High Noon

Date: Friday, December 9, 2011
Time: 11:50 a.m.
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Short CourseYards/Meters
199 days to Olympic Trials

The day before a swim meet I have a ritual of sorts. I always do my usual meet warmup, take a little break and get a timed 25 from a dive. Here's how that went:

Short Course Yards:
400: 200 free/100 back/50 breast/50 free

Reverse 400 IM: 25 scull/25 kick/25 drill/25 swim

4x50 breast kick drill on 1:00

100 easy

6x15 breakouts on :45

150 easy

Ten minute break

Short Course Meters:
25 breast from a dive (13.5)

125 easy

Total: 1550 yards/meters (50 minutes)

I started doing this type of day-before-meet workout in 2009, and it's worked out well for me since then. It's good to do something from the blocks the day before a meet, just to get your mind and body into racing gear. Sometimes, my first race has been not too good, so I decided to avert that by doing some kind of race the day before. I was thinking of doing a 50 today, but I thought it would be best to do only a 25, if it turned out I wasn't feeling good today. Going 13-mid is good, and when I shave and put on a racing suit (I wore a brief today), I should be able to get a 12-second opening 25, which will give me a great start to my 100 breast.

I decided to swim at the noon workout to test out the weather that time of day. The sun felt good on my skin, and it was a comfortable 60 degrees! I'll still need to wear my parka this weekend, but it felt much better than 38 degrees at 6 a.m. If I had the opportunity to do so, I would swim at noon every day in the winter.

Shaving tonight was very good. Only one razor cut! Usually, I'm nursing three or more, because I tend to rush through parts of the shave. This time, I cut myself on my clavicle, a ridge of bone that my razor had difficulty getting around.

While shaving today, I thought a little about the first time I ever shaved. It was at the 1991 Pan American Games. I sat in the shower in Havana, Cuba, trying not to swallow the water coming from the shower head. Before that, I had used Nair, because I thought the important part was just removing hair, not the dead skin. No one told me the Nair way of shaving was wrong until I got to Cuba, and my roommates saw me applying the cream the day before my race. While I'm glad they showed me the light, I wish someone had done that for me earlier! How fast would I have swum before August 1991 if I had known to use a razor?

Oh well. Going to kick back and relax tonight. First race is around 2:45 p.m. tomorrow!