I had a great day down in Santa Clarita! The meet had a really good turn out, about 140 swimmers, and as usual everything ran really smoothly. Also… no rain!!! It’s about time I manage to go out of town without getting rained on.

I drove down early and hung out by the pool watching the end of the 1650’s. I set up my tent over by the Rose Bowl Masters and caught up with my Rose Bowl friends. I had 4 CVMM teammates come out today but they showed up a little bit later.

Today was my first 100 fly of the season. A mix of availability, desire, and just accidentally missing it have kept me from actually swimming it. Last year at this meet was the first time I broke a minute as an adult. Considering I’ve been swimming like no fly recently I was just hoping to break a minute today. I took it out in a 27 and came back in a 31. I need to tighten that up. I really didn’t feel so great in the water but the time adds up so I guess it’s fine. I’ve got a 58 in me this year… maybe in Wisconsin?

My 50 free & 50 fly are kind of in plateau town. The free has been stuck in the 25’s and the fly has been in the 26’s. Nothing to exciting to report out of either of those races. I’m hoping to break out of those numbers shortly.

Oddly I’ve had a little bit of a crush on the 50 breast recently. It’s always been my “palate cleanser” race. Something fun that I don’t really care about the results of. I’ve started to have some decent swims in it and I’ve started to enter it a little bit more. I felt really good off my start and my hands were moving nice and fast. One lane over I had my buddy Tony’s kid. He pulled up on me in the back half of the race but I used my veteran wiles to out touch him at the finish. It’s good to know what I lack in speed I can make up with experience :) Much like my 50 free races with his old man we’ll have to recontest this race in the near future.

After my last race a bunch of us grabbed a lane and messed around with my underwater cameras with some friends and teammates. Post our impromptu photo shoot me and some of the other CVMM kids grabbed some food before everyone had to drive off in all different directions. Tomorrow I’m planning to hit Avila for an ocean swim and then probably fall asleep until like Monday afternoon :) I have a little bit of a break until my next meet… next time I’m racing will be in Wisconsin!

Julie, Me and Ahelee hanging out underwater

deep in thought

finish to my 50 free

As of right this moment, online registration is still available here, If you miss that you can deck enter.

Read the Meet Info Here!

See you at the pool tomorrow!

picture by Mark Savage of my 100 fly from the 2009 SCM meet at Santa Clarita

Say whatever you want, that was an awesome dream! Some of the other kids enjoyed the idea but had a hard time imagining it so I went ahead and sketched it out to help those of you that can’t quite put it together visually….

So if you ever wondered what I do at work all day, there you go.

Anyways, here’s today’s workout:

200 swim
200 kick
200 pull

300 free
2 x 250 free
3 x 200 free
4 x 150 free
5 x 100 free
5 x 50 free

3400 yards total

Tonight I have a board meeting for SPMA to attend to, should be good. We’ve been getting stuff done and it’s time to figure out what’s next. As always, if you’re a Masters Swimmer in SoCal with ideas on how to make our LMSC better I’m all ears! Just shoot me an email and let me know what you’re thinking.

After work today I felt highly compelled to make a trip to the beach. It pushed up into the low 80’s during the day and the sun was shining… no real reason to say no. Just in case I grabbed a jammer and my ocean swimming stuff on the way out.

When I got to the beach there were plenty of people hanging out. The bar was packed with the temporarily Irish and the beach was packed with college girls trying to soak up what sun they could. I made a bee line for the water to see what we were dealing with here. I knew it was going to be 53-54ish, but I wasn’t really ready for how cold it was going to feel! I walked in the water a bit and decided swimming without a wetsuit today was for crazy people.

A few minutes later I decided to go in a little deeper just because… eventually I talked myself into getting in for real. I tossed all my stuff up by the stairs to the beach and trekked into the ocean. It took a while for me to get all the way in. I probably spent like 10 minutes getting acclimatized.

Eventually I swam out and just enjoyed the water and the view. I didn’t swim any kind of real distance but I really needed to spend some time in the ocean, it just makes me happy. Cold too… brrrr. But you know what, water in the low 50’s is a good reminder you’re alive!

I brought out my camera today and got some video so you can live vicariously through my oceanic adventure :)

So uh, today kinda hurt… I’m going to just get that out of the way in advance here. There was some mild shit talking on Facebook earlier today that I may have been involved in that turned into a harder than usual noon workout. I was greeted on deck with an “oh good you’re here because I wrote the workout just for you!” Uh oh. I’m not complaining (now that I’m done), but wow… good reminder of how much more shape I could be in if I had the time!

On paper it doesn’t look anywhere as hard as it was in real life. But believe me that we were all huffing and puffing at the end of each repeat and most of us were wishing for a swift and silent death.

600 continuous alternating 100 IM/100 free
400 pull alt fast/easy by 50
200 kick alt fast/easy by 25

Repeat x 3
4 x 25 fly @ :30
2 x 50 back @ :50
2 x 50 breast @ 1:00
100 free fast!
minute rest/gasp/complain

12 x 50 free @ :50 (1. easy 2. fast/easy 3. fast repeat)

3000 yards total

I managed to play with a new camera during the kicking portion of the warm up and the pics in this post are from that. It’s an UltraHD FlipCam set in a waterproof case. So far I’m pretty impressed with the image quality and that you can actually get some intelligible sound through the waterproof case. It’s not as easy to play with while swimming as my Pentax Optio W80, but I think this might way outshine that camera for taking video from a stationary or slowly moving vantage point… we’ll see… I need a few weeks to play with this thing before I decide how much I like it. So for your enjoyment… random screen capped pictures!

Shot from the 2009 Naples Island Swim

I’ve gotten a lot of questions and emails about the Naples Island Swim for this year and I have some good news for those of you that like it as much as I do. We didn’t have a host for it this swim at the beginning of the year, but Shore Aquatics has stepped up to make sure this event keeps going. I’m really stoked about this and can’t wait to hear more. So a big thank you to Shore and our new event director Merritt!!! I can wait to go down to Long Beach in August to do some swimming!

Become a fan on Facebook for updates as they happen!

Rinconada Pool Steaming at 7:30am

I drove up to Palo Alto on Friday night for the Rinconada Masters Meet. I met up with my friend Sarah for dinner to load up on Indian food and talk swimming a bit. She had a meet this weekend too but not the one I was going to so it was good to sneak in some dinner to catch up a bit.

In the morning I went to the pool way early even though I wasn’t in the first event (1000 free). I mainly just wanted to get a place to park since I heard like 220 people preregistered and the pool doesn’t actually have a parking lot! I grabbed a good spot and then went to check out the pool. It was pretty frosty in the morning and the pool was really steamy. Since I had hours before my first event I decided to go on an adventure on foot. I grabbed my iPhone and looked for the nearest place to eat some breakfast. I ended up wandering around for like 2 miles through some neighborhoods and a little downtown area and landed in a diner for some eggs and bacon. Afterwards I took a longer way back to the pool just to go exploring. It warmed up quite a bit while I was wandering. In theory it was supposed to be cold and windy all day but that never really came true.

When I got back to the pool it was considerably more populated. I ran into my Pacific Masters friends Jim from the Manatee Masters and John from Santa Rosa and set up my stuff by them right along the edge of the kid’s wading pool. It’s a good thing I had them to talk to because I had to wait forever for my first event. I don’t think I swam until almost 1 o’clock! While I was around I also saw Erik from Santa Rosa, Coach Chris from Mountain View and I got to met Jana from Menlo Masters who reads the blog! As a surprise bonus I met a couple people from San Luis Obispo (down where I live) who recognized my name over the loud speaker as being “that search engine guy.” I don’t think I’ve had work cross over into the pool like that before so that was kind of funny, one of the guys had just called my office Friday afternoon… small world huh? :)

Anyways, let’s get to some swimming shall we? My first event of the day was the 50 freestyle. I was stoked to finally be getting in a race! The swim was ok but it felt a little “off.” The blocks felt a little squirrelly and I had a subpar push off and dolphin kick of the turn. I swam a 25.6 which is par for the course right now, but it didn’t really feel correct. I just sort of wrote it off as being the first swim of the day and moved my focus to the 200 free.

Me and the 200 free just can’t quite come to terms with each other. Last time I swam it I went out way fast and gassed out hard. This time I went out too slow and never made it back. Although I gotta say my last 25 was probably the fastest of the whole race so I had something left in the tank. Upside is I made a new friend with a dude who beat me by about a second in the next lane over. It was his first meet in about 25 years, I always like to talk to people in their first couple meets back just to soak in that happiness and excitement. I’ll figure this thing out eventually… I just don’t see any reason why I can’t get down to around 2:00 flat but I keep swimming closer to 2:07-8. Maybe next year I’ll get my SCY time more where it should be.

At this point it was getting really late in the day and I decided to just swim the 50 fly and scratch the 100 free since I had a big drive home and wanted some daylight for it. Since I only had one event left I really wanted it to count. I tried to focus a little harder before my race and be really aggressive off the start. I’m pretty sure I growled a little bit underwater while kicking off the dive :) My 50 fly wasn’t a best time but it was up there. I swam a 26.4 which I’m plenty happy with for a midseason meet that also happens to be in a big string of meets (I have 3 meets in a row this month!).

After my race I got changed and started the big drive home. Normally I would have written my recap last night, but honestly I just wanted to go to bed instead! So here you go… a meet wrap up just a day late. Next week I’m swimming in Santa Clarita, mainly 50’s this time around.

I thought this was interesting... never seen this posted at a meet before

busy on deck

this pool never stopped being busy! Tons of people were in the water!

Men's 1000 free

The pool is in the middle of an Ewok forest

the start of the women's novice 50 free event

Hanging out by the kiddie pool

]]> http://robaquatics.com/2010/03/2010-rinconada-masters-meet-wrap-up.html/feed 4 http://robaquatics.com/2010/03/2010-rinconada-masters-meet-wrap-up.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RobAquatics/~3/mEa_tarLFvU/getting-ready-for-rinconada.html http://robaquatics.com/2010/03/getting-ready-for-rinconada.html#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:36:06 +0000 Rob D http://robaquatics.com/?p=941 I had an unreasonably gorgeous day for a swim in Santa Maria today, it was one of those where no one wanted to get in the pool because we just wanted to lay out on the deck and soak up the sun. After about 15 minutes of talking and avoiding doing work we all got in and did a modified version of a workout from a few months back.

400 reverse IM, kick/drill/kick/swim

2 x 200 kick @ 4:00
2 x 200 free IM @ 3:30

2 x 150 kick @ 3:00
2 x 150 IM (no fly) @ 2:30

2 x 100 kick @ 2:00
2 x 100 IM @ 1:45

2200 yards

So… we didn’t get to far today, but we had fun so I guess that counts for something :) Today was probably my last workout before I head north for the Rinconada Masters meet on Saturday. Online entry closed today, but it looks like deck entry will be available. I’m swimming the 50/100/200 free and the 50 fly. I’m really curious to see how the 2 novice events go… I’ve never seen that before in a meet. The other thing that is way beyond me is the concept of a 1650 YARD FLY! Holy crap! Who does that? For those of you capable of such a feat, I salute you!

Since I’ve never been to this pool I had to do my pool recon via Google Maps. It looks like we have 14 lanes and it’s at least deep on one end judging by the diving boards.

I’m excited about having some deep water for my 100 free. I swam a really good time for me at the Fullerton meet last month and I feel like I could have swam it faster if it weren’t for the part where I had to totally change my dive to compensate for the 4 foot deepness of the pool! This meet will also hopefully be redemption for my 200 free. I swam a best time at Rose Bowl in the rain, but I gassed out hard in the process. Like embarrassingly hard, admittedly it was after swimming a 500 and a 1000 free… but still… it was pretty weak. I’d like to see what I can do here when I’m not totally exhausted! Anybody else planning on being there?

For those of you that are charitably inclined it might have crossed your mind to give some money to US Masters Swimming to support their mission, and if you’re like me you probably had no idea how to actually do so! At last years convention I heard about the USMS Endowment Fund for the first time and started looking for some more information about it. USMS recently set up a page on the site that spells out what the Endowment Fund is all about and gives you a way to make a donation. Currently it’s a write a check and fill out a form kind of a thing, there’s talk of making it all online during the year.

Here’s a snippet of their description of the program:

The USMS Endowment Fund is the charitable arm of U.S. Masters Swimming. Established in 1989, the fund provides grants to programs with a focus on medical and health research on the benefits of swimming, development assistance for new Masters programs, outreach to other adult fitness organizations, and education to improve leadership, address swimming and adult fitness issues and to help Masters programs with special needs.

If you go to usms.org/giving/ you can read about some of the things the Endowment has supported and learn how to give or apply for a grant.

This is something you’re probably going to be hearing a lot more about in the future from USMS. Our new president (and my teammate at CVMM!) Jeff Moxie has a big vision for what USMS could do to reinvest in swimming via the Endowment Fund, and personally I’m excited about the potential to do good stuff!

To give money to the USMS Endowment Fund go here

To apply for a grant from the Endowment Fund check out this pdf

Anyways, I thought that I would do a quick video to show you how using a HeadBlade works. I’ve been a user since I started shaving my head regularly way back when I was in the Army. So here’s some video I took this weekend in my hotel of me shaving and mumbling about shaving… it’s riveting documentary work for sure :)

If you want to get a HeadBlade for yourself or just go check out their stuff you can do that over here.

** just for full blogger disclosure, on top of being a long time fan I am a member of their affiliate program