Thursday, October 16, 2008

27 Minute swim - 10/16

It has been a month since my last swim - mostly because the training plan I've been following for the half marathon has had me running most days of the week. Until this week when I decided to taper off the running, I just had enough other stuff going on that swimming fell to the back burner.

During the day today, I got myself all charged up for it though. Some days you just spend the whole day itching to do something to kick your own ass. Since I'm restricting myself from running during this last week, that left swimming as my outlet.

The notable thing about today was that I feel like I'm starting to get used to swimming enough again that I am able to zone out. Whereas before, my maximum amount of time between breaks was about 5 minutes (more due to boredom rather than getting tired) - today I did a stretch for about 18 minutes. A large part of it was 'why take a break when I'm just going to be doing this again in another minute or so?'

Lap 1: 4:00 Avg HR 125 Power setting 50
Lap 2: 18:00 Avg HR 152 Power setting 35
Lap 3: 5:04 Avg HR 151 Power setting 40
Avg power setting (time based): 38

The power setting at 50 was a bit too much to start off, without being warmed up or anything. So I set it down to what the dial initially showed as 40, but ended up being 35. Apparently there is some time required for the current to settle down. So I brought it up to 40 after taking a 90 second break between lap 2 and lap 3.

They say that at top speed, the endless pool does the equivalent of 1 mile in just under 20 minutes. Before I closed up the pool for the evening, I turned it up as high as it would go, and found the power setting (whatever units it is) went to 90. So I'm thinking that the 27 minutes at a power setting of 38 is about 0.6 miles.

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