January 10, 2009

RAMS 10k swim practice

So there has been this idea in my head for quite some time that I've always wanted to be able to say that I've swam a 10k. I don't know why, but in high school we'd always do practices that were like 6-7k and never really got up that high. In college, I only ran track and XC so I didn't swim for the blue wave at Geneseo.

Now after joining RAMS for at least a year now, they have done several really cool things for meets, relays, and practices. On Sunday January 4th there was an option to swim a 10,000 yard workout at RIT. I went.

There were about 20-25 of us that started out the workout and we pushed off at around 10am. There weren't going to be any REALLY hard sets today, it was all about just getting a ridiculous amount of yards in. We all started in good spirits and had some fun.

It was long (i'm not going to lie) and a lot of people bailed a little early, but that's okay. I was planning on the whole thing and wanted to prove to myself that I could swim it. Lori threw set after set after set at us and we swam it. Gradually the numbers dwindled to a point where we each had our own lanes. At about 8500 yards into the practice Lori throws this one our way: 4x(2x100's on 1:30, 1x50 stroke on :60) It wasn't that hard just the fact that I was feeling pretty good at this point. My triceps were cramping a bit, but all in all the wheels had not fallen off yet.

I swam each 100 somewhere between 1:09 and 1:12...it was insane. I don't know how I went so fast, but it just became what I had to do at that point. I guess I just needed an 8500 yard warm up! :o) After that it was a small cool down and we hit 10k. There were only 3 of us that finished, myself, Bruce and Big Jim.

That's me on the left and big Jim on the right after completing our 10,000 yards. I apologize for the paleness. It was fun and I wish they did it more than once a year. But the next big thing that is popping up at the end of the month is a one hour Postal swim. Should be fun, they keep track of your laps and you just swim as far as you can in 1 hour.

I still have to get a few more race reports up here, so I gotta run, but JFT folks...that's what the 10k swim is all about :o) Cheers.

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