Master Swim Class

This weekend I went to Illinois to visit Vicki for the weekend, leaving my husband behind to do all the chores (sorry Matt!) and watch as much playoff football as possible.

My brother-in-law offered to use his air miles so I could have the luxury of flying instead of the nearly 6 hour drive. Which made me feel like a high roller.

My sister picked me up Friday night from the airport and after swinging by Portillo’s for a chop salad we made it to her apartment and tried to decide what workout to do the next day. When we get together exercise is always on the agenda.

Vic is a member at a really swanky fitness centre. The kind with clean showers and free towels and all the workout equipment that is trendy these days (but maybe not enough squat racks for my liking). They also have a 25m lap pool.

Vicki really got into swimming this year to train for the 2 sprint triathalons that she participated in. I, myself, had a brief (and pathetic) stint on the high school swim team in grade 9, and more recently have been taking to the pool for interval training. In spite of that, neither of us is particularly good at swimming.

I’m slow and sloppy and have poor form and my breaststroke is just as efficient as my freestyle (which means I’m either prodigious at breaststroke or pathetic at freestyle).

So when we decided to try out the 7am Master’s Swim Class (a class for actual good swimmers) to say we were both a bit nervous is an understatement. I crawled out of bed with little enthusiasm at 6:20 and we got dressed and headed over to the gym.

There were more people there than we would have liked, which meant we were sharing a lane with a regular to the class, but luckily his pace was similar to ours so I didn’t feel as inadequate as I expected I would.

The entire hour and a half class was freestyle swimming (lord help me). We did some drills using buoys, paddles, and flutter boards but it was mostly swimming laps at whatever pace the instructor recommended. I’m trying hard to remember but I think this is what we did:

200m warm up

200m pulls with the buoy between our legs

200m pulls with paddles on our hands

200m flutter kicks

4 x 100m negative splits

4 x 100m easy to practice our form

4 x 100m negative splits

3 x 75m pulls with the buoy and paddles

I appreciated that the instructor watched Vicki and I and gave us some tips to correct our form. Apparently my kicking sucks (no surprise there) and I swim with my head up too much (a symptom of my breaststroke preference, perhaps?) so I tried to take her tips and apply them to my stroke.

After an hour and a half and at least 2 kilometres of swimming, I was tired for pretty much the rest of the day.

We did make it into the city to check out The Field Museum–What an awesome place! I’d love to go back and see what we missed.– but by 7pm I was exhausted and ready to crash.

Swimming always takes it out of me.

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