Fast Friday

I was dismayed when I walked onto the pool deck yesterday and the coach announced it was "Fast Friday." This is the kind of workout I typically despise – 100 meter sprints with lots of rest. The object, of course, is to go all out on all of them (I have always had a problem with the term all out. If you go all out on the first one, you shouldn't have anything left for the rest of the set). For as long as I have been a swimmer, sprint workouts have been my Achilles heel. The lactate builds quickly with my arms and legs burning in protest at the effort and sometimes I barely eke out times faster than a longer set on shorter rest. It is ridiculous that a set of 10x100 with some hard 50’s kick interspersed is more tedious and painful than a set of 3x1000, but for my metronome style, it is. When the workout was over, satisfied with my performance and the gains that it will bestow, I thought about the importance of doing workouts that take us so far out of our comfort zone.