How we attacked it and how it attacked us.
Myself and Katie decided to do 100×100 in preparation for our 10k swim that we were doing in May 2012. I tried to do an email search to find out whose stupid idea it was, so I could blame Katie, but alas I couldn’t find any emails. However, somewhere deep down I know it was probably mine.. Idiot! The idea was it would be good to do a 10k before we did our 10k open water in May, however, as with running a marathon, it isn’t essential to do the full distance in training so we didn’t put pressure on ourselves to complete it. If you know me and Katie though, you know that once we decide to do something, that is pretty much it and we can be the best and the worst influence on each other for this reason.
As it was March completing this in open water wasn’t an option so we went down to Crystal Palace and set about doing 100 x 100. We used a plan that was from H2open magazine site and then amended it for ourselves. It broke it down into 10 X 10 X 100 and varied each 10 based on effort/rest and additionally, we decided to alternate who would be leading every 10 x100.
The swim went to plan and then we hit block 8.. I mentally broke at this point and the end never felt like it was coming, however, you knew that block 9 and then block 10 would get easier… or so I thought. Block 9 was hideous and Block 10 was the swim down from hell. Everything hurt and you wanted to swim fast to get it over with, but 1) I couldn’t and 2) I knew I needed to reduce pace in order to swim down properly.
Unfortunately it was before the days of the garmin swim, so I can’t show you our splits, but I remember clearly that we adhered to the above as only the queens of pacing can.
Needless to say it was a challenge and one that resulted in Katie crashing (not seriously!) twice on the way home.
TEAM Mermaids 