Today was my 20 minute swim. It was warm and lightly raining outside, which actually made for a pleasant temperature in the outdoor pool. I was equipped with my heart rate monitor, I felt good. I estimated I'd swim 16 laps = 800 meters = half a mile = triathlon swim distance. I was psyched.
It was a gruelling 20 minutes. I was never tired per-se, but I didn't even come close to swimming continuously. I kept stopping to catch my breath, then feeling better pretty quickly and getting back to it, just to feel out of breath almost immediately. I still can't figure out why I was breathing so hard. Sometimes I would swim on my back, but I felt like I was going so slow, and I would veer left and right too much.
My heart rate monitor didn't monitor my heart rate very well. Maybe the strap was moving too much, or maybe it didn't like the chlorine? When it did synch up it showed me what I suspected: my heart isn't the limiting factor; I was rarely above 150 bpm.
The whole process actually reminds me of when I started running recreationally three years ago: I would slow to a walk all the time but was never really sure why. Breathing? Boredom? I'm honestly not sure. But with practice and time came the ability to run continuously for 30, 40, more minutes. To just run and run and run, even when I don't feel like it anymore, to just tell my body to keep going as long as the body is still listening to me. Endurance is a very mental thing. I had assumed that since I have built up my running endurance to x minutes it would cross the sport divide, but I guess it doesn't.
Come to think of it, I am fighting this same endurance battle on the biking front. All the biking I've done so far is to get to or from work or errands, to get somewhere that I want to go. But now that I think about it in these terms, there's always a moment around 10 minutes into my rides where I just want to stop pedalling. I don't stop, just slow down, because I have a train to catch or some other compelling goal. But there is no such goal in the pool, just another lap to complete for no immediately apparent reason.
Wow, I feel like I've made a breakthrough in the mental game of this training. How cool! This entry didn't take the path I was planning at all, so now there's no good segue into this very important (to me) bit of information, so I'll just jump straight in:
I kept looking at my heart rate monitor's time display, wishing for the time to go both faster (so I'd be done) and slower (so I'd complete the half mile in time). With about 6 minutes to go I had 4 more laps to complete to hit that goal, so I bucked-up a bit and stopped being so lazy with my effort, and completed with five seconds to spare! I should have been elated, right? But something didn't feel right. I don't know all the statistics, but I just didn't think I should have been able to swim a half mile in 20 minutes with the truly lack-luster performance I put in.
So I went to the gym front desk on my way back to the locker room, and asked the girl there "Are we sure the pool is 25 meters?" and she said "Oh, no, it's 25 yards. We told you meters before, but I looked it up and it's yards."
There we go. I didn't swim 0.50 miles but 0.45 miles. I would have had to swim 1.6 more laps to make it to half a mile, probably taking another 2.5 minutes. I guess that isn't much difference. In fact, I'm tempted to go out there with my super-duper-mega-long measuring tape and measure that sucker myself.
The side meters have been updated appropriately.
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