Short-course is for wimps.
I showed up at the pool this morning (the 19th) and was surprised to find that it had been converted to long-course. I had forgotten that this pool makes that change every other weekday morning, a practice they only began this month and will last for the summer.
My initial internal response: "Aw, man!" I actually very briefly considered turning around and going home.
My reluctance is primarily borne of there being fewer lanes to go around and more sharing by necessity, but it's an impulse also built on years of short-course swimming and only occasional long-course swimming during the summer. Additionally, I find it more difficult to be creative in my workouts with a long-course pool; a stop every 25 yards naturally lends itself to more flexibility in that department.
Flip-turns are a strength of mine, and fewer of them gives me less of a crutch in racing. There's something particularly interminable about being a practiced short-course swimmer in the middle of a long-course pool and being reminded that the wall is twice as far as it should be. By the end of my session I did find something of a groove, and I was able to split the lane rather than circle-swim for most of the time, including for the entirety of my main set.
The guy sharing my lane was also a former competitive swimmer, and he made a remark about my doing the 200s at a fast clip. (200m is closer to 225 yds - 9 lengths - than it is to the 8 lengths or 200 yds of a short-course pool.) I made my usual gracious but self-deprecating remark along the lines of "not as fast I used to be." In the locker room ("locker room" is a misnomer here, but that's how I've always known the place you go after you swim) we had a brief but good conversation about training, Michelangelo, and the "10,000 hours" theory of mastery. (There will be more on this last item in a soon-to-be written entry with regard to the book I read last weekend.)
I was left wondering if a statistical study has ever been done that measured the success of U.S. swimmers on the international stage according to how much long-course swimming they did in their training over the years. Most U.S. swimmers do much of their competition in short-course in high school and at the collegiate level, so it might be a difficult thing to parse. (It's also of course more practical to build a short-course pool.) It's a subtle difference, as the best stars of short-course do seem to make the transition, but there is a different skill set both physically and mentally to a degree.
I don't want to make a habit of it, but I'm looking forward to more mornings of long-course.
My initial internal response: "Aw, man!" I actually very briefly considered turning around and going home.
My reluctance is primarily borne of there being fewer lanes to go around and more sharing by necessity, but it's an impulse also built on years of short-course swimming and only occasional long-course swimming during the summer. Additionally, I find it more difficult to be creative in my workouts with a long-course pool; a stop every 25 yards naturally lends itself to more flexibility in that department.
Flip-turns are a strength of mine, and fewer of them gives me less of a crutch in racing. There's something particularly interminable about being a practiced short-course swimmer in the middle of a long-course pool and being reminded that the wall is twice as far as it should be. By the end of my session I did find something of a groove, and I was able to split the lane rather than circle-swim for most of the time, including for the entirety of my main set.
The guy sharing my lane was also a former competitive swimmer, and he made a remark about my doing the 200s at a fast clip. (200m is closer to 225 yds - 9 lengths - than it is to the 8 lengths or 200 yds of a short-course pool.) I made my usual gracious but self-deprecating remark along the lines of "not as fast I used to be." In the locker room ("locker room" is a misnomer here, but that's how I've always known the place you go after you swim) we had a brief but good conversation about training, Michelangelo, and the "10,000 hours" theory of mastery. (There will be more on this last item in a soon-to-be written entry with regard to the book I read last weekend.)
I was left wondering if a statistical study has ever been done that measured the success of U.S. swimmers on the international stage according to how much long-course swimming they did in their training over the years. Most U.S. swimmers do much of their competition in short-course in high school and at the collegiate level, so it might be a difficult thing to parse. (It's also of course more practical to build a short-course pool.) It's a subtle difference, as the best stars of short-course do seem to make the transition, but there is a different skill set both physically and mentally to a degree.
I don't want to make a habit of it, but I'm looking forward to more mornings of long-course.