Swimming Hurts FOR REAL

Several years ago, while talking about an upcoming tri, Kyle and I had a conversation that went similar to this:

 Kyle: "You need to be in good enough shape that when you get out of the water and are exhausted,  it doesn't take much time to recover from the swim and get your biking legs going".

Me: "But swimming never makes me exhausted enough that I need a long recovery to catch my breath... I just get on my bike and GO!"

Kyle: "That's because you're not doing it right."

At that time, getting in the pool twice and gliding around for 20 minutes was a good week for me. My "swimming" was more like floating than anything else, so naturally, I was rarely actually tired.

My swimming routine continued this way for a while... It wasn't until about a year ago when I started swimming with the masters group in Virginia that I learned what *swimming exhaustion* really meant. Needless to say, my swimming has improved substantially in the past year.

About a week ago, after finding out I'd been accepted onto the Timex Factory Team, Kyle agreed to start coaching me again under the condition that I actually do what he says (in the past I've taken his coaching as more of a guideline of what I should be doing...). Today I made it to the one week mark, which in my opinion, is just short of making this a habit!

So, as part of this new coaching program, I'm doing periodic tests to assess where I am and track improvements. Today's test was a timed 1mile swim. The idea is that my time for a 1650yard swim will be a good predictor for what I can do for 1500meter open swim. The goal was to stick to a 1:30 pace, which would be 24:45.... I ended up going just slower than that goal with 24:50, and it HURT. I took off a little fast in the first 500, stayed on pace through the 1000, and slowed down about a second on average through the end.

As I hit the 1000y mark, my thoughts were: "Everything is burning, even my legs! Why do my legs feel so heavy when I'm not even kicking that hard. Is this what I'm going to feel like during a race?... because I don't know if I can jump on a bike and hammer it out right now..."

Swimming hurts... FOR REAL. I think that means I'm finally doing it right!?!