1000m swims are kinda hard for me. They hurt and I didn’t really feel like hurting this morning. So, I did my 1000m at a somewhat pedestrian pace. Or so it felt. In reality, my time was 5 seconds slower than last Monday, and almost 25 seconds faster than the previous Monday. Two weeks ago was my fist time in years trying a 1000m for time so maybe that isn’t so significant. What I feel happened is I’m generally in better shape for this distance after a couple weeks, kicked the intensity down maybe 5% today and sacrificed about one-half of 1% in performance. Sure, I would like to have bettered my time this morning but I feel there is something to be gained at varying intensity like this. I concentrated on my stroke and became more comfortable at this, a distance that until now was very much not comfortable. As with all sports, my theory goes anyway, pushing your limit has to be fun. If you’re miserable, you won’t push yourself day after day. It takes tons of time, but finding the limit of your performance envelope and consistently bumping up against it can be meaningful and really is necessary for improvement. To put in the time it takes to see big improvement better be fun for you or there’s gonna be a lot of misery.
da numbers:
- 200m easy free
- 1000m free
- time: 18:17
- 200m easy free
- 200m fly kick
total distance: 1600m
