Sunday, February 14, 2010

The whole echilada... erm, cannoli

Today, I ate a cannoli. 

And not just any cannoli. a Chocolate mousse cannoli dipped in chocolate chips from the world famous Mike's Pastry.


Why am I telling you this? 

Because whenever I eat something like that, something way out of the range of my normal dietary constraints, it means something big went down in terms of exercise that day.

And today that thing was swimming a mile. And not just any mile, but a continuous mile with but a short break to catch my runaway iPod as the h2oAudio case slipped off my waistband and attempt to test its 12 foot depth rating. Thankfully I caught it before it got close. 

This swim is significant not because I swam a mile, though it is a first for me to swim that far in a single session (actually 1800 yards including warmup). 

There is some significance to the fact that this swim was continuous. I haven't really talked about last triathlon season very much, but in my training last season I rarely swam more than 400 or 500 yards a day, and it was even more rarely a continuous swim. I've been building my distance over the past several weeks, with swims this week of 1200 and 1400 yards. 

What makes this truly significant was the time to complete the distance: 48 minutes. Now, I know that doesn't sound fast. Because it isn't a very fast mile. But that time means something, even as as slow as it is.

It means that I can already swim fast enough to finish the swim leg of Timberman under the 1:20 time limit.


A mile is 1760 yards long. The Ironman swim is 1.2 miles long. To finish the race under the time limit, I would have 30 minutes to swim an additional 400 yards. That's almost 8 minutes per 100 yards. My pace for todays swim was about 2:40 seconds per 100 yards.


The best part of the swim is that I wasn't completely baked, as I have been after some training swims. I am definitely gaining strength and endurance.


Back to the beginning of this story; the Cannoli. It was really sweet. But it tasted even sweeter because I knew I'd earned it.

2 comments:

  1. That is awesome progress! Great reward too:)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Barb! The Cannoli was REALLY good. Rach is in love with the place and I've never had one before. I dont have her sweet tooth, but I caved to the peer pressure. I went with chocolate mousse over ricotta cheese though.

    ReplyDelete