Open Water Swim Training

July 12^th and I finally got out for my first Open Water Swim of the year.  Met up with fellow swimmers Janet & Amy at 5:00 am in the creepy lake Mini-Donka that we all know and love.  It’s a fairly small body of water so it gets a bit warm and weedy this time of year.  All of that adds to the excitement of doing an outdoor swim.

Although I’ve had my new Garmin 910xt for close to six months now, today was the first time I got to use the full GPS functionality during an outdoor swim.  There is no more guessing on whether the floating pier is 250 yards from our start point anymore because Garmin said it WAS!  It was nice being able to know precise distances during the swim and also being able to see the metrics afterwards including the cool map of the work done…..

We basically swam intervals from one side of the lake to the other with each being in the neighborhood of 250-300 yards.  Initially we stopped and chatted a little longer after each interval than was desirable, but after each set we reduced that rest time significantly.  I also made an attempt to do the first 100 yards easy, the second 100 moderate, and the remainder at a HARD effort.   The total time and distance below includes the rests and I wound up with 2612 yards in 52 minutes and 12 seconds.  Also listed below are the specific intervals I did along with the average pace on each.  All of this information is thanks to the Garmin 910xt (that is not an advertisement, but instead my glowing approval of the device):

52m 12s  2612 yards 2m/100 yards

Dist       Time      Pace     Rest
=====   =====   =====  ======
260yds   0:04:34   0:01:45  0:01:43
290yds   0:04:27   0:01:32  0:01:35
260yds   0:04:34   0:01:45  0:00:56
266yds   0:04:46   0:01:47  0:00:19
278yds   0:05:02   0:01:49  0:00:27
291yds   0:05:01   0:01:43  0:00:45
301yds   0:05:17   0:01:45  0:00:31
346yds   0:06:55   0:01:59

I feel very content with where my swim fitness is these days & I am very comfortable in the lake.  Today’s swim was very comfortable and easy to me and I tended to use this workout to focus on sighting in the open water and swimming good tangents.  I came away satisfied with the work done and had only one “issue”.  I forgot to put the body glide on my neck which caused some wetsuit  rubbing and post-swim irritating around my neck line.  That problem is always solved with body glide…..I just have to remember to use it.  All things considered today was a very good swim!