I spent Saturday and part of Sunday at the UIC Flames Natatorium for the ILMSA State Meet. I swam five events in total, three of them relays. If I discount my times from when I swam as a kid, I posted personal best times in both individual events. Two of my relay split times were consistent, and one was impossibly off (0:20.45), so I’m sure that’s not accurate.

• Mixed 200 Medley Relay (Free) : 0:31.09
• Men 200 Free (seed 2:36.00) : 2:29.39
• Men 100 Breast (seed 1:32.00) : 1:23.58
• Men 200 Free Relay (3rd) : N/A
• Mixed 200 Free Relay (3rd) : 0:31.84

I had intended only to swim on Saturday after failing to meet the registration deadline for the 500 Free which ran on Sunday. Fitz, my coach, asked if I could sub for a leg of the Mixed 200 Free Relay, so I agreed to come back. I did a long warmup and cooldown around the race and turned Sunday into an abbreviated version of my weekend practice.

The Chicago Blue Dolphins entered 19 swimmers in the meet, and that was a huge difference between my experience in Evanston where I was the sole representative and here. The team hung out together between events, encouraged each other, posed for pictures and generally contributed to that spirit of camaraderie that had been missing the first time around.

Whirl came along and cheered me on. Spencer and Templar came out to spend the afternoon at the pool and cheer as well. Once again, my squad of loyal fans adopted my (much speedier) work colleague, Brent, and cheered for him, too. Brent was the sole representative for his team at the state meet.

I know I’ve got some work to be competitive in my age group, but I am seeing steady progress on my times. I dropped seven seconds from the time on 200 Free I posted in Evanston. I dropped nine seconds off my practice time-trial seed time on the 100 Breast. My 100 yard split in the 200 Free was only a second slower than my goal time for the year in that event and the entire time for the event was only three seconds off my goal pace for the year.

Before the meet on Sunday, I stopped by Niqui’s house to try on a used men’s wetsuit she is interested in getting rid of. As Doug Sohn — of Hot Doug’s — proudly states, “There are no two finer words in the English language than ‘encased meats’, my friend.” After 15-20 minutes of wrestling with the wetsuit I successfully transformed myself into an ostensibly buoyant encased meat. Or a penguin.

I went through all of the trials of the wetsuit as a prerequisite to attempting some open water swimming later this year. There are a couple of events on the horizon that I’m considering where a wetsuit could be useful besides just practicing in Lake Michigan, Lake Tahoe and Donner Lake this summer:

• Swim Across America: Chicago : 1.5 Mile : August 4
• Big Shoulders : 2.5 K : September 8

Now, get back in the pool!

I got to thinking about the 2012 Go the Distance event I signed up for at the beginning of the year. I mentioned it a while back. Since January I’ve been keeping track of my progress and most recently I’ve tweaked my goal a little bit. I was thinking about a way to visualize my progress beyond what I could see in a spreadsheet or a chart. That got me thinking about how far 500 kilometers really is. I started looking at maps, and it turns out the length of Lake Michigan is pretty close to that same distance.

A bit of research here and there and I found the course map for the Chicago Yacht Club’s Race to Mackinac. It is the oldest annual freshwater distance sailboat race in the world. 536 kilometers (333 statute miles, 289.4 nautical miles) from Chicago, starting just off Navy Pier, to Mackinac Island, Michigan. After I read that, I had my goal. I could swim to Mackinac. Not all at once, mind you, but over the course of a year, I could make it. Follow along.

View Larger Map

At the end of each month, I am adding a checkpoint along the route. I am also marking when I hit certain recognized milestone achievements. My ultimate goal is to reach Mackinac Island by the end of the year.

If you’d like something a little more immediate, the ILMSA State Meet is next weekend: April 19-22. It will be held at the UIC Flames Natatorium in the Physical Education Building at UIC. This is the same location where I swim with my team. I’m excited to see how I do. Thursday and Friday are in the evening only: 1000 Free; I’m not attempting that this time around. I am swimming two individual events on Saturday:

• Event 14: 200 Free
• Event 18: 100 Breast

It’s highly likely my coach will place me in a relay as well, either the 200 Medley or the 200 Free. I toyed with the idea of swimming the 500 Free on Sunday, but by the time I got around to registering for the meet the 500 Free was already closed. Cheer my teammates and me on if you like. Should be quite a show with some very fast swimmers entered into the meet.

Reserve your seats, now! The ILMSA State Meet is two months away. I know this because the pool where I practice on Tuesday evenings, the UIC Flames Natatorium, has been reconfigured from the eight-lane 50 meter long course pool to an eight-lane 25 yard short course pool. Teammates have informed me this happens every year and the pool will remain in this configuration through April.

At first I thought that’s too bad, I’d really come to enjoy swimming in the long pool. Then I considered the upside. I’ll have the advantage of regularly swimming in the competition pool for several weeks before the big meet. I decided back in January to give the State Meet a shot. And to prepare myself, I swam three events in the Evanston Meet in late January. Despite a vicious case of nervousness, I managed to acquit myself without an overly undue amount of embarrassment. I swam three events and turned in three personal best times, beating my seed times in each event if we don’t count my DQ in the 100 Free due to a rolling start. I did say I was nervous, right? Anyway, here are my results from the Evanston Masters Swim Meet on January 22nd.

• 100 Free : 1:12
• 50 Breast : 0:39
• 200 Free : 2:36

Whirl woke up with me at Oh God-thirty, came along and cheered me on. My friends Farmboy, Princess, Spencer and Templar came out to spend the morning at the pool and cheer as well. It felt great! Incidentally, my squad of loyal fans adopted my (much speedier) work colleague, Brent, and cheered for him, too.

The whole experience got me thinking about setting some actual goals for the upcoming year and see how close we come to hitting them. To that end, Niqui turned me on to the USMS program: Go The Distance.

Go the Distance is a self-directed program intended to encourage Masters swimmers to regularly exercise and track their progress. There is no time limit for the distance milestones, except that they must be achieved in the calendar year 2012. GTD is on the honor system– you track the distance you swim. [...] When you achieve certain milestones, ranging from 50 miles through 1500 miles, you will be recognized on the U.S. Masters Swimming website and will receive special prizes from Nike Swim, our event title sponsor for the event.

Initially I wavered on a target distance. First I thought a mile a day. Since 2012 is a leap year, that would mean 366 miles. When I compared that goal to the yardage I turned in for 2011 (216 miles), I decided perhaps I should scale back a bit. — I settled on the distance of half a million meters. That translates to a little more than 310 miles but sounds so much more impressive. Right!?

So that’s one goal. Now I’m looking at my times and thinking of some others. I’d like to be able to compare where I am now to where I was at my peak at 18 or 19, I’m just not sure I have any of those times anywhere. I’ll have to look around. Anyway, that may not be terribly realistic at this stage, so I’ll focus on something that is more in line with my current performance. I’d love to drop my 500 Free time below seven minutes, shave a couple seconds off my 100 Free and see if I can get a competitive time in the 200 Free. As far as stroke events, I’m less certain, but faster is always better.

So let’s stretch it out a bit. Without further ado, here are some goal thoughts for 2012:

• 100 Free : 1:08
• 200 Free : 2:26
• 500 Free : 6:55
• 1000 Free : 14:20
• 1500 Free : 21:30
• 100 Back : 1:20
• 50 Breast : 0:37
• 100 Breast : 1:16
• 200 IM : 2:34
• One hour nonstop distance : 4100 yards
• Total distance : 500000 meters

I’m not expecting to hit all (or even any) of these goals at the State Meet, but hopefully come December I will have achieved a few of them and pushed myself to set some new ones.

See you in the pool!

So it’s been a year of swimming regularly. I started thinking about it as something to do to augment my regular exercise and after a year I’ve found that swimming has not only taken over but I just sent in a registration form to compete in an honest-to-God swim meet. And not some little fuck-around meet, either. A big one. With blocks and timing pads and everything! It’s kind of a big deal.

As I was sealing up the envelope with my registration form inside I started asking myself how I got here. What changed? And what had I actually accomplished along the way. I’m not sure what exactly changed, other than enjoying it. It was fairly simple to alter the workout routine to substitute swimming for my typical cardio work. As I re-familiarized myself with the pool, I did it more and more, and the elliptical less and less. I started off swimming 1000 yards on my lunch hour, two or three times a week. Now I’m swimming five days a week, three days on my own and twice a week with a USMS team. I’m averaging 14000 yards a week– about five times what I started doing.

So there’s that. What’s more I started keeping track of things as the year progressed. I mean, it’s swimming. You go up the lane, you flip around and you come back down the lane. Up and back, up and back, up and back. It’s not the most exciting of exercises.

For several months I swam the same workout each time. I started with five 200 Free on whatever it took to do them. When I completed five of them, I congratulated myself, got out of the pool and walked around feeling virtuous the rest of the day. As I got stronger, my times dropped and I could complete the workout in less time. Eventually I added a sixth 200 Free, but by that time I was pretty bored.

So I watched the clock. I started playing games with myself. Can I do this 50 in less than a minute? Can I string a set of three 200 Free on the 4:00 together without completely gasping out? Can I catch that guy swimming a lane over? I think it was that last one that did it. Having those little imaginary races in my head with other people in the pool. They didn’t know they were racing me. Or maybe they did; I don’t know. Maybe they were doing the same thing to me. We never talked about it.

I started tinkering with my workout. I tried to remember the workouts from when I was a kid– that was fruitless. I turned to online to look for help, and initially that was only mildly helpful. Workouts are all over the place in terms of intensity, distance and goals. Triathlons have become popular forms of exercise and there are a number of suggestions for workouts as part of triathlon training. I looked at some of those and mixed things up a bit, but nothing really fit right. Eventually I discovered a website run by some Kiwis out of New Zealand that provided customized workouts. Swimplan asks you to enter some basic information about yourself, your swim ability and your facilities and then kicks out up to five workouts every day for you to choose from. By this point I was swimming regularly five days a week: three times during the workweek and twice on weekends. I signed up, punched in my basic numbers and waited to see what it would suggest. It kicked out at 2200 yard workout, nearly double what I had been swimming on a daily basis. But the workout was broken down into sections: warm up, build up, core and warm down. It had sets. It had intervals. It suggested appropriate rest and intensity levels. It was, essentially, a stand in coach.

And I ate it up. I took that first workout with me to the pool and was through it much faster than I had anticipated. And I felt great afterward. I thought I would be completely gassed after doubling my workout. I wasn’t. Over the next few months I refined my information, added time trial data. I bought some paddles and a pull bouy so I could drill with those. Swimplan supplies appropriate drills depending on what equipment you tell it you have.

Swimming was very much part of my daily routine. Whirl commented that if I went too many days without swimming, I would grow crabbier and irritable. Complete a workout and I would return to calm, cool and collected. Endorphins are amazing that way. I got to know a few of the regular swimmers at the pool, people I ran into every week. In more than a few conversations, it was suggested that I look into Masters swimming. In mid-October I followed up on those suggestions and I’ve been very happy about that decision ever since.

The end of the year has been plagued by some facilities problems with my regular lunchtime gym. The pool has been intermittently out of commission starting in November. So an added benefit of joining the team is that team practice has given me another outlet while the gym tries to fix their pool.

My highlight accomplishment has to have been the Hour of Power workout in late December. The workout was very simple: swim non-stop for an hour. They kept track of our distance and recorded our time at the end of every 50. I swam 3850 yards in an hour, approximately 2.2 miles. And what is more impressive is that I kept a much steadier pace than I could have hoped for.

Some accomplishments over the past year swimming:

• Weight Loss : 43 pounds
• Weight Loss : 6 inches off my waist
• One hour nonstop distance : 3850 yards
• 100 Free : 1:13
• 200 Free : 2:41
• 500 Free : 7:23
• 1000 Free : 15:26
• 100 Back : 1:35
• 100 Breast : 1:36

I plan to use those results to build some goals for the next year. But before that, it’s off to the races!

In January I started swimming regularly for the first time in about twenty years. When I wrote about it at the time I said that I wasn’t swimming for competition; I said that I was just doing it for myself. And I think I meant that. Now it’s ten months later and I’ve been steadily adding more and more to my workouts and swimming has pretty much taken over from my other exercise routine. I started off swimming 1000 yards three days a week. As I got more comfortable, I added a fourth day and then a fifth. Then I started edging up the distance. I was swimming faster and requiring less time to rest. I started keeping a log of my distance totals and every once in a while I would time myself. You know, just to see how I was doing. Nothing serious.

Of course there was absolutely nothing vaguely competitive about any of this. Racing never crossed my mind– not even when I caught myself secretly trying to pass the guy in the lane next to me. I found Swimplan and punched in some of the statistics I’d gathered over those first few months to establish a profile. I have really appreciated Swimplan and have recommended it to several of the other regulars I’ve met at the pool. That first workout added fifty percent more to my regular workout, and it’s kept steadily increasing ever since. Up until last week, I was averaging a total of 10000 yards per week. I’ve fallen into a comfortable routine — five days on, two days off — swimming Friday through Tuesday. On the three weekdays I swim over my lunch break; The pool is just two blocks away. On the weekends, I try to swim first thing in the morning.

Then a couple of things happened in rapid succession that altered my thinking. In one week at the pool I had three people ask me if I swam competitively: two mentioning the US Masters Swimming program, and the third talking to me about triathlons. At the time, this seemed like coincidence, but now I can say with some confidence that it probably wasn’t entirely coincidence. The Chicago Triathlon, the Wisconsin Ironman and the Chicago Marathon were all scheduled to run within about a month of the comments, marking the culmination of the summer triathlon season.

A goal is not always meant to be reached. It often serves simply as something to aim for. — Bruce Lee

I had a new goal. I’d accomplished most of what I’d sought out to do. I was comfortable in the water again. I was getting stronger and continuing to lose weight. I was feeling better about myself. The objective data was there for anyone to analyse: times were quicker, distances longer. It was time to step it up again.

So last weekend I signed up for Masters swimming. I joined a team and last night I attended my first official workout. The Chicago Blue Dolphins practice out of the UIC facility about a mile and a half from home on the southeastern corner of the campus. It has two gorgeous pools in the building. The large pool is a huge pool: eight lane 50-meter by ten lane 25-yard pool and a large diving well offset on the deep end. The small pool is a more typical six lane 25-yard pool. The workouts are challenging, effectively doubling the longer workouts I’ve been doing on my own through Swimplan. New drills, new techniques and coaches there to help make adjustments and provide encouragement.

From what I can tell, the competitive swim meet season starts in January, so I’ve got a bit of time left to practice before then. Regardless, it’s a powerful motivation and one I’m really excited about undertaking.