open water training ideas

My next week and a half will be spent traveling with my wife and my dog. My training will be unorthodox, or at least, varying from MY normal routine of pool/weight workouts. This is going to be Rocky IV-esque. As a substitution for weights, I plan on doing a lot of "ups": push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and dips. We have a set of stretch cords I bought for about 20 bucks. I'm going to take those and do that resistance training I've been neglecting.

And I'll be doing my workouts in a lake. With a meet coming up the weekend after I get back, I've been mulling over ways to train for pool-based events in the open water. I'm not sure how re-acclimating to altitude will affect my meet swims. We'll see. But the least I can do is keep up my training.

I talked to Jeff today about some ideas for doing interval-type training in open water. He suggested counting strokes, since I won't really be working with known distances. For instance: 100 strokes hard/100 strokes ez, etc.

Initially, I had thought of using a watch, 2 minutes hard, 2 moderate, 2 easy, and so on. But the stroke counting idea is a better one because I won't have to check my watch.

It has occurred to me that it will be a good time to work on stroke tempo training, also. I can count strokes, look at my watch, and figure out my stroke rate. One thing I've talked about trying to do is get my stroke rate higher. I won't be able to check my distance per stroke very easily. That's ok, though, because it will keep me from trying to track too many variables at once. Simple. Hopefully.

Tomorrow, I'm going to try to get stroke counts for 50m of all strokes. That way I can get an approximate idea of how many strokes I'll want to set as a goal for my efforts. That way, if I want to swim an IM "set", I'll just swim x number of strokes butterfly, x number of strokes backstroke, x number of strokes breaststroke, and x number of strokes freestyle for each rep.

I'm going to attempt to train for a run at the 30-34 LCM 200 fly state record. It's a soft one, at 2:37. I took my 400 IM out in 1:15.02, and that felt pretty relaxed, so I have a real shot at beating it. The thing is, I have one shot this year, 6 days after we get back from Michigan. So one thing I hope to do while I'm in Michigan is overdistance fly. In the lake. Rocky IV style.

The much more difficult challenge will be not overindulging in all of the food my family will have available for me.