Yes, it’s off season, so why am I still swimming, you may ask? First off, I enjoy it. If you asked me two years ago if I enjoyed swimming, I would have looked at you as if you had three ears.
I find swimming to be very relaxing and meditative. But today’s workout at Open Water Swim Long Island (OWS LI) was nothing but intense! Christine Biondi is the head coach under Bryan Krut, who owns OWS LI. She was running the show today and gave us one of the toughest workouts I’ve done in a long time!
We started out doing a 500 yard warm up. Followed by 8 50’s but after 25, you had to get out of the water and dive.
“Ummm, wait a second Christine,” I said. “I don’t know how to dive.”
She told me it was easy and showed me how to do it a couple of times. “Make sure to tuck your head and bend your knees,” she said.
I swam 25 pulled myself out of the pool using my arms to push out of the water, stood up, put my toes at the edge of the pool, bent my knees, put my arms over my head, tucked my head and I jumped. The next thing I knew, I was deep in the water. It felt like everything was in slow motion. And slowly, I was creeping out of the water and continued to swim. Wow, that was fun. A few times that I did it, my goggles fell off and water got into my eyes. But my nose plugs stayed on and that made me happy that water didn’t go up my nose into the back of my head!
Following that, she had us do a series of exercises after every 25 — squats, burpees, push ups, bicycle, and jumping jacks. Each time, we had to swim 25, get ourselves out of the pool using our upper body and then continuing with the exercise before returning to the water. Every time I was at the deep end, I would try to dive in… I wasn’t brave enough to dive in from the diving blocks, I dove in from the side of the pool.
At the end, we did a cool down of 100. It felt amazing.
What was your most fun swim workout?
