Fourth Time Trial of 2013

Christine told us a week before that we were going to have a time trial on May 15th. Our fourth one of the year. She didn't mention it again and she didn't send out a reminder email. 

Why?

Because there are some people who won't come if they know it's happening. They're just not fans of time-trialing. 

I am not one of those people. I LOVE time trials. I love pushing hard for not too long and then finding out if what feels like pushing hard is actually pushing harder than last time. 

As per usual, for the time trial we had to swim 300m. Three times. 

We started off with a 600m warmup. I spent the entire 600m trying to pay attention to all of the parts of my stroke that I need to work on. Keep my head down. Finish the stroke, don't cut it short. Stretch my body out. Tighten my core. Kick kick kick. 

After the 600m warmup, we had to do 8x25m sprints. That was to get our bodies ready for swimming fast and pushing hard. 

Then we got to decide who was going first. During time trials we break up into pairs and one person swims while the other person times them and writes down their times. After the first person finishes all three 300m swims, we switch. There are pros and cons to going first or second. I prefer first and George, my time trial partner, preferred that I go first so we were both happy. He scrambled out, grabbed a shirt to stay warm and set himself up by the side of the pool with a stopwatch, paper and a flutter board to write on. 

"We'll leave red top" Christine announced. I look at the two swimmers going with me. They were both faster, much faster, so I had no hope of pacing with them. I wouldn't even be able to see their bubbles by the end of the first 50m. So I headed off on my own, with nothing to gauge my speed by other than my breathing and energy level. 

Every hundred metres, George wrote down my time. Every hundred metres, George and Christine yelled something at me but all I heard was yelling noises, not words. So I had no idea if I was too slow and they were yelling at me to speed up, if they were just yelling encouragement or if I was super fast and they were telling me to pace myself. I swam hard, or what I thought was hard anyway, and finished hot and gasping but not dead. 

"You swam 100m in 1:34!" yelled Christine. "And broke 5 minutes for 300m!!". 

I grinned.

We had a few minutes to cool down, catch our breath and sip our drinks before we did it again. And again. Three times through. The first is the easiest I think because I still have lots of energy. The second is the hardest because I am tired and know I still have another one yet to do. The third gets easier because I know that, when I'm done, I'm done. 

I slowed a tiny bit with each 300m but not horribly so. I felt good all the way through and could definitely have done another one if I needed to (not that I offered of course). 

I did not remember my times from the previous trials so I had to wait until I got home to compare them. But I knew that I had never broken five minutes before and I knew that 1:34 for 100m was pretty damn fast because I usually struggle to break 1:40. 

So here are the results from January, February, March and May (we didn't have one in April). 

January Time Trial   5:12 5:21 5:17
February Time Trial 5:09 5:12 5:15

March Time Trial     5:13 5:08 5:06

May Time Trial        4:59 5:01 5:05 

Pretty cool eh?

Even better - at the March Time Trial, Christine said that her next goal for me was to be able to swim 100m in 1:35. I laughed and said 'maybe by July'. Well, the first 100m for each 300m was 1:34, 1:35 and 1:37.

Sometimes I don't mind being proved wrong.