Swim in the New Year: 100x100 Yards of Swimming, Plus More

New Year’s Eve, for most people, means a bunch of drinking, partying, and late-night shenanigans.

For me, it means the annual Swim in the New Year event at the University of Maryland. Last year, I swam 5x2012 meters to welcome 2012. And this year, I was slated to do 5x2013 yards, swum as 100 x 100 yards with a little bit of extra to work in the spare 65 yards to make it 5x2013 yards total.

Now if only I could find other people crazy enough to spend New Year’s Eve doing this.

Oh. Right.

Beth, Rachel and I got to the beautiful University of Maryland natatorium right when the event started at 10 am, and quickly got to work on 100x100, with Mia joining us for 2013 yards a few minutes in.

To make 100x100 yards bearable, you have to break it up nicely, and make counting relatively simple. I employed a few key strategies here:

• Incorporation of drills
• Use of strokes other than freestyle, in IM order
• Planning a kick set 2/3 of the way through to rest shoulders
• Doing a substantial portion on an interval that makes it easy to keep track of how many you’ve done. In our case, we went with 1:35, which keeps you on your toes tracking the interval to ensure that you don’t lose count.

Our set broke down as follows:

Warm up

12x100 @ :10 rest

8x100 drill/swim by 50

Set 1

20x100 stroke/free by 50, IM order

Set 2

20x100 @ 1:35 

Set 3

10x100 social kick @ :10 rest

Set 4

20x100 @ 1:35

Warm down

10x100 @ :10 rest

In each of the breaks, we swam to the flags and back to get in the extra 13 yards for every 2000 yards, and also took a snack break.

(I kicked my diet to the curb for New Year’s Eve and enjoyed some delicious, sugary carbohydrates on deck to keep myself going during a 3+ hour swim. I’ve been incredibly diligent about sticking to my diet, one day of sugar won’t kill me, though, it turned out that it made me feel terrible later on. More on that tomorrow.)

Rachel originally set out to conquer 60x100, but hung on for 80, and Beth and I made it the whole way. Unlike last year, when I felt like I was just barely holding on for the last 2000, I finished #81-90 in 1:19 pace.

That’s not too slow.

We climbed out of the pool and took a picture to prove that we did it.

(Because clearly, you can see that we did 100x100 yards, and not just some other swim workout.)

And that was my last athletic event of 2012. Fun times with awesome friends.