Planning 2010 training and swims: well underway and have spent time with my distance coach, Marcia Cleveland, laying out an increased base load of yardage during these winter months with the goal of larger benefits later in the year. Can you say boring.... Beginning this week I start a slow ramp-up of yardage with the goal being 30,000 yards per week come the end of May. This is when open water season begins and cold lake michigan swims. I have a 1 hour postal event sometime this month (thats a swim as hard as you can for 1 hour to see how far you can go activity. I'm betting somewhere over 4000 but we'll check back and see how that goes). In July, I will try the 10k US Masters Nationals in Indianapolis, its the open water championships in Morse lake and between now and then sprinkle a number of 1.2 and 2.4 mile races for fun and probably a couple lake Wawasee crosses for an excuse to go to the Frog. Later in the fall, I'll be back at San Francisco for the Alcatraz race but this time maybe a 3 miler around the island and back or possibly the "bridge to bridge" (from golden gate to oakland bay bridge, a tough one for sure). Most important however will be my English Channel qualifying swim likely in October when the water is 60f (location yet to be determined) and I will need to go a minimum of 6 hours, likely 7 or 8 so I can learn about "hitting the wall physically and mentally in cold rough water. I do have some reservations, but not scared, just need to take this one step at a time and learn from the successes and failures...
On the charity front, finally making some progress. I have hooked up with the "swim across america - Cancer charity folks" and am hoping some type of relationship for fund raising either locally or nationally but have yet to learn of their interest. I have also received positive news from the Goshen School district for further discussion on how this might apply to the Dollars to Scholars Program. The biggest challenge is finding the mechanism to track and raise the funds and then marketing it without this becoming its own job. So if anyone has ideas please let me know.
Finally, for you old Goshen swimmers heres a laugh. A few events sprinkled in to remind the old muscles that sprinting, if you can call it that, is good physically happened this past weekend. Had a local masters swim meet and did the 1000, 500 free consistently clipping 1:17's per 100 which for my current long distance was good and then to remind me of old swim club days I tried backstroke and IM's. Well my 50 bk was a 29.6 and 100 was pathetically a 1:05 and same for my 100 IM. I guess its ok, just that old competitive thing... The longer races were good from a pace and practice stand point. I did find however that in a 25 yard pool under race conditions you tend to use your legs much more pushing off the walls, turns etc. More leg training will help this.
