What's the big deal with 250,000m?
Nothing really except that I'll get a fancy swim cap and a pin from Masters Swimming Canada. And I'm only 750,000m away from joining the Million Metres club.
Realistically I know I've swam a hell of a lot more than 250,000m since joining this Masters group almost 4 years ago but I didn't start tracking my workouts with them until October of 2011. I tracked my workouts for 2 months and then stopped. Even though I kept swimming with them, I wasn't entering the workouts on their site. I thought that I could go back and enter everything in but they only let you go back a month. I realized this in May of 2012. D'oh!! So I started again in May of 2012. At that point I had logged 20,600m. So in one year I managed to log roughly 230,000m.
That's a whole lot of pool time. I used to dislike pool time but I did it because it was a necessary part of triathlon training.
Then a funny thing happened. Somewhere along the way I actually began to enjoy it. And then something else happened. I started to improve. The improvement motivated me to keep going and stay consistent. Funny how that works.
I find it to be a fantastic form of cross training as well as a great recovery aid. It's worked out well that my harder training days are on Tuesdays and Thursdays and then Wednesdays and Fridays are either swim days or complete days off. There's nothing like a good swim to help flush out left over lactic acid from a race or a hard workout. Obviously it's also an excellent cardio workout as well. I definitely attribute swimming to helping me keep my cardio fitness at a fairly high level.
Even if I decide to stop doing triathlons somewhere down the road, I don't think I'll ever stop swimming. I'm sure it's something I'll be able to do long after my old bones decide they can't run anymore. Or perhaps it's the key to keeping my old bones on the road. Only time will tell.
Is there an activity that you do that you don't really love but you do it out of necessity?
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