800 yd pool goal time tonight; 13:20. Sure it's not blazing fast, but it's more than four minutes faster than my swim time at the Air Force tri last October. That's just shy of 25% of my time I managed to cut basically since January. It felt great and I've been on a bit of a high since I finished up my swim.

In a effort to make myself feel even better, I checked out the times of the Colorado high school state swim meet. They had times for 500 yards, so I compared that to my pace. I felt pretty humbled after that. I wouldn't have managed to even make the top 50... against the girls swimmers. In fact, the lowest place they showed was 34th, and she still managed to be on pace to swim an 800 in about 10 minutes. That made me realize I have a lot of work to do to improve, but based on my gains so far, I know it's definitely possible.

This mini-milestone has helped re-energize my swimming a bit and now I have a new goal... to cut my 800 time down to 12 minutes by the end of the summer. I just need to work on my stroke a bit, rely on my kick a little more and remember that if I make it, I'll only have to drop 2 more minutes to be close to the top 50 of the girl's state swimming championships.