For those of you not familiar with swimming, here are some handy guide to some of the terms I will be using in the remainder of this post.
USMS - United States Masters Swimming, the governing body of all Masters swimming in the US.
Masters Swimming - Swim Team for Adults
Postal Challenge or Meet - A competition that all USMS members can compete in regardless of location. Participants swim the event in their home pool following certain parameters and then post the results to the host club. Normally you have to pay a nominal amount to participate and then you receive a t-shirt or cap in the mail as a badge of honor.
5K or Five Kilometers- A measure of distance in the metric system that seems nominal to most experienced runners, but is really really long for swimmers who aren't open water enthusiasts.My goal for the summer is to swim the 5K in a time that I am proud to post to the meet. That being said, I have not swum 5000 meters in one setting in the last ten years, since I finished swimming on my high school team. (Yeah, ten years. Now you know how old I am.) I am not ready for this. Will it be impossible? No, I'm about halfway there, but it will still take a lot of hard work on my part. If I am going to do this, I want to do it right. In order to properly motivate myself, I have to do a trial run. I need a baseline, a stepping off point. I need to know exactly how awful this is going to be before I do it for real. So I am going to swim it tomorrow and I will finish it, even if it kills me. So no matter how long it takes, no matter how many times I need to stop and rest, I will finish. And then I am going to train for the next two months, do it again at the end of August and post the results to the meet. I will be tracking my progress and sharing the wonders of distance swim training with you here on this blog.
Hopefully this blog will motivate me to work harder, keep me honest in my training, and maybe motivate someone out there in the world to jump back into the pool, learn to swim, or basically get off their behinds and do something they never thought they could.
So if you are at the Goldsboro Family YMCA between the hours of 10am-1pm, stop by the pool and see me. The guards might need your help pulling me out of the pool.
