SBR Utopia Season II - OPEN (Page 132)

Wow!  Nice ride Jason!

Beast!

Snowstorm here today.  I was stuck in the house for 4 hours with no power emptying the sump pump hole with a bucket to keep it from over flowing into the basement.  That was my replacement workout for a run - up and down the stairs carrying buckets of water!

Spam Musubi power...I had 2 of them on the ride. 

spam musubi, definitely a Hawaiian thing

Wowzer on teh ride, well done

For kicks and giggles I threw the 910 on last year when I was snow-blowing the driveway after a storm.  Thought it'd be a joke, but turned out to be 1.6 miles of shoving that thing along!  Was actually a workout (kinda).  

Recipe?

I love me some Spam!

No issue with it repeating?  It's tasty, but just a bit fatty…  Do you use just enough for flavor?

Matt

Ultra simple.

Take one slice of Spam, about 1/4 inch thick.  Pan fry it just to brown the outside, make a ball of white rice to match the size of the spam except the rice is about an inch thick.  Wrap it with nori (Japanese dried seaweed).

Tasty, and contains simple carbs (white rice), protein, fat, and salt (spam), and is extremely easy to digest.

Looks like this (in plastic wrap).

(Spam Musubi.jpg)

Had my azz handed to me by a 16 year old girl during a set of 400s in the pool this morning.  I bailed after 3500 meters, they had another 1500m to go in the set and it was the beginning of a taper week for them.  

candya$$...

Why, oh why does my swim continue to make me suffer.  I'm not swimming much at the moment, but have added back in some consistency so I'm swimming 3x per week, just over 2000M each time.  Swam on Wednesday and things felt decent, swam this morning and things still felt decent, but at the same effort level on a couple of faster sets and I'm 6-7sec/100M slower than I was 2 days ago.  This constantly happens to me, and is probably the sinlge most frustrating part of swimming, because I don't know what I'm doing differently to cause these huge fluctuations in my pace.  Not sure if anyone has any suggestions, cause every time I make a step forward I take two back - rinse and repeat, and I go absolutely nowhere in terms of improvement.  Two years of trying to improve, and putting in 500K meters in the pool, an increase of 33% volume this year over last year = nothing. </whine>

Was there anything different between today and Wednesday?

The reason I ask is that about a month ago, I did a 500m set for time.  About a week and a half later, I did another one and was about 12 seconds slower over the 500.  I just figured it was an off day (and my set prior to it was a kick set, which isn't really conducive to being able to swim fast, for me).  Anyways, I did another 500 this morning and was the same exact time as the last time (i.e. 12 seconds slower than my fastest one about a month ago). 

I was thinking about it after and was disappointed....did I peak a month ago and I'm starting to get worse now, despite swimming the same / more??  And then I realized....when I did the 500 a month ago, I was swimming with someone who was swimming just a little faster than me, so I suspect I was getting a decent draft effect.  And when I've done the other two 500's, I've been swimming (effectively) alone, and not getting the draft.

So maybe you were swimming with someone on Wednesday and swimming solo today?  Or maybe you ate something before Wednesday's workout and not today's?  Or maybe you had a hard bike/run last night, but didn't before Wedesday?  Or maybe it just was an off day?

Just throwing out ideas....maybe some of the fishies will have more / better ideas.

Good post Marc, the catch is key.

Neil, did you see the swim video analysis that AdventureBear posted in TriTalk?  It's on page two now but it's a great underwater video showing someone who can swim a 1:08 in an IM but has a terrible catch and hand entry position, yet prior to the video he thought he had a good high elbow and a good catch.  Video can be a real eye opener if you have any way of obtaining that.

Successfully removed and opened up my sealed headset cartridge bearings.  Gleaned them out and added fresh grease.  Still needs to be replaced soon, but my LBS was out of stock at the moment.  Cool to add another maintenance item to my quiver.  Wasn't even that hard.

I've seen similar at about the same points. Wasn't getting much on 6-7k/wk. Did see improvement on 10k or more even this summer after already gaining quite a bit earlier in the year. More volume than that did lead to more and faster improvement still. And also echo the focus. I do work on other things, but try to tie it all in to the catch & pull. I try to never overlook that part, always having at least some concentration on it. Kick improvement, built up some more ability there and picked up the timing so that i can drive the roll from side to side more effectively as opposed to it just kind of happening.  I feel the loss of it on pull sets now.  I'll work on some torso balancing as it can sag at times. While doing that I'm also mindful of what it's doing to the entry and downswing into the catch. When doing it well and it feels easy, I'm driving my arms into that part of the stroke more. Not that I'm working harder, but seeing that I have more command of the action then before, if that makes sense.

I would certainly agree that magical things seem to happen at 10K+ a week of swimming.  When I put a couple weeks like that together I feel unbelievable in the water.  Now, I need to string a couple months together!!

Nicole's question about swimming with someone else and getting a bit of a draft is good too.  It can easily throw your speed off, even if you are a few seconds back of them.

X5 on swimming more. 16 weeks averaging 10k+ went a long way for me.

I think one of my big issues is that I become a head case in the water (not the first time I've said this).  To what Marc said before, as soon as I start thinking about what I'm doing right or wrong, then I'm thinking and questioning everything that's happening.  For the most part though, when I swim I think about kick timing, body roll, catch/pull.  I try not to overcomplicate it more than that, but tend to once things go wrong.

As for my actual catch/pull, I know I leave the pull short a lot, so I conciously think about that, but the catch messes with my head big time.  If I leave my arm closer to the surface of the water, I find it puts too much strain on my shoulders, and I don't get as strong a pull - so I allow myself to pull deeper, since it seems to be more effective (though still trying to focus on getting my forearm vertical).   Need to find a recent video.