Monthly Archives: September 2013

C3 Swim Report

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After successfully completing the Rottnest Channel Swim in February I started looking for other swims to do this year; Rottnest was my “big” swim for the year, but I still wanted to look at doing something challenging to keep me focused on training through the summer.

After hearing good things about Swim the Suck last year it was quickly added to my calendar, however while it is only slightly shorter than Rottnest (10 miles versus 12 miles), as a current assisted river swim it is likely to be considerably easier than the Rottnest’s ocean conditions, so I was still hankering for something that would stretch me a little more.

The Boston Light Swim (BLS) was an interesting contender; it is a “shorter” swim at 8 miles but the typical water temperature for the swim is in the low 60’s and all of my long swims to date have been in the low 70’s, so training for a cooler swim would have been a great goal. The cutoff time (5 hours) is kind of tight for my speed, but after asking around on the Marathon Swimmers Forum (MSF) I was more confident I could make it and resolved to sign up for it. Unfortunately it turns out the BLS is extremely popular and has a very limited number of slots, it was booked out within 15 minutes of the registration link going live, so I was back to looking for a swim.

The MSF is a great resource for both hearing about and researching swims, and fellow forum member Jason Malick had posted on the MSF about a swim he was organizing for the first time this year, a 15 mile trip around Cape May (the tip of the Jersey Shore) that he’d dubbed the Cape Circumnavigation Challenge or C3 for short. Not long after I failed to get into BLS, Jason posted that there was only one slot left for C3 so I jumped on it.
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Another long set and some lessons learned

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With the C3 swim fast approaching I’ve really needed to increase my weekly swimming distance. For Rottnest I was getting in 20-25km a week, and this past summer it has been any where from 0 to 15km.  The last two weeks I’ve managed get in a little over 20km each week by adding in a long workout at BAC on Sunday. As per my last post in the previous week I knocked out a 9km/3hour workout, and this week I managed a 12km/4hour workout.

While doing the long sets I’ve noticed that after about two hours my shoulders start to hurt, and my speed definitely decreases over the duration of the workout. I was able to counteract the pain in my shoulders somewhat on this last workout by concentrating on ‘toning’ (as my coach would say)  my butt and core and working on initiating the stroke from my hips.

This tends to suggest that I have a tendency to overuse my shoulders/arms, and it is only when they start to hurt that I notice and am able to actively counteract that tendency.

Definitely the goal for this week during my shorter Masters workouts is try and deemphasize the shoulders from the start (though on the faster intervals it sometime tricky to do anything except concentrate on making the time), and see if I can carry that through to next Sunday’s long set.

One of things I do like about pool workouts versus open water is that sometimes there will be someone either in my lane or the lane over who is near my speed. If my set synchronizes with theirs, then there is a great opportunity to play with technique, as you can then immediately see the impact of small changes on your speed as your position changes relative to theirs.

This past Sunday I had a great opportunity when a guy in the lane over was going a hair faster than me and pushed off the wall at the same time. I managed to pace him for at least 500m (before my 30 minute set break), having to really work at my technique to keep up (I was at the 10km or so mark in the workout so really didn’t have the energy to just power through).

What that set showed me is that I am definitely lazy with my body position when I don’t have an external stimulus (like a pace swimmer). I was able to keep up better when I dropped my head somewhat and increased the ‘tone’ in my core – getting a more horizontal position in the water, and also being a little more aggressive with my kicking.

The level of physical effort involved in keeping up with this other swimmer was not excessive (I considered not stopping at my 30minute break just to take advantage of the opportunity more), but there is definitely a mental effort to keep everything right when there is no visible feedback.

While preventing shoulder pain is my top priority from a technique perspective, there were some pointers this week on how I can ultimately improve my speed.