Survival Saturday and the Black Widow
Bryce : What's that smell?
Lara Croft : 5 am.
Those of you who watched the first Tomb Raider movie (with Angelina Jolie) will remember this quote. Bryce (Lara’s tekkie sidekick) is woken up by Lara Croft at, for him an unearthly hour, and stuck his head outside his caravan door. Fortunately my alarm clock wakes me up a bit later: at 5:30am. It’s early and it’s Survival Saturday. Actually, I’m already awake most times before the alarm goes off. I need time to get going. Tip-toe out of the bedroom (not to wake my better half!) and make my way downstairs for some fruit juice. Doggies fed as well. Masters training starts at 7:00am and I’m usually out of the house by 6:20.
Outside it’s still dark and -4C. The windscreen is iced over, the car seat and steering wheel freezing. Still the car warms up quickly and 20 minutes later I arrive at the Hoornse Vaart, home ‘pool of DAW. On the way I try to get mentally prepared for what is to come. Training schedules vary; but usually between 5800m and 6000m for a 2-hour session for the ‘elite’ Masters Swimmers. I usually end up swimming between 3200m and 3600m.
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I also step out of the pool about 10 minutes earlier to get back home in time for the dryland training session with Amanda and Ata (our trainer) starting at 10:00 am.
This time, however, I was feeling pretty tired after swimming
about 3200m and thinking about stopping. But then I thought
I’d have a go at swimming the Black Widow (aka 400m
Individual Medley – the pseudonym is a reflection of how tough
this event is!). One of my biggest challenges – if not the biggest –
is to achieve a QT for Kyushu for the 400m IM. We were still
training over 25m (although the pool is 50m, a central ‘barrier’ can
be raised turning the pool into two 25m pools). So, the first
leg of the 400m IM – 100m Butterfly – seemed less daunting,
if I focused on good turns and push-offs. After the first 100m,
I felt ok. The last leg was the 100m Freestyle. I felt I could do this
but slowed down and focused more on technique than going all out chasing some great time. I touched at 10’31”, which is a lot slower than my PB of 8’:58”, which I swam in 2015, but not much slower than the 2019 Gwangju listed qualifying time of 10’:14”. That surprised me, as I realised the time after a tough training session and not going “full out”. I later found out that my excitement was soon to be blunted.
Anyway, enough over the Black Widow. After a quick change and a rest, off to do some dryland training with Ata. In the meantime, the outside temperature had risen to a balmy +2C and we were greeted by Ata outside the gym. He mentioned that as the gym was still relatively cold, we would do a warm-up outside (if you can follow that logic). This consisted of running up 50 steps and then down again in a 3-2-1 pyramid, with the last run all, the way to the top (100 steps).
As I hate running this so-called warm-up just about killed me – and we hadn’t even started with the weight exercises! The remaining time in the gym was literally survival. We went through a series of sets and reps consisting of squats, flys, ab curls, triceps, lats, pecs and every addition bit of muscle you can imagine! We finished with some stretching and were home by 11:15. Now for a well-earned cappuccino and chill…
The excitement of the achieved 400m IM time was short-lived. In January 2023 and FINA published the new QT’s for Kyushu. As the saying goes “A new year brings new challenges” and the new QT for the Black Widow is 9:49.05 – slower than my all-time PB; but a full 40” faster than my training time. That’s equivalent to an improvement of 10” per 100m. Oh well - let’s give it a go!
The road to Kyushu has just become more challenging…
