Second Day Down

A friend of mine just came back from training camp. Training camps are supposed to be hard core and I am sure it was. The only thing I heard from her though is "I hope the weather is nice so I can chill outdoors". How convenient it must be to be able to plan rest and stress? Unfortunately I have little experience with that. I can handle stress, I never negotiate with my coach about easier training and I can push beyond pain. However when MY body needs rest, it just takes it. There is no such thing as "I will go on for 1-2 more days". It simply crashes. Tomorrow is Good Friday, the pools and the gym sare closed. Which means REST. And I was looking forward to that day for two weeks now. It was supposed to be THE planned rest day... Unfortunately my body and I have different opinions about that, again... and I never seem to win that fight.

72 days out...

I am very nicely surprised right now seeing that I am 72 days out of Nationals. For some reason I kind of had it wrong yesterday thinking it was about 65-ish. Technically, I just gained a week, ;)

Being so close to THE day, I started organizing the paper work necessary for competing overseas, entering those results in the Swimming South Africa's (SSA) database and looking at some test swim meets. For making my result count in SA I need to bring with me a ZIP file or send a link to SSA. I hope it works out nicely. Sometimes results get published very late and if I miss the deadline of 3 months, they won't count... which happened 2 years ago. However, now it is not the point when I should be thinking about this.What is important now is training, nutrition and rest:

Training is gong pretty well so far. Now it is the time when I am supposed to "kill" myself and this is exactly what am I doing. For a second week in a row I am swimming lots of 400s- not bad for a person who couldn't handle even 200m butterfly one month ago, right? Believe it or not this is my preparation for my 100m race. As you know I need to catch up a bit with my training and increase my endurance and this the best way to go. After a week of bad muscles aches I started getting used to the huge volume of training... well at least half of me. Right now I am giving myself heart attacks every time I swim, because I am not sore anymore and I can push so much harder. Swimming and dry land training won't get any easier soon. However, I am getting some help- my coach is back on deck!!! It makes a huge difference. It is so hard training on my own- I cannot push myself as hard as my coach can push me, no one can, and secondly, knowing that he is there helps me focus even more on what I am doing instead of thinking of resting and how I am the only person from the entire squat in the pool right now.

Here's my new favorite main set of all times, which I did yesterday evening:
x3
400 Fr (~ 15sec Rest) + 400Fly (~30sec Rest) + 400IM (~30sec rest) + 400Fr (~1min Rest).
It is a quite hard one, however very enjoyable....or perhaps this is the reason why I enjoyed it so much?! Believe it or not the 400fly and 400IM are my favorite parts. :) I wrote down for you the approximate rest intervals between the 400s rather than starting times, because I assume you will have different starting times than me anyway. Favorite or not it is very tiring and I hope I won't do that one any time soon again, haha. I assume coach will come up with something even more challenging though. ;)

Probably the advanced swimmers and athletes among you know the rules of performance orientated nutrition: eat healthy everything according to your training schedule however if nothing healthy around, just get the calories you need and go back to healthy food asap. And when I am saying "everything" I really mean it right now. You cannot believe the amounts of food I am shoving. I eat almost every hour and still wake up hungry in the middle of the night sometimes- 4 eggs, 2 pizzas (I know I know, this is not healthy!), 250g steak, 250g green salad and spinach, 100g pasta, 2 large potatoes, 125g cottage cheese, 3x50g choc bunnies and many more choc eggs (what? It is Easter after all!), 100g yogurt and oats... this is my list for last weekend's (!!!) munch. I hope I don't need that much food over next weekend as well, otherwise I will be broke much earlier than I ever thought. On the other hand I lost 400g body weight over the same weekend and with all that training I really don't believe I lost muscle mass. Sooooo, do you still want to take me out for dinner? :D

Have happy Holidays and good luck to those running the Two Oceans Marathon!

hugs, Nora

Hopes And Doubts

With only 83 days to go to Nationals I am kind of starting to get nervous. Will it be worth it to fly all the way up just for competing? Will I do well at the swim meet? Did I have enough time to prepare and did I use this time wisely? Was my new training plan and training schedule working out for me?

Unfortunately I will have answeres to these question only after the swim meet.

83 days are a very short time and it will go by quickly. Coaches say that if you are nervous prior a swim meet means you are ready, otherwise you wouldn't really care. Coaches also say that after the swim meet is before swim meet- you just finished racing and you already starting preparing for the next one or for the next year's event. I do agree with all of that. Unfortunately this is not he case right now. I didn't have an year. In the entire 2010 I was swimming only then and off because of an shoulder injury. In the first 1-2 months of 2011 it wasn't any different. My training times are so inconsistent that I don't really have a clue where I am right now- once I swim close to a PB or even faster, then I simply drawn. So, yes I am damn nervous. Is it possible to be training properly for only 4 months and to swim good times at National level? And what am I going to enter with anyway? I am not a sprinter; I cannot explode off the blogs. I need time to accelerate. But is my stamina enough to keep up my speed and technique over a longer distance? On the other hand as a pure butterflier I have not really a choice of events. Perhaps the smartest thing is to focus on one - the 100m. I will probably swim the 50 fly, whcih is on the first day, toget a feeling of the swim meet. And freestyle as a warm up before the 100m fly. I don't think I will be entering the 200m though. I haven't trained for it at all. I cannot even remember when it was the last time swimming a 200m butterly set in training... It is on the last day of the competition and I have no other events on that day... Should I just do it for fun and see how close to the top 8 I can get? It will hurt... very badly. And I don't like showing weekness. There is nothing worse for me than dying on the last couple of meters to the wall. And with dying I mean really badly dying. When you can barely move foreward.

Just thinking about all this makes me want to go to practice 4 times a day. NO! I need to stay rational and smart. Overtraining won't be in my favour either. I have 2 more months to train hard, one week of each is meant as short training camp) and 2 weeks for tapering. Keep your thumbs crossed for me! I really need lots of good luck.

If you also have any suggestions for me, regarding my dilema, please share it with me.

Keep training smart!

hugs, Nora