Benchmark Metronome

So today was benchmark (aka time trial) day. I was still a little stiff from skiing on the weekend, or to be more accurate, from falling a lot on the weekend and I woke up wheezy so I figured it was not going to be the greatest swim ever. Turns out I somewhat misunderestimated myself.

My previous best, set this year, was 1:46 for 100m. Considering that was very close to my peak of tri fitness I’ll happily take 1:47 for today.

We started off with a 25m butterfly time trial, which I did in 32 seconds and change – a PR! (Also a PF, “Personal First”, so not really cause to break out the confetti.)

Then we moved on to the meat of the workout - 100m free. I didn’t realize that we were trying to maintain a pace across two sets of three reps so I went out pretty hard on the first and finished in 1:47:8. After a minute rest my second rep was 1:49 and then the third was 1:51, a trend that I thought would continue into the next set.

We did an easy swim then a kickboard time trial (athletes are freaks and will time anything!) in which I set my 50m kb PR/PF of 1:15.

The next set of 100m pieces is easy to report: 1:48. Or rather: 1:48, 1:48, 1:48. When I told Paul my 3rd 100m time he called me a metronome as I was so consistent. It was pretty cool that despite going out at what I thought was too hard a pace in the first set that I could maintain it throughout the workout. I was dying after the last set (Paul’s other comment was that I’d definitely passed my threshold), but I did maintain my pace.

Just to really keep things fun we ended with a 25m piece, which I did in 21.8. No idea if that’s anywhere close to a record as we didn’t track those last year – understandable what with us all training for distance events!

The weirdest thing about the workout was what I think of as “The Grouse Grind Factor” – I hated every minute of it while I was doing it but as soon as it was done I was thinking how much fun it was. It's mental twists like that that keeps people racing!