No Mojo in the Water Tonight

Every week in the summer in Boulder there's a "splash & dash" series called the Stroke & Stride.  Swim 2 loops of a 750 meter course in the Boulder Reservoir(total 1500), then run 5K.  It was with weekly swims at the S&S over the past couple of years that I was able to let go of that open-water swim fear.  At the end of last summer I had even dropped my S&S swim time down by several minutes.  

I wore my sleeveless wetsuit tonight - water was colder than 2 weeks ago when we last swam there, but it feels less constricting so I like it better than the long sleeve wetsuit.  The long sleeve one makes my arms  fatigued after awhile.  That's another reason that I thought I'd be looking at a faster time tonight - though my arms were chilly especially in the second loop.

My swim time at the S&S tonight was among my slowest ever, and I'm trying to figure out why.  Possible reasons:

1 - Poor sighting technique means that every time I left my head to see where I'm going I stop my forward momentum, then have to build it again - over & over again.

2 - Swimming to the far right or far left of the straight line distance to each buoy and having to swim extra distance to get over to the buoy in order to go around it(more than once)

3 - Intentionally swimming away from other swimmers instead of  in their wake to get the aerodynamic benefit...sometimes I change my course if it appears someone might be in my path or I might be in theirs

4 - Not doing well at pacing my swimming, with regard to going fast enough to be more competitive yet slow enough to comfortably do the distance - given the bike & run to follow

5 - Wasted time between laps (exiting the water, running down the beach to enter the water again, taking off goggles to clear fogging ....then slowly but steadily starting off into second loop)

6 - The answer is probably "all of the above"

I thought the second loop was faster but as it turned out they were pretty close in time.  I FELT like I was swimming fairly well - not super fast, but not that slow either.  I don't get it, because I've been feeling faster in the pool lately.  Warren saw me on the run - he was coming back less than a mile from the finish line when I was still in my first mile of the 5K run. He said "are you ok?" as that was a really slow swim, even slower than I usually go.

I had to let it go & focus on the run.  Since I'll be racing a Sprint triathlon in two days(Sunday) the plan was to do the run fairly easy and save the legs.  There is a lady in my age group who also does this event, and she swims faster than me(duh, who doesn't?), but my run is typically several minutes faster.  I saw her tonight on the run, and she was WAY ahead of me on the way BACK on the out & back course, when I was in going out.  I thought I didn't have much chance of running her down, but I continued to gain on her, but ran out of road and she crossed the finish line about 10 seconds ahead of me.  Bummed me out.

The cool thing about that, however, is that I didn't give up and made the effort to catch her  - and almost did.  Maybe not the smartest thing to do a couple of days before a big race, when I had decided to just go easy - but I'm starting to cultivate the competitive drive that makes me push myself harder.  Just participating in a race is fun, but taking it to the next level in performance expectations is a place I'm not so familiar with - I'm starting to enjoy going there. 

I raced in a swimsuit tonight for the second time in my life, and the first time in years.  It was cooler in the warm temperatures and the comfort and freedom of movement was great.  I'm liking the feel of it.

My triathlon friends are all trying to help me figure out why things fell apart tonight.  I am not AT ALL thin-skinned about constructive criticism of my swimming skills, and I welcome feedback - if you have ideas on where I need to go from here - please share it with me~!  I believe there must be something I'm missing and there is a way to turn this around.