Fish, Skate, Breath...

Total Immersion...

Def 1:  Being completely involved in your pursuit.  Focused.  Avoiding distractions.

Def 2:  Laying on your side, slipping quietly underwater, feeling your nasal passage filling gleefully with water, because you haven't quite mastered "balance".  

Flew to Atlanta this weekend to further my journey from cinderblock to swimmer at a TI Freestyle Workshop.  Signed up for Charleston, but with only two of us, we moved it to the coaches home "turf".  In all, a terrific experience.  Bill was a great coach with a clear game plan to move through the weekend.  The underwater video taping alone was worth the trip.  Ever watched yourself swim?  Scary!

Surprise 1:  The pool was filled with salt water.  I'm guessing Saturdays' six hours in the water would have been much harder on the epidermis if we were dealing with chlorine.

Surprise 2:  Dial in the stroke and 25 m becomes so effortless that you can do repeats on just one breath.

Granted, there's a lot to keep track of to achieve that "dialedinness".  That's where muscle memory comes in.  (I'm hoping my muscles have better memory than my brain...)

Not ready for the 10K swim just yet, but then that event is hard to wrap my head around.   Mom always said "Don't go in the water right after eating."  How would she feel about an event where you eat while you're in the water?  

Bottom line - strongly recommended.  

Lost in Translation

Reality checks are important.  CompuTrainer sessions are great.  Love 'em.  I know, not necessarily a universally shared position.  But I love long sessions in a controlled environment with uninterrupted efforts and gobs of feedback.

But, numbers are what they are.

What matters is how it translates to real rides.  The time trial portion of ABD's Fall Fling a short, but very real reality check.  It suggested a number of possibilities.  One is a pure and simple failure to increase power.  We're not totting a watts meter on the bike so we can't fall back to numbers, but there's always the stopwatch.  And the elapsed time was well off the majority of riders in the age group.  

It's also possible we were dealing with a bit of over-training, but if that's the case, that's equally troubling considering the amount of training we've been doing - in comparison to the typical training regime of the 70.3 or IM athlete.

Since it was the last of the season, it signifies the official start of the next winter of training.

IMTV

So the brand is growing, the races are selling out within hours, and the big dance in Kona is buzzing like the Superbowl.  Want to watch?  Here are the options.

Go there.  Great excuse for a vacation, and to check out the course, and to gawk, etc...

Or plop your sedentary backside down in front of a computer for x number of hours and hope the streaming server has enough headroom so as to not kick you out just as Chrissie gets ready to send Norman into an emotional meltdown - by passing him.

I'm already logged in.  Doesn't appear to be anything happening yet......

The Five Disciplines

As the rookie, the newbie, the froshie... It's become clear that a serious triathlete must spend serious amounts of time working in each of the five triathlon disciplines.  They of course are:

1  Swimming

2  Cycling

3  Running

4  Nutrition

5  Blogging

I've been running for a while, I'm getting the cycling to come together, but as for the rest....  well ya gotta start somewhere....