No, I didn't go swimming naked. I showed up on a tough day. Which to this point has been every day for the past month.
There's a master's swimming group at the university. For $50 a semester ($20 for students, higher for faculty/staff, like me), we get an hour at the team's pool four days week, and a coach with a whistle and a clipboard and everything. Karl works in campus recreation and has a pretty good handle on what it takes to coach swimming. We've only been doing 2,500-3,000 meters because that's what most of us can handle in one hour. The hour we get starts after the UW team leaves and before an open swim, so we've got to be efficient with our time.
Those workouts have been as intense as any I've done. My high school coach stressed quality and technique over quantity; while our opponents boasted of 5,000 yards-plus five days a week, sometimes twice a day, we topped 5,000 yards once in my four years on the team, and that was largely because we swam like shit at the conference meet and coach Stanoff wanted to make a point.
No, this time around the 2,500-meter workouts feature lots of stroke work and hard intervals. We swim 300 breaststroke in 4:30, then go straight into 5x50 freestyle kick on 1:20. Then we do a 200 IM. That's just an example. For the sake of perspective, I had no problem with 4,000-5,000 yards in my hard Ironman training cycles.
Apparently, that was because I didn't challenge myself. If I extrapolated the current workouts over two hours, I would stagger home and go to bed without dinner most nights. The last of the intervals are done with Karl yelling at us from the pool deck to push ourselves, and my arms completely numb.
This is all to say nothing of me gasping for every breath of air. Behind my office once stood a pair of outbuildings. Both were razed during September, as was a classroom building across the alley. That meant about a fourth of the air I've breathed for the past month has been dust, which turned my nasal capillaries to mush. Since getting back from Wisconsin I've been congested and (stop here if you're squeamish) expelling a good deal of blood with my snot. Only after I'd been back a couple weeks did my boss mention that she and another co-worker on my side of the building had missed work with respiratory distress brought on by the construction and moving of earth behind us. Lo and behold, there's a thin layer of dust on everything in my office, including me.
With limited breathing capacities it's no wonder I've felt alternately lightheaded and short of breath during the past couple of swim workouts. I even shortened one of them because not only was there no way I'd finish the workout in the time allotted, I couldn't lift my arms for the last interval, much less for the 200-meter cooldown. And yet the guy in my lane, who appeared to be around my age, steamrolled right through it.
Not even during the first couple weeks of high school swim practice did I feel this out of shape. To think I finished an Ironman five weeks ago...
• In a semi-related item, I made the first payment on
my new bike, an Argon 18 E-112. Because
Adrenaline Tri-Sport sold their last frame the day before I got fitted, Roger the ace bike fitter had to order it directly from the company. As this is the time of year to buy 2009 bikes and cars at a discount, the company was more than happy to jettison one of its models with a fairly nice price break. My ceiling was firmly set at $3,000 and we'll come in a shade under that (which means I won't eat out the rest of the year). The bike should come in this week, though I won't pick it up until the 30th — aka my next payday. The over-under on the number of times I'll get outside with it before winter sets in permanently is six.
• Tiffany wondered if the dead person floating in Lake Monona ever surfaced. Well, at 2 p.m. on Ironman Wisconsin Day, about four-and-a-half hours after the last swimmer cleared the lake, the body surfaced. That's all I heard, and that's all I cared to know.
