Stuck my toe in the water

Yes­ter­day evening I went back to the gym. I haven’t been in a while for a vari­ety of rea­sons, but I guess most­ly because it’s eas­i­er to just put my shorts on and run if I want a work­out. It was a pret­ty abbre­vi­at­ed vis­it, but I touched a num­ber of bases. I found that while my thumb is still a bit achy from a sprain a few months ago that it can sup­port weight in a num­ber of direc­tions with­out pain. Nei­ther lat pull­downs nor chest press­es gave my thumb any trouble.

I found swim­ming to be more work than I remem­bered. Part of this comes from my arms being prob­a­bly a bit weak­er than they were the last time I got in the water, which was almost a year and a half ago. The rest is that I haven’t for­got­ten quite all of the train­ing I got before I start­ed to neglect swim­ming, and so instead of splash­ing around not get­ting any­where and con­se­quent­ly not encoun­ter­ing much resis­tance in the water, I was able to actu­al­ly move myself for­ward. This was real work, and I got worn out pret­ty fast. But again, it’s been eigh­teen months since I tried swim­ming. So I only did ten laps, but that’s ten laps more than I did the day before.

Look­ing at my pace, I see that I’ve slowed down a bit, but not as much as I thought I might, and I stopped at the ends of the pool to rest. Time spent stopped while the clock is still tick­ing is a big drag on over­all pace. If I stay with this just a bit, I’ll find a pace and rhythm that I can main­tain again.

Swim­ming has always been the weak link in my triathlon chain. What I proved last night is that I could do a sprint dis­tance tri today and I’d fin­ish. Trea­sure Island is com­ing up again in Novem­ber, and there’s no rea­son I can’t do an Olympic-length tri by then, and prob­a­bly beat my 2004 time by a sub­stan­tial margin.

So I’ll start look­ing for a sprint dis­tance event to do some­time in, say, late Sep­tem­ber. That will give me an inter­me­di­ate goal to work toward, and being a short­er event I can set per­for­mance-ori­ent­ed goals rather than sim­ply set my goal to finish.

At some point I should renew my mem­ber­ship to the Gold­en Gate Triathlon Club. I’d hate to wear my team jer­sey if I’m not even an active member.