jock librarian

Our head coach asked us to imagine the following open water scenario: "You're swimming along at a steady pace when all of a sudden, the currents turn unpredictably against you. And you have to make adjustments and pick up your turnover."
Saturday and Sunday's main sets focused on swimming in variable waters and involved lots of pulling. Both days provided intense upper body workouts.

Here is Saturday's main set:
100 free moderate swim
1 x 50 pull fast
100 free moderate swim
3 x 50 pull fast
100 free moderate swim
5 x 50 pull fast
100 free moderate swim
7 x 50 pull fast
100 free moderate swim
9 x 50 pull fast
100 free moderate swim

From Sunday morning...repeat the following six times:
150 pull moderate
3 x 50 pull descend

My reading, this weekend, was purposely light. After finishing Betsy Carter's sweet novel about a young woman who leaves the Bronx to join a school of mermaids in Florida's Gulf Coast, I picked up Gracie, a teenage sports story. My favorite part of the book is when the teen and her father are studying film clips of Pelé, the former Brazilian football player.

"Keep watching," Dad said to me. On the screen, Pelé was tracking a much bigger opponent. The player knocked him down, but Pelé sprang back up, stole the ball and scored.
"Pelé wasn't tall or fast, but he had it up here," Dad said, tapping his forehead. "And he had it in here," he pointed to his heart. "He made the impossible possible." He turned his attention back to the screen. "Look how he absorbs that guy's energy and turns it on him!"
Dad got up and began to pace as he watched Pelé in action. "In every game there's one moment when one player can change everything. Di momento de gracia."
Dad rewound the film and gestured for me to come beside him so we could look at it together. This time he ran the scene of Pelé taking the ball from the larger player in slow motion. "Right there, when that guy hesitates...that's the moment, when everything sets up perfect and then pauses. Pelé feels it [and scores].