At some point it is important to look back and enjoy the gains you have made. I often forget how far I have come and I really enjoy thinking back to one year ago, thrashing around, the water fighting me on every stroke. My first blog post on swimming came on June 27th and I have posted 34 times since then. That works out to about 5 per month, although I haven’t been consistent each week.

June 27th also corresponds to when I started keeping detailed records of my swimming. I have been swimming pretty seriously now (at least twice a week and often five days a week) since October of 2006. I have no idea what my sprint time was back then, but I guess more than 25 seconds on 25 meters.

When I started keeping track of my times I was swimming 20.90 on 25 meters, but I had made a lot of progress over the previous six months.

By August I had whittled four seconds off my time and reached my personal best of 16.37 on 25 meters and 37.79 on 50 meters. For the last two months I have been working to improve my technique and although my personal best doesn’t show it I feel like I am preparing for being able to swim much faster.

Another big factor of my personal best probably has to do with the amount of swimming I was doing. During September and October I was swimming over 7,000 meters per month, while in November I swam around 4,500. I don’t know exactly how much I swam in December because I lost my SportCount timer and so I wasn’t keeping track of my swimming, but I guess it was around 4,500.

It works out that when I am swimming over 7,000 I am swimming about nine days per month. Another interesting fact is that during October my regular crawl time was about two seconds faster than my other months. My average crawl time on 25 meters is 29.62 per lap, but in October it was 27.95. While two seconds isn’t much because I was swimming quite a bit during that month then it means that I was pushing myself on almost every lap. When I had set my personal best on the 16th of October the two sessions before my average was just above 24 seconds.

That analysis tells me pretty clearly what I need to do if I want to reach a new personal best in 2008: Swim FAST all the time.

Here are my goals for 2008:

1. Swim 10,000 meters per month
2. Keep an average regular crawl of 25 seconds or less
3. Break 30 seconds on 50 meters

To accomplish this I will need to make sure I swim 10 times per month, which is at least three times per week. When I am at the pool I need to make sure that my workout includes 1,000 meters, which is about 40 laps of swimming. I’ll post my workout in a while that will hopefully get me to my goals.

In the end, I feel that I have made a lot of progress, but over the last two months I have stopped doing the things that helped me reach my personal best. So it’s time to get back into gear and push myself harder and harder during every workout.

Being sick is seriously not fun. I had a week of vacation and I thought I would rest my arms as I had strained my tendons. But then I went and got sick. Ouch, out of the pool for two weeks.

After jumping back in this week I have made a massive un-improvement. In fact, my 25 m swim time is so bad that I have apparently lost 11 weeks of training. I really hope that I will get back to setting records much faster.

We’ll see I guess.

I am going to take this as an opportunity to re-learn a couple of things. The first being my breathing technique. I am going to need to study this one a bit, because I don’t even know where to start. What I do know is that it isn’t my strength keeping me from going, rather I get so out of breath.

The other issue I want to re-learn is my kicking. When I started I told myself that I would learn how to kick after I learned how to use my arms. I think this was a mistake. I should have done both even if it would have taken longer. Kicking correctly is challenging, but it is important and shouldn’t be neglected.

Well, back to it.

Although not my fastest time it is nice to be able to stay under 18 seconds. Today, after swimming, one of the very nice life guards asked me what I was training for.  I was a bit surprised, but told him that I wasn’t training for anything but just to be able to swim as fast as I could. He was under the impression that I was either training for a competition or for a triathlon.

I was thinking about his question and wondering why I push myself so hard to improve my time. Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer to that question. I love swimming and I want to see what I am capable of, so I learn what I can about technique and swim as hard as I can, that’s all.

Why do you swim?