OHP - one hour postal swim

This past Saturday was the National USMS one hour postal swim (actually you can do it any day in the month of January, but entries have to be in by 1/31).  Basically it's a timed race where you swim as far as you can in a pool in an hour.  It hurts like hell....I am the postal coordinator for the Rochester Area Masters Swimmers (RAMS) and with that comes the inevitable headache of organizing who is swimming in what lane and who is volunteering for whom...sounds easy, but not when you have to juggle 20+ people and work their schedules.  Regardless, it went fairly smoothly.

Saturday was my day to swim and I had done this race in 2009 and managed to struggle thru 4,650 yards or so which averaged out to 1:17.X/100yard pace.  This year I know I'm swimming faster and I set a fairly loft goal up there of 4800 yards in an hour.  (1:15 pace)  We had done a 10 x 10's on 1:15 workout set earlier in the year and I got thru it, but it was painful and I really wasn't sure how I was going to do in this one. 

So, Saturday.  We start and I took the first 500 out in 6:00.00 - exactly 1:12 pace.....a TAD too quick, but I was settling in.  At about the 2,000 yard mark I had amassed about a 20-30 second buffer of time faster than the predicted 1:15pace that I wanted to go. I really thought I was doing the first 2k fairly comfortably.  At about the 3k mark, I had seen that buffer completely vanish and I hit a really low point in the hour of pain that I was going thru.  I kind of lost count (good thing we have counters on deck!) and started day dreaming a bit.  Once I saw that the clock read about 10 mintues left, I started to pick it up and push it....a lot.

By the time I hit the wall, I honestly only thought I had gone about 4650 or 4700 yards total and was shocked to hear that as the whistle blew, my hand hit the wall for a total of 4,800 yards in an hour! I was dead-nuts on my pace of 1:15 pace.  Not too shabby for this time in the year. So this squirrelly kid managed to shock himself and pull off a decent swim and breakfast at Charbroil afterwards too.  (I think that was Kim's favorite part!) Next up this weekend is the always fun Cast-a-shadow 6 hour snowshoe relay at Black Creek Park and that should be a blast.  I've been training hard and I have much to say about that, so until next time, see you on the roads and trails (or spinning in my basement) Cheers!