2 x 1.95 Mile Swims, Negative Split

This morning I woke up a lot earlier than normal to get to Jordanelle by 5am.  I wanted to do a longer swim today, and had to be done by 7:30.

When I pulled in, Jim had just parked.  Goody, Ashley and Chaz were right behind him.  It was a pretty good little group for that early in the morning!

My goal today was to swim 3-4 miles.  The water felt great!  When I looked at my watch later, it said 73.5 degrees.  It was very comfortable.

It was hard to see the buoys on the first lap.  I had lost track counting them and had to stop at each one towards the end to see if I was at the last one.  From there I swam out the peninsula and then back the way I came to the opposite end of the buoys.  I saw Tim along the way and said "hi".  I was kind of dragging towards the end and thought about just calling it good.  I decided this was a mental training day and I was going to stick it out.  I swam in to the ramp and got a drink.  I finished my first lap in 1:04.

I saw Goody on my way back out.  He wasn't having a great day either and said his arms were tired.  I think he ended up calling it good at that point because I didn't see him again and his car was gone when I left.  There was a bit of chop on the way out on the second loop, but nothing too bad.  By the time I got the end of the peninsula, it was back to being pretty calm.

Sometimes I get stuck in the trap of just picking an easy pace and plugging along until I hit my target distance.  It's fine to do this once in a while, but if you are looking to increase your speed, you need to be doing intervals and doing more than just swimming at an easy pace for miles.  I think I'll do another post on how to make your open water training swims more effective, stay tuned.  Anyway, I decided I would push the second loop and see if I could negative split the first loop.  It was a good thing I took a drink at the ramp at the end of the first loop, because it started kicking in and I was feeling pretty good again.  I saw Tim again and stopped briefly to say "hi" again.  I wasn't sprinting on the second loop, but I was pushing myself at a faster pace.  I had counted my strokes between buoys on the first lap and my stroke rate was higher on the second loop.

When I swam into the boat ramp for the second time, I stopped my watch at 59 minutes.  Nice!

I reset my GPS between each loop because I wanted to measure how far one loop was.  Each L-shaped loop ended up being about 1.95 miles.

Here are the maps and data for each loop:

Loop 1 - 1.95 miles - average speed: 1.79 mph

Loop 2 - 1.95 miles - average speed: 1.97 mph

I'm glad I decided to keep going this morning. It felt great to push through my negative thoughts and then to negative split the second loop.