Going by Feel

I had a pretty full day of work today, but managed to stop at the pool on the way home.  This is the fun part of my training life.  I had no planned workout, initially I'd thought of swimming at least a half hour straight, if not an hour, like I did last week.  When I actually jumped in the pool, I made the decision to do a series of 100 yard intervals.  Last week, I swam an hour straight at a pace of 2 minutes for every 100 yards.  That's about 8-10 seconds slower per 100 than when I was fully prepared for Kona.  Not too bad, considering I literally hadn't swam since!  Swimming non-stop is relaxing, but I can do that anytime.  I'm sure I'll do it again.  But today I didn't feel like swimming at that pace, so I set a target of swimming at a 1:40/100yd pace.  That's what I did, doing the next interval at the 2 minute mark, so essentially getting in the same volume in the same time, just training my body to swim faster in order to do it.  After about 10 of these, I switched to 50 yard efforts at about the same pace.  And restarting each of these every minute.  After 36 minutes of swimming, I started to slow down a tad, so I figured that was time to stop.

Swimming is all about feel.  It's always interesting how easy and free I swim initially.  Today, my first few 100 yard efforts were done literally with minimal effort, with fewer strokes and obviously more at ease.  As I progressed, the number of strokes that I needed to maintain the same pace increased.  I'm going to have to think about that next time.  Do I allow myself to go slower in order to use fewer strokes?  Do I focus on the increasing my effort while maintaining the easy feeling of swimming with the fewest amount of strokes?  Swimming is fascinating.

The other thing that I enjoy about going by feel is the natural way it feels.  My return to ironman-like training is about feeling the joy of the workouts.  Going by feel is purely a joyful experience, as is doing the same on a run or during a bike ride.  That's what it's all about!