tyler's take

Yesterday I swam my penultimate postal swim of 2009 (and possibly my life): the 6000 yard swim in a 25 yard pool (for those who prefer some help with the maths that’s 240 lengths or 120 laps). I somehow talked a real-life professional athlete into doing the long swim with me (what a sport!). Here’s a shot where he’s all smiles (yes this *is* before the swim, but there were still some smiles after):

Everyone needs a counter/timer/verifier for a postal and we each had our own. One of us was somehow talented enough to talk the 2009 Wisconsin Ironman Champion of the World into being his counter. The other one of us had to make do with the only other person who was willing to sit still indoors for over an hour on a beautiful Sunday afternoon and record splits every ~30 seconds (thanks Larry!).

Race preparation
Apparently, a pro triathlete prepares for a long pool race slightly differently than a pure swimmer does. For example, while we both followed our regular training routines through Thursday, one of us trained hard in swim practice on Friday, but sat out a portion of the hard stuff, then swam easy on Saturday and followed that with the regular dryland routine, but did some of that with super-light weights and bands. The other one of us did who-knows-what crazy training on Friday, did a long, long ride on Saturday, and then did a hard ride on Sunday morning *right before* the 6k swim (it shall be left as an exercise for the reader to determine which is which).

Race Report
We swam side-by-side in two adjacent lanes, and both started from a push at exactly 5 minutes after straight-up noon with absolutely zero prior warmup in the pool (this zero-warmup strategy seems to work well for me, for others not so much).

For suits we both wore similar all-textile Finis Hydrospeed legskins (still legal until at least January!). Some people can tolerate wearing a full bodyskin for a long race like this, but I find that even a 1500 is far enough to let the suit cut me up fairly substantially. For example, the TYR Sayonara that I wore for the 1500m swim portion of the Austin Tri cut me fairly well on both lats, as well as rubbed off most of the top layer of the back of my neck where the zipper cord wanted to be (I suppose some kind of body lube might help with the chafing, but I’ve never tried it). The Finis legskin ended up working well, but whoever designed the super-short booty part needs to go back with the tape measure and rethink it a bit (i.e. not all swimmers are plumbers, and big … erm … “gaps” let in a lot of water, which is not a good thing for cutting down on drag). Fortunately, the suits had a bit of stretch in them and getting them wet seemed to help bridge the gap (so to speak). Overall, the legskin did provide a lot of good muscle compression, and did seem to help ward off fatigue.

In general, I felt fairly strong the whole way and my pacing was fairly steady. I did not finish the swim under the hour mark (and going in I did not expect to), but I did go significantly further at the hour than I had last January, which made me feel pretty good about my current conditioning … at least, my distance conditioning … we’ll have to wait and see about the sprint races!

Immediately after touching the wall on my last lap I found my triceps and lats to be very sore, but my legs felt fine even though I had kicked quite a bit (quite possibly this lack of soreness in the legs was due at least partly to the compression provided by the legskin). From past experience with other long swims I anticipated the upper body soreness to carry on for at least a day or two, but after a short swimdown in the pool (only 300 or 400 yards) I found most of the soreness has dissipated. By the next morning I felt relatively back to normal, but this may have been partly due to the awesome post-swim Taco optimization that took place with the two swimmers and one counter (optimize in 45? I think we made it).

As far as postals go, there’s only one left for me: the 3000 yard swim (25 yard pool). I have exactly 4 weeks from yesterday to get it done, and this time I need to convince two more guys, or one more guy and two gals, to do it with me so we can make a “relay” out of it (technically, it’s an aggregate swim not a relay, as there is no exchange). The 3k actually should be easier to persuade folks to do than the 6k, but time’s marching on, and there are not that many more opportunities for open lanes in the TSC … we’ll have to wait and see!

This morning in between swimming outside at 7am (was the air really 59 degrees? good thing the pool was heated to 79) and doing dryland training at 10am, I hoofed it downtown and joined some friends for the 2009 NAMI Austin walk, which started at 9 am at Auditorium shores and went north across the river, around the capitol building and back.

I took some photos at the event.

A fair number of dogs brought their humans with them (some a bit crazier than others):

APD helped with traffic control:

A lot of people had fun: