El Andalous - Swimming Goals

Part of My Swimming Route - El Andalous in Background

It’s been a cold winter this year, which is why I’ve spent so much time on repairs and reorganization. However, when I look at my Suunto Ambit watch it seems that I’ve done a lot more swimming than I feel I have. Although there’s the occasional week where I haven’t been at all, mostly I have managed to go 2-3 times a week. That’s not bad!

I’m sure the water must also be colder than usual, so I’m quite proud of being so hardy. I’m just so determined to make the most of the good weather when it finally happens. Once I’m in, the water isn’t so bad, but it takes me a while to take the plunge. This year, I’m splashing myself with sea water before I swim and getting myself accustomed to it first. That helps. I was quite impressed with myself when I noticed one of the Germans refusing to go in because it was too cold. I think of the Germans as being a pretty hardy bunch, especially compared with me!

At long last, my swimming speed has also marginally improved. Last time I was here, I was trying to swim faster, but my watch kept on telling me I was swimming more and more slowly. It was quite depressing. When I returned this time, I decided to give up swimming any faster, and then promptly my speed went up. Very bizarre.

I used to do about 1.8 or 1.9 km/hour; when I tried to improve, my speed decreased to 1.6 or 1.7 km/hour. I thought I’d tried everything to improve it! I am now steadily managing 2 km/hour; if I’m very lucky, I might get up to 2.1 km /hour. This isn’t anything to shout about, but for me it’s progress. I’ve decided it’s mostly due to doing more strokes per minute. I really need to improve my skill!

My watch now has a new feature where it tells you how you compare with all the other people who are using the watch. It kindly informed me that, for open-water swimming, I am in the top 100%. This made me laugh out loud. That’s a very nice way of telling me that I’m in the bottom 10% (since my next goal is to reach the top 90%). In fact, I’m probably at least in the bottom 5%, but it doesn't go that low!

To achieve the top 90% I need to take 7 minutes off my best time to swim 1.5 km and 3 minutes off my best time to swim 1 km. This all seems impossible to me, but I like to have the goal. For 500 m, I just need to reduce my time by 25 seconds to get to the top 90%. You don’t have to do these separately, so if I swim 1.5 km, it will record my fastest 500 m as well within that distance, and my fastest 1 km, and then decide if it’s faster than any other instance where I’ve swum, eg, at least 500 m.

It’s not even worth my while looking at the average times for my age (which are done by 5-year age group, so  I'm 50-54)), as they are totally out of my grasp. There's no excuse!

I am hoping that maybe once it’s winter in Australia, the averages might go down a bit. I blame all these high goals on the Australians who train ridiculously hard.

Also, the top times by Suunto watch users are not necessarily very accurate. I’ve looked at some other people’s recorded swims and I saw one, for instance, who was allegedly swimming at 15 km/hour for 1 km. This is twice as fast as the Olympic champion, so I can’t help but feel this must have been a wind surfer or something like that using the watch for another purpose.

On some of my swims, my watch has failed to pick up sufficiently good GPS data and the swim has been automatically excluded from the “personal bests”; I feel a bit cheated. I’ve learned to wear my watch a bit tighter so that it doesn’t swivel round to the area near my palm (when it fails to record).

However, these percentage data give me more motivation, a goal, and an additional interest, which I guess is the real point of it all rather than accuracy per se.

All this inspired me to try to find out a bit more about what a reasonable swimming speed is deemed to be. It seems that most swimmers seem to think about 3 km/hour is average (for those who swim regularly), which would explain why I’m so far behind. I now have this as my long-term goal.

I also found out these interesting statistics – Goldfish swim at 1.4 km/ hour; Herring at 6 km/h, Olympic swimmer c 7 km/h, Mackrel 11km/h, Salmon 45 km/h, Tuna 60-80 km/h (depends on species), Swordfish 96 km/h. It just shows you how amazing some fish are! I am beginning to think they really don't need my book 25 New Year's Resolutions - for Fish!