Getting My Pool MoJo Back

I'm back at the pool now and am getting into the swing of it again.

I swam last Monday and again last Friday.

Those will be my swimming days for the foreseeable future and I say them out loud to Doug the night before so I can't change my mind.

Both times I went last week I swam for an hour rather than the hour and a half I used to do in the master's class. An hour feels much more reasonable and I can get about 2500m done in that time.

When you consider that I'm training to swim 1500m max this summer, it doesn't make much sense for me to do twice that distance and more every time I get into the pool.

In addition to only swimming for an hour, I also decided to buy a three-month lane pass rather than sign up for the next Master's session.

So I'll be swimming with the regular folks and fighting for my spot in a lane rather than swimming with the crazy folks and having a lane almost always to myself. It's a bit of a tradeoff but I'll try it for a few months and decide if I like it.

What kind of workouts am I doing now that I don't have a coach writing them down on a whiteboard for me? Good question.

Luckily, I was a very keen student and I went home after every master's class and wrote down my entire workout in Training Peaks. Complete with goal times, actual times and instructions.

Which means that I can be my own coach.

I pulled out one of my small moleskin notebooks, tore out a few pages and wrote out four workouts in dark black ink. I put them inside a plastic sealable snack bag. Every time I go I just pick the one I want, put it at the front of the baggie and I'm good to go. Some are distance workouts, some are speed. Some are a bit of both.

It's now even easier to figure out what lane I'm in. Just look for the black flip-flops with sparkles, the sports bottle filled with NUUN and two ziplock baggies, one with two tubes of Dex4s in it and the other one stuffed with workouts.