January 2017 - USMS 1-hour ePostal 2017 and Other Goal Progress

I didn't waste much time getting started on my 2017 goals. To reach my yardage goal the plan is to swim roughly 6 days a week on average. That will be a bit of a jump from 2016, but not too much that I'll injure myself doing it since I gradually increased my yardage toward the end of 2016. The only hiccup in that plan came in the first week of the year when a winter storm kept pool facilities closed for an entire weekend. I had already taken New Year's Day off since Chris and I went to Myrtle for the night. I had also taken that following Wednesday off, probably because of work. As a result, I missed 4 of the first 8 days of the year, however that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. I plan to keep track of my yardage in My Fitness Log on the USMS website. It also keeps track of my progress toward my goal. As you probably guessed, I was behind for the first month. No worries, plenty of time to catch up. After that first weekend I only missed 4 days the rest of the month, which were designated rest days. By the end of January I had swum 91,400 yards (or 51.93 miles). I had also gotten back on track according to my FLOG since the goal yardage for the end of January to be able to get to 1M yards by the end of the year was 48.26 miles. Status of Goal #3 - on track!




Feeling motivated to go after my 500 Free goal time and work toward completing the Postal Swimathlon League (I'll explain in a bit), I signed up for a few "local" meets, maxing out events in all of them. On the 15th I signed up for the Dixie Zone Championships, which RAM hosted on April 7th and 8th. On the 20th I signed up for the Frank Clark meet in Greensboro on February 26th and the Coastal Masters meet in Bolivia, NC on March 4th.

Events for Frank Clark: 1000 Free, 200 IM, 200 Free, 100 Back, and 50 Breast.
Events for Coastal Masters: 500 Free, 50 Free, 100 IM, 100 Free, and 25's of each stroke (total 8 events) and two mixed relays.
Events (originally) signed up for Dixie Zones: Day1 - 1650 Free, 1000 Free, 100 Fly, 400 IM, 200 Breast. Day 2 - 50 Fly, 50 Back, 100 Breast, 200 Fly, and 500 Free. I also made myself available for all the relays. I opted out of the relays and switched a few events as the meet got closer. I will review those in a later post.

Now, the Postal Swimathlon League is a competition done in quarterly intervals. Quarter 1 (Jan-Mar) is the "Sprint" Distance events; 50s of each stroke and the 100 IM. Quarter 2 (Apr-Jun) is the "Middle" Distance events; 100s of each stroke and the 200 IM. Quarter 3 (Jul-Sep) is the "Long" Distance events; 200s of each stroke and the 400 IM. Quarter 4 (Oct-Dec) is the chance to improve your time on any of the events you want. At the end of the year your final times for each distance and then cumulatively are added up. It's more something to do for fun and to attempt every event as some point throughout the year than anything else. I figured "why not?" This also factored in to my decision to change a few of my events for Zones.

Lastly, but certainly not least, I did the first ePostal of the year. The postal I missed in 2016. The 1-hour ePostal. It's simple, swim as far as you can in an hour. I set a goal of 4400 yards. I ended up with 4375 yards. Here's how it went down. I got with Harry and decided on a date, we chose the 31st of January. Location, Optimist pool in North Raleigh. Optimist was set up SCY, width-wise. I swim at Optimist regularly so I thought it would be good. I'm not all about excuses, so although this will sound like one, it's not, it's just an explanation. The pool in the middle was warm, like really warm. At the walls, cool. Not something I would have expected to have an issue with, but I realized pretty quick that pushing to both go somewhat fast and do so for an hour straight that it was one. I was at 2250 yards around the half-way point and was making good progress. However, after about 2500 yards or so going back and forth through the different temperatures was starting to make me nauseous. I was quickly losing my motivation to go fast or to even finish the postal. I kept pushing, just telling myself that any additional yardage is better than none. 3600 to 4000 yards was the worst. I really almost stopped it was that bad. My splits reflected as much and I'm sure Harry could tell something was up at that point. Kept pushing. I was able to pick up the pace for the last 5 min or so and had never been so happy to get to a wall as I was when that clock hit 60 min. I was bummed to fall short of my goal but I was glad I got it done. It was my first attempt at the 1-hour postal, so I will just have to do better next year. Progress toward Goal #1 - on track!

Now for the results of the postal, which will impact Goal #2. top 10 in each AG get points for the National Championship races, including postals. I had to wait until just recently to get the results of my postal. 4375 yards landed me in 14th place in my AG. 4400 yards would have tied me at 10th. You can see how not getting a single point would bother me, and it did for a bit, but in the end it's a starting point and fuels my motivation going forward for the rest of the National Championship races this year. So, no points from the 1-hour ePostal and thus no significant progress toward Goal #2. My next chance for points will be in the Swim Around Lido Key.

New Swimming Adventure and Goals for the New Year, 2017

One thing people close to me know is that I can be a bit obsessive with the things I love and that my passions can and often do change rather quickly. By the time I got to my Half Ironman at B2B last year I was pretty burned out on triathlon. It was also becoming something more dangerous than I thought it would be and I just didn't feel safe riding on the roads anymore. Thankfully, cycling is not my passion and I understand not everyone I've gotten to know during my time training triathlon can toss it aside. For me, the risk outweighs the reward. Some choices suck, but this wasn't a hard one to make. Maybe someday cycling will be safer and people will be more biker friendly. Until then, if I get the urge to ride, I'll do it on my trainer. I didn't want to run anymore either, at least not on any sort of regiment or training plan. Nothing to do with safety and more to do with overall lack of motivation or desire. I complained about doing it far more than I enjoyed it. So, after the Turkey Trot I was done with running for a while. It's now mid-April and I haven't run since December 1st or biked since I got off my bike in T2 at B2B. You probably see where this is going by now.

Swimming. My first passion and my happy place. It's what keeps me sane when life gets crazy. I had a number of goals last year, some I accomplished, some I didn't. This next chapter of my athletic journey probably started back in May when I discovered the ePostals, though I didn't know it then. At that time, I had missed out on one of the postal swims, the 1-hour ePostal. As a result, goal #1 for 2017 is to do all 5 ePostals.

The second goal is one I actually had last year but didn't pan out. I want to achieve All-Star status for my AG with USMS. Since the Lake Lure races in 2016 were cancelled last year I lost my chance by no fault of my own. Goal #2 for 2017, All-Star status! I plan to increase my chances by swimming 3 of the 6 USMS Open Water Nationals races this year, the first of which is just days away. The Swim Around Lido Key is a 7 mile marathon distance swim in Florida this Saturday. I was able to convince Chris to make the FL trip with me because it's the same weekend as the Dark Side Half Marathon in Disney. We both get to do a race and have a mini-vacation at the same time, win-win! The other two USMS Open Water Nationals races I'm signed up for are back-to-back in Chattanooga the first weekend in June. The first is a 2.4 mile swim on Saturday, followed by a 9.2 mile ultra-marathon swim on Sunday. These were a bit more expensive than I thought they were going to be, so I decided to bag the 4th swim I was planning to do in Seattle. Hopefully I'll be able to get enough points from the 3 open water swims and 5 postal swims to get the All-Star award for my AG. Only time will tell.

The last goal is probably the one I've shared the most, but it is the last one I made. I had set a yardage goal in 2016, but I had to keep upping it toward the end of the year. So, for 2017 I set a really high yardage goal that would keep me in the pool more but also should be doable with all the training I'll have to do for the longer swims. My yardage goal for 2017, Goal #3, is 1 million miles (1M)! That is roughly 570 miles. I had never really tracked annual swimming yardage/mileage until I started logging workouts on Strava. As a result, I can't be 100% certain I've never done it before with all the swimming I've done in my life, but we'll just say it'll be new territory for me.

In addition to my 3 goals for 2017, I also hope to do the Brute Squad Postal again in November and participate in more meets. I'd like to PR some pool races. All-time PR's would be great, but really any PR since the end of my college swimming career would be fantastic. I may even start a "PR by AG" tab, since I will plateau eventually because of age. Hopefully I'm still several years away from that. Now that I think about it, I did have a 4th goal, though it wasn't specific to 2017. I wanted to swim the 500 free in under 6:00. Spoiler alert, I've accomplished this one already!

There you have it, my goals for 2017. I've been bad about updating this blog so far, so for the sake of this post not being ridiculously long, I'll do a few more to catch up to the present. A lot has happened so far and I'll have more to say than I thought. Stay tuned!

Since I never did an end of the year post, but I did post them on Facebook, here are my mileage totals from 2016:

Swim: 327 mi (575,805 yds)
Bike: 2,265 mi
Run: 675 mi
(These totals include: 1 Marathon (my first), 1 Half Ironman, 1 Half Marathon, 1 10K Race, 1 8K Race, 2 Open Water Races, 5 Postal Swims, and 6 SCY Nationals Races).