Mile Postal Swim 2013

The Mile Postal Swim is a cool event where, like the Hour Postal, you swim a 1650 in your own pool and have someone keep track of your splits, then mail in the results and results and rankings are compared nationally. I needed a good hard effort this week to make sure my body was woken up enough to race on the weekend so this was a good opportunity.

Based on my hour swim I figured I could swim something around 19 minutes so my goal was to try to break that time barrier. I was still not feeling all that great because I had only been back into training a few days since being sick but had been feeling good in the pool so I was pretty motivated. 

As with the hour, I started off very easy to make sure the pace was well under control. Somehow my first few splits were still way too fast and I think that was just due to not having good feeling back yet. Being in touch with the effort you are putting out is a sharp awareness that comes and goes with how consistent and fine tuned your training has been recently. 

I checked in at 500yds and my pace was right on so the second 500 I just focused on maintaining my momentum and keeping track of where I was at. The 1000yd split was under the pace I was shooting for as well so I was pleased but the unintentionally fast start had left my arms a little heavier than what one would hope. The third 500 I wavered a little because I lost track of my yardage and started trying to  do too much mental math which distracted from keeping my pace up. 

Coach Joel indicated the 1500 mark and I pushed hard for the last few 50's finishing in 19:04. The splits for the last 200 were really fast and there were a few hundreds in the last third that were definitely off. The pacing was off but it was a good time, and a good test of fitness for this time of year.