Monica's Mile 2013

Today was another first for me - participating in a swim-only event. Dawn and her Master's swim coach, Susan Ingraham of Masters of South Texas coordinated Monica's Mile, a fundraiser for our friend Monica Caban, who was paralyzed after being hit by a car on her bike last year while training for Ironman Arizona. The options for the event were a 1-mile swim or a 1-hour swim.

Dawn informed her athletes that we'd all be doing the 1-hour version. This means swimming in a 25-yard pool for an hour while someone counts your laps for you (thank you Patrick!). Sounds awesome, right? Not really. But we would be doing this for a VERY good cause and the girls and I found a way to have some fun - we wore coordinating Captain America swimsuits. Here we are with Coachie in the middle, looking speedy in her swim skin.

Shelly and I shared a lane, which happened to be next to Coachie, who, I must say, was a little screamy this morning. "No stopping! Don't stop to drink water! You swim for an hour! You can do this! I'm going to base all your intervals off this time so I want it to be right! Get in the water! Warm up! What are you dooooiiiinnnnnng?!" In her defense, getting all of us to behave may sometimes be like herding cats. But anyway, the 8 am swim start went off without much warning and 32 people in 16 lanes were swimming!

As we started, Shelly and I stayed together, perfectly in sync, for the first 12 laps or so. Then I fell back and stayed about half a lane behind her for the rest of the swim. I watched and made sure that she didn't get too far ahead of me, and we settled into a "comfortably hard" pace for the hour. Until the 2-minute warning when everyone on the deck started screaming. At that point, I hustled to catch up with Shelly and we finished the swim together - 3450 yards in 1 hour. 138 laps. I worked that out to be 1:45 per 100 yards, or 1:55 per 100 meters. Not our fastest, but not our slowest pace.

But my goodness, was that boring. It's so weird to be bored and out of breath at the same time. I lost count of the laps after about three and after that, it was torture not to know how far we had gone and how long we had left. I kept looking at the lanes around me, watching Coachie and Linda lap me on either side, and watching Aixa and Orissa turn at the ends of their lane, 2 lanes over. There were no buoys to let me know that the swim was almost done. Only a black line at the bottom of the pool.

Once we were finished, we were happy happy campers. That's Linda beaming next to Shelly. She swam a thousand yards further than us and that includes stopping to drink (yes, Dawn! She stopped to drink!) and to take off her Captain America suit (she had one under it) because it was too big. She's a real swimmer, and my swim hero.

Then, because Coachie loves us, she sent us out to run for an hour and a half. And after several snot-rocket-blowing laps of McAllister Park's trails, we headed back to the pool to cheer the 10:30 group that was finishing, and to give Monica a hug.

The coolest moment of the day was when an older lady came up to greet Monica right after we took this photo. She told Monica that Monica had inspired her to swim further in an hour than she'd ever done before - 4500 yards. Now that is speedy. Monica graciously thanked her and I think we all wiped a tear away.

It was an awesome morning with some awesome people! Absolutely worth getting up early on a Sunday in 29 degree weather to get into a pool. :)