Willie Walker's Weblog

After this past season of bicycle racing as a pack finishing Cat 4, I've decided the sport is too dangerous. In the last race of the season, I took a look around me and saw scarred legs, people in slings, and multi-thousand dollar bicycle frames that were on their way out due to crashes. The captain of my team broke his collar bone and two ribs in a race that I signed up for, but had to miss due to last minute commitments -- had I gone to the race, I would most definitely had been in that crash. In the road race stage of the Longsjo Classic, the guy next to me went off the road while we were doing a 55+ MPH descent. He survived and beat me by a wheel at the finish, but the thought of being so near to death or permanent injury really did a number on my head.

I had to face it -- I'm never going to be a Lance, and I mostly likely never will make my way up to a Cat 3 without being involved in some sort of severe crash. But, I love the sport. So, I've decided to take a safer route and work on triathlons. I did them in college and had fun at them. The intense thrill of being in a tight pack flying 40+ MPH down a winding back road, bumping knuckles with people on each side of you, dropping people (and being dropped), and hurling after a hard sprint won't be there, but at least there will still be some competition.

Almost this entire year, I've been going to the Y and doing laps for 45 minutes to an hour one or two times a week. Swimming is good cross training and I like it a lot. Over the course of this year, I tended to find the 'right' times to go swimming -- not too many people and if you had to split lanes, the people you were splitting lanes with knew how to swim. The cool thing is that this includes Sunday mornings; my wife and son can come and we can swim as a family.

To make a long story even longer, one of the regulars I saw at the pool turned me on to this concept of Total Immersion Swimming. I swam on the high school swim team (did the 500 free and the 100 fly), but never really had any formal coaching. The coaching back then was "swim fast....now swim faster...now do it again." Since I was thinking about actually needing to become competitive as a swimmer again for triathlons, I thought I'd check out Terry Laughlin's book.

Wow! After reading through the book and applying some of the most important concepts (swimming long, swimming down hill, rotating the body, etc.), I dropped my typical lap time by 5 seconds with no extra effort. Cool! I'm going to spend the rest of this year working on techniques from the book and will probably start speed work in January. I'm so psyched by this 'new way' of swimming that I'm going to try for a 20 minute mile next year. That might be a bit of a stretch, but you gotta have goals.