Holy Heck.

Actually, I was thinking something slightly more profane for about 30 minutes this morning while swimming. D3 is setting up a women's triathlon team and in honor of the occasion, I swam with them this morning. Optimistically, I'll be swimming them with them every Friday morning, if I recover from today.

Clearly, I have been slacking at masters. Sure, I've been bitching about my pace slowing down since Christmas break and actually this week was the first week I felt back to where I was. But in general, when I swim I'm not praying for lighting strikes or heart attacks. (Digression - on my birthday swim, I was telling the coach that I could probably move up a lane but I'd have to draft like crazy and work really hard. And plus, there were 5 people over there and only 2 in my lane. And he told me he just went to a talk by an elite runner who was talking about suffering - how he prayed for lighting strikes and heart attacks during hard sessions. How the human body can tolerate a whole lot of pain. And I said, "Is this supposed to be a pep talk???")

And today, I was kind hoping for a big brown floater or something to close the pool. The workout was HARD. Our main set was 9x150 on 2:30. Just 2 weeks ago, I was doing 150's on 2:27. Today my first ones were 1:18-ish but they got progressively slower until they were 2:30 and there was no rest. Our total workout was 3000 yards, which is on average 500 more than I usually swim in an hour. And I'm not sure how I feel about all this.

For one thing, the D3 coach was telling me I need to breath every other stroke instead of every 3 when I'm doing fast sets. I've worked my ass off this winter getting comfortable swimming 3. I'm pretty proud of myself. I see the argument for both cases and I'm confused. On one hand, you get more oxygen breathing every 2. But on the other, you end up with muscle imbalances and symmetry issues. I fully plan on racing every 2, but should I revert back in practice too? Just for the speed work? It feels like cheating. This is what you get when you work with 3-4 coaches, which is what I'm effectively doing with my Rally master's classes.

The D3 women's team officially starts in mid-March and then there will be group runs again, in addition to the weekly swim. I'm super excited to explore my pain tolerance some more.