Goggles at Dawn

Setting out from the marina at Mana On Thursday 25 March, Rebecca and I set out on an excursion from the north to the south island, across Te Moana-a-Raukawa / Cook Strait. The plan to do this swim was formulated in June 2020, when we were just out of lockdown, and we thought a tandem Strait crossing in the summer would be an exciting challenge. Our initial date for the swim was 7 February, but the weather didn't cooperate then, or for the tide windows since.   Because the Strait is extremely tidal, being a narrow channel between several large and dramatic seas/oceans (the Tasman Sea, and the Pacific and Southern Oceans) you can only attempt a crossing in quite limited tide windows during the slacker tides that correspond roughly with the first and third quarters of the moon. During this 2020-2021 season, the weather has also been very uncooperative, and after one swimmer made a successful, albeit very cold crossing at the end of November; after that, there had only been two ...

 In 2016 I started keeping a record of how far I swam at each session, just using some grid paper pulled out of a refill pad.  I had a very rudimentary spreadsheet, into which I'd enter the information, and get a total for each month. I think sometime in the third quarter of the year I set a goal of swimming *at least* 10km per week. At this point I wasn't really doing much open-water swimming, just two sessions with a masters club, one technique session with a tri/multisport club, and maybe one other swim a week. I remember doing a couple of 4km solo swims at Freyberg and thinking that was a long way . How things have changed. I continued the same refill pad/rudimentary spreadsheet plan through 2017, and 2018, and indeed 2019 ...or most of it. Then there came a time in 2019 when Rebecca and Bre were starting to accelerate their training (fairly rapidly) for their Lake Taupo 40.2km swim in January 2020.  They decided to use a shared spreadsheet for recording their daily s...

The set pictured below is one that we did a few weeks ago at Thorndon Pool (which is 33 1/3 yards, or roughly 30.5 metres long). I think it was on Saturday 6 March. It took a little while to do but was varied and interesting. We had a great group of people for this set, and took over a whole lane. It was fun, and the set included (I hope) something for everybody. ~~~~~~~ These are two sets that I've done a few times at Freyberg recently on Wednesday or Friday mornings after the prelude of a lighthouse swim (2.6km). For reference, Freyberg is 33 1/3 metres long, so 3 lengths to 100 metres. 1. 4,400 metres 1200m warm-up as 66 fr/33 bk 400 as  4x(33 kick/33 drill/33 swim) w/fins 400 as 4x(33 sculll/23 swim) w/pullbuoy  3 x 200 @ 3.05  pull/paddles 200 easy/choice 2 x 200 @3.05 pull/paddles 200 easy/choice 1 x 200 @3.05 pull/paddles 200 easy/choice 9 x 33 strong @ 00.40 fins/paddles 300 warm down 2.  3,400 metres Warm-up is  6 x (100 kick/133 IM) with fins...