I've been swimming a lot, which is great! I feel weird saying that 59 degree water is "cold" but it is, currently, to me. So "cold" is more of a feeling, then a number!
training stuff
I've been swimming a lot, which is great! I feel weird saying that 59 degree water is "cold" but it is, currently, to me. So "cold" is more of a feeling, then a number!
Well hello there! I have a lot of to catch up on, but for now, I thought I'd just go straight back into the cold water swim logs. I have found these incredibly useful for gauging swim times, especially since I haven't been cold swimming in years.
Although I admit it's also a little defeating when I look back and see posts like this one, where I swam for 55 minutes in 53ºF water, no neoprene at all, and it was my "first good shiver of the season". Today I swam for 35 minutes at that temperature, with a wetsuit, and I was a shivery afterwards. I know that it's dumb to compare, since I had been swimming multiple times per week for a few years at that point. It's hard not to! But that means I can get there again, if I want. Onwards!
I should say from the outset, before I launch into a long winded explanation of why I DNF’d, that I actually met nearly all of my goals for signing up for this race.
We needed a long term goal to get us back to something of a pre-pandemic life. 2018 Santa Rosa was such a bad time for me–bad attitude during training and a bad attitude during the race–that I really wanted to have fun with triathlon again. I wanted to train hard, but also enjoy it. I wanted to go into the race with a sense of calm, determination, and gratitude. And honestly, I think I did achieve that.
I discovered something about myself this year.
My cold water season kind of petered out last year; I didn't swim nearly as much as the year before, my swims were filled with more stress then fun, and my attempt at the 24 hour relay did not go well (I signed up for 45 minute shifts, but only managed 2 before I had to drop back to 30 minutes). I felt a bit lost, depressed and aimless. And then covid hit.
Just a quick note: I am migrating this blog from one platform to another, so some things will change and some old things will break, my apologies. I will no longer have the option to subscribe via email, as that was a Wordpress thing, so the only option will be RSS. You will notice some of the exerpts look a bit broken with the logs, but since I am too lazy to fix, click to the individual post for the correct formatting.
I guess I stopped logging when the water hit the 40s! To be honest, I haven’t felt very motivated with ice swimming lately. Earlier in the season I said I tentatively had a goal of an ice kilometer. But I never truly committed to that; in tandem with that goal, I set another goal to speed up my 1000 yd to 15 minutes in the pool, but I was pretty tepid in trying to achieve that as well.