Dan Head

Thank You! Final Thoughts on the Swim Across the Sound

We came. We saw. We kicked ass.

No, Team RBG didn’t win the Swim Across the Sound this year— or even place for that matter. What we did instead was raise $6200 for St. Vincent’s Hospital’s Cancer Center, helping real people battling real cancer within our own local community. We finished in fine form in just under 8 hours, having each put in four half-hour pulls starting at 8:45 am at Port Jefferson, NY, and finishing around 4:30 pm at Captain’s Cove in Bridgeport, CT. We had Terry as our boat captain again this year, marking his third turn with our team and our third team appearance overall.

I was really proud of how our team did. We’re all old guys except Jake, who’s been out of the water for six years and only just started training again five weeks ago. Chris and Stephen have been in for similar amounts of time, with Chris having put in half his training at a lake in Maine just this past month. Meanwhile, Stephen hasn’t swam for any reason other than water polo in… maybe a year?

My personal highlight came right off the beach. I met this 20-something-year-old kid from the Yale Water Polo Team wearing a racing wetsuit while we were waiting for the race to start. We exchanged pleasantries, and then the gun went off, and he smoked me right off the bat. I thought, “Well, this kid is literally half my age and wearing a wetsuit. It sucks, but I better just let him go.”

I lost sight of him.

Turns out, that kid started WAY too fast and cracked. I actually came out of the water several hundred yards ahead of him!

Beyond that, I personally had kind of an unremarkable day. Not sure I managed my taper right, honestly, so that I am today wondering if I didn’t leave myself substantial room for improvement next year. But at the end of the day, no one really cares. We had fun, finished well, and raised a lot of money. These were our actual goals.

According to my watch, I swam a total of 4.1 miles in my four half-hour pulls. It’s kind of hard to evaluate that without a better understanding of the impacts of the tidal currents, but I felt fairly good throughout, and I got faster as the day progressed. In training, my primary goal was always to feel good as the day went on, and that, at least, worked out as planned. I still kind of feel like I should have been faster, but “fast” is quite a relative concept when it comes to marathon swimming, especially in Long Island Sound.

I should note, too, that I won the Swim’s DREAM OF LIFE AWARD this year for my work with the Swim since 2015 and especially for organizing Team RBG. So I took the award home, but it was very much a team effort, and winning it made me feel incredibly grateful to my teammates. Getting your buddies together to raise $1500 apiece for a freaking marathon swim is not particularly easy. I am intensely grateful to the guys who’ve answered the call year after year.

Chris, Stephen, Andy, and Jake, you guys are the absolute best. I literally could not have done any of this without you.

Thank you again for your support with the Swim. It means a lot to us, and it means even more to the people whose lives are falling apart as they struggle with cancer. We can’t cure cancer, but we can at least try to help people as they struggle to fight it themselves.

That’s our mission at Team RBG. Thank you for being there for us. 

Go Team RBG! BEAT CANCER!!!

After what feels like an eternal preparatory period, we have finally arrived. It’s Swim Across the Sound Week.

Truth is, I haven’t trained this hard in a good, long while. Part of this came out of a desire to do well in the Swim, but most of it came from simple competition from my Army Swimming teammates. Several of the guys swim a lot -- way more than me! -- and I’ve found myself swimming more over the course of the last year or so just from a desire not to be the slowest guy in the group chat.

Not that this has worked. I definitely am the slowest guy in the group chat.

But I’ve still been working hard, and now that we’ve finally hit the tapering phase of this training cycle, I can actually feel myself rounding into form. That’s been fun.

Still, I always feel like it’s a weird kind of struggle once I start tapering. You wouldn’t think swimming less would be a serious challenge, but it’s been messing with me both because I’m training less and therefore out of my routine and also because I always get in my head about how “ready” and “in shape” I am as the yardage starts coming down. Once I’m no longer proving it to myself on a day-to-day basis, maintaining my confidence on sheer faith in my training can be really, really tough.

Thankfully, we’ll hit the water Saturday, and that’ll be that.

I am beyond ready to just get this done.

I’ve gotta say, too, that my team looks good. Chris Wiley has put in several 5K swims in recent weeks, mostly in open water up in Maine. Meanwhile, Stephen is playing in a big-time water polo tournament this weekend -- all the way down in Columbia! -- and I even got a chance to meet Jacob and watch him swim recently at the gym, so I know first hand that he is an excellent swimmer. We should do really well.

Friends, if you haven’t donated yet, please consider doing so. Our team is about $2K short of our goal, and while I’m happy with the money that we’ve raised, I also know that real people need real help when they’re dealing with cancer. The Swim helps those folks hold their lives together while they fight that devastating fight. We’re trying to do what we can, and you can, too.

The Swim Across the Sound is Saturday.

Go Team! Beat Cancer!!!

Sometimes swimming is great, sometimes swimming is a grind, and sometimes it's both. Less than a month out from the 2022 Swim Across the Sound, and we've gotten into a space where it is very much both.

Let's start with the simple reality: I am swimming very well.

But I've also been swimming a lot, so this isn't exactly a surprise.

I typically train on a four-week cycle with three working weeks followed by a Rest Week. With that, I generally try to put in three or hopefully four swimming days per week alongside two or hopefully three sessions in the weight room every week.

But while weight training is great, I cut it out a couple of weeks ago in order to (massively) increase my swimming volume with the predictable result that my muscles recovered at the same time that my recovery ability increased overall due to the reduced workload. This allowed me to go from putting in maybe 2500 yards per swim with long Saturday swims in the 3500 to 4000 yard range to now putting in at least 3400 yards per swim with long swims in the 4500 to 5000 yard range. At the same time, my standard pace per 100 has gotten somewhere between 5% to 10% faster overall.

All of this was by design. This was The Plan.

But it *is* a grind.

More to the point, there is a very real reason why I don't swim this much all the time and/or compete on a Master's Team. Bottom line, I'm just not in that headspace anymore, and honestly, that's a good thing.

However. I got excited when I started swimming better, and the desire to double-down kind of grabbed hold of me. Among other things, I decided to stop drinking over the month of July, so that I could *really* focus on recovery and swimming well. Part of me wanted to let the sport take my life over for a month one last time, and though I realize no one cares, I wanted to see if I could see my six-pack again.

Alas, I found myself at the Boat Club this past Friday just not enjoying myself. Worse, my wife very much did not enjoy my company, either. For whatever reason, I just don't seem to have the bandwidth to focus solely on swimming while also focusing on the rest of my life. I was just sitting there, kind of obsessing on what I wanted to accomplish in the water later that weekend.

Unfortunately, life can only have one Top Priority by definition.

As it has been, swimming remains a balance with the rest of my life. Hitting that balance is and will probably always remain one of the trickiest parts of the sport. I need to now swim well while I'm swimming but engage fully with the rest of my life during the rest of my time. And yeah, you know, that's probably not how Tom Brady does it, but...

It's Tom Brady's job. For me, that's just not the case.

Friends,

My buddy Chris is visiting from Washington State, having just retired from the Army. Alas for poor Chris, I immediately dragooned him into following me for an open water swim yesterday in one of our kayaks. I also made the poor bastard bring our waterproof camera to take pictures of the ordeal.

Keyword: waterproof.

We got about 800 yards into the swim, and everything was going peachy. Boats were waving, the sun was shining, and Chris even had tunes blasting on my waterproof speaker. Again, note that keyword.

A wave came by, and I pushed through it, then looked back to see where Chris had gotten to with the kayak and my Gatorade. Only, I didn't see Chris. I only saw the kayak -- upside down.

I thought, "That's not good."

Swam back, and lo and behold, there is Chris swimming right next to me. Luckily he'd worn a life jacket. It wasn't a hard sell or anything making him wear the life jacket, but in that moment, he looked pretty damned glad to have it. We were a solid half-mile out from shore, and the kayak was filled with maybe two feet of water.

Bilge pumps are a thing for kayaks. Who knew?

I thought we were about to have a really long morning, but a boat happened by at just the right moment, we got the kayak righted and -- mostly -- emptied of water, and we drove on with our mission. Happily, we didn't lose any equipment, but well, my new phone should be here tomorrow. What can you do?

Finished up with just over 5K in the water under gorgeous blue skies, and save for that one rather eventful moment, it was a pretty nice day out there.

So. This is where we are. And let me just say that I like swimming plenty, but NO ONE would swim 3.1 miles just for the Hell of it. We did all of this to beat cancer. If you can help us and our team with that, we will be very grateful.

Thanks again. Have a good rest of your weekend.

--Dan

Swim Across the Sound (Update 2): Aerobic Threshold Mystery!

Well friends, we have reached the part of the training cycle in which I remember why I retired from competition. Which is to say that I woke up this morning tired and sore to the point that it took a real effort of will to get out of bed and go swim. Looking back on my competitive swimming career these days often feels like remembering that time I had a mental illness. I was mad about everything pretty much all the time, and I used those feelings to fuel my competitive fires. Today I’m in a much better headspace, and that’s great 99% of the time, but boy, it is sooooo much more difficult to find the right mindset when things get tough in training.

Sally and I went to see Sammy Hagar & the Circle in concert this past Friday night. Fun show, but we wound up drinking a decent amount, and it was hot in there. I won’t say I felt awful Saturday, but I certainly didn’t feel great. Despite drinking a full bottle of water before going to bed Friday night, I still woke up Saturday feeling like a wrung sponge. Managed to put in 4000 yards in the pool Saturday morning while Emma was at dance, but they weren’t, like, great yards. I think the best we can say about them is that they were serviceable.

My main set was three times through:

-- 3 x 200 @ 2:50, aerobic pace
-- 100 kick
-- :30 rest

Aerobic-paced sets can get kind of tricky in the pool. You want to keep your heart rate between 70% and 80% of your heart rate max for an extended period of time. This can be a lot harder to do than you might think. Runners often train to do this using a heart rate monitor -- I’ve done that myself -- but unless you feel like wearing a chest strap when you swim, maintaining a steady heart rate while swimming can be much more challenging. Once you get going, the natural tendency is to speed up, leading to a crash down the line. When you’re training to swim pretty much all day, those kinds of crashes are counterproductive.

So I bought a new swimming watch, the Garmin Swim 2. This thing can take one’s heart rate while swimming, which is amazing.

I have for years assumed that my aerobic heart rate was about 140. Doing aerobic sets, then, I’d typically do 200s with ~10 seconds rest, take my heart rate for 6 seconds between sets, multiply by 10, and there we are. Bottom line, I needed to be around 13-14 beats in 6 seconds to stay on threshold.

Swimming Saturday, my heart rate sat stubbornly between 131 and 136 pretty much all set. The good news is that I swam comfortably at that rate -- if not fast -- but even when I later did a 200 for time at the end of my workout, I could only get my heart rate up to about 146 bpm.

But hey, maybe that was just the hangover talking. Right?

So today I did a shorter workout with longer intervals at a higher intensity. My main set was 2 x (5 x 100 @ 1:30), trying to hold 1:15 or better throughout. This was tempo work, not true speed work, so maybe 85% to 90% effort overall. I took each hundred out steady and tried to build through each rep, and I was between 1:13 and 1:15 all the way through, generally getting faster through each set overall. Performance-wise, this wasn’t too bad. Coming at the end of a long week of training, I was more than happy with it.

Again, though, my heart rate sat stubbornly between 140 and 145 throughout the set with a measured max at 146. Granted, I wasn’t out there doing intervals of butterfly, but still… I’d have expected to get up into the 150s easily. Going by feel, I was definitely hitting 90% effort on the back half of each 100.

Sigh. Maybe my max heart rate has fallen in recent years, I guess because of age. The most recent formula I’ve seen is 211 - (0.64) x age, which predicts a HR Max for me of ~180 bpm. But that still yields an aerobic threshold of around 143 bpm, which is more or less where I’d assumed I’d be going in.

So I don’t know. Either I’m just tired, and that’s making it hard to get legitimately cranked up in the pool -- a distinct possibility -- or else my aerobic threshold is somehow a Hell of a lot lower than it used to be. Or maybe my new watch just isn’t figuring my HR correctly while I’m swimming.

Something is going on.

The article where I found that HR formula suggests a methodology for finding one’s max heart rate that would involve something like 3 x (2 x 50 Fly @ 1:00) tempo pace. I might try that next week just to see if I can get up into the 170s. Certainly, that’s about where I’d expect to be on a set like that.

Anyway, it's been an interesting training cycle to say the least. Thanks again for your support!