Long Swim

I felt like I wanted to challenge myself in a new way this morning in the pool. It's been quite standard recently to swim ~4k with a long main set that involves a bunch of strong swimming. That's great, but I feel like I've adapted to that pretty well and would likely benefit from switching things up a bit. In this scenario I felt like I could switch it up by going shorter/faster OR by going longer/easier. With an Ironman 4 weeks away it seems like opting for the longer option made the most sense. So given that, my goal was to accumulate some fatigue in the water today without going hard but by going long. I didn't think 5k would be enough... But thought 6k would do it. So that was my thinking getting in the water this morning.

Did a 2k warm up and it was relaxed/easy. I timed it but not because I was trying to see how fast I could go, but more so I could zone out and lose count but be able to figure out where I was by looking at my watch. Turned out it was easy to figure out bc I was dead on 1:40 pace the whole time (15min at the 900 and 33:20 at the finish). During the w/u I came up with the main set... had several possible versions in my head but this is what I settled on and the reasoning for choosing this one was that it made the math really easy (each 1200m round would take exactly 20min). Basically I did it all off 1:40/100 base send-offs. I used paddles for the longer swims and swam the shorter ones no pads. No extra rest between rounds.

600/2x300's
600/3x200's
600/4x150's

Got to the end of that and wasn't feeling the fatigue I wanted so went one more round 600/6x100s which made the main set 4800m. 200 c/d gave me 7k total for the morning. I left the pool feeling satisfied like cool... consistent 4k strong effort swims allows me to pop off a 7k whenever I want without really feeling bad at all. I think if I had a gel I could have gone another 2-3k no issues so that felt good! I'm not going to start swimming 7k every session or anything but once in a while challenging myself with something bigger like this makes sense to me.

Day off for the legs- no bike or run today. My hip actually feels pretty solid which makes me happy and bodes well because this is what's on my schedule for tomorrow...