Waterlogged.

It's funny how when you mostly socialize with runners, mentioning a long swim gets a "woah" in the same way that running 20 miles gets a "woahh" from a non-runner. Since I'm in both of those circles, swimming and running, I'm jaded when it comes to the distances of either. When I try to explain that swimming 5000 yds is "like running 13 miles" I still get baffled looks from my running friends. It might be the time equivalent, but it encourages a lot of questions. How do you keep count of your laps? (in the pool) - I just do. I count in sets when doing specific workouts like 10x150yds (that's 10x6 lengths). You learn at a young age as a swimmer to keep track of things like that. When we do our warmup of 1650,I count every length and try my best to keep track. It helps to have my stopwatch running and hit the lap button every 500yds because I know it takes around 8mins to swim that. If it sounds like torture to count that much, it's not. It's second nature after all these years. Also, just because I'm counting doesn't mean that I'm not also thinking about other things. "What Do you think about?" is a very popular question and the answer is simple: everything or nothing. It's no different from what I think about on a run, which means I mostly think about what I'm going to eat when I finish. :) You'd probably be surprised how much you can learn about people between sets. I have a bunch of pool friends that I've gotten to know simply from swimming in front of or behind them and chatting after each 200 or 1650 or whatever the distance may be.
All in all my swim training has been really fun and I'm racking up the yards this month. In the first week of May I swam almost 13,000 yards, just over 10,000 yards last week and I'm hoping to hit around 16,000 for this week by Sunday. Yes, that is a lot of yards, but I'll be ready for the Chesapeake Bay swim come June 12th!

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