The Pace I Need and the Life I Have

The pace clock showed :58.

Then 1:00. Another 1:00. Finally, :59.

I was swimming the fast 100s in a set of broken 200s, each with an easy 50 before it and another easy 50 afterward. The recovery mattered. Four fast 100s with rest between them are not the same as swimming ten consecutive 100s without stopping.

But those four times still mattered.

To break ten minutes in the 1,000 freestyle, I’ll need to average slightly less than one minute for every 100 yards. Seven weeks into this journey, I had just produced that pace four times in the middle of practice.

For the first time, the goal felt less like an idea and more like something my body might eventually be capable of doing.

The swimmer beside me

Masters swimming gives me competition, measurable times, and a reason to train. It also gives me people who make it harder to settle for an ordinary effort.

Scott is one of those people. He’s about ten years younger than I am, was an accomplished college distance swimmer and butterflyer, and remains one of the top swimmers in the country for his age group. When we are both at practice, I almost always work harder.

He doesn’t pressure me. He doesn’t need to say anything. I simply know that he’s not backing down from a set, so I don’t want to either.

Training beside him also reconnects me with the atmosphere of college swimming. The yardage is shorter and the stakes are different, but the positive pressure feels familiar. There is someone in the lane who can expose the difference between completing the workout and truly attacking it.

In 2025, Scott and two of his former college teammates joined me on an 800 freestyle relay at the Colorado state meet. Because the youngest swimmer determines the relay age group, our team competed in the 25-and-over division despite having a 40-year-old swimming one of the legs.

We set a Colorado state record and finished the season with the fastest Masters time in the country, not only in our age group but across all age groups. All four of our 200 splits were within roughly a second of each other, and I was not the slowest swimmer on the relay.

I remain absurdly proud of that last detail.

I want to race those younger swimmers again this season. I would also like to beat them. Tuesday’s four fast 100s were an early reminder that keeping up with them in April depends on refusing to coast beside them in August.

The missed morning that became two workouts

The week hadn’t begun with those encouraging times. It began with another alarm I couldn’t answer.

We had returned late Sunday from our South Dakota trip. After seven hours in the car, I’d still completed a gym session before bed. Expecting myself to wake up early Monday, swim, return the rental car, and bike home from the rental center had been ambitious.

When the alarm sounded, I chose sleep.

I still had to return the car, so I loaded my bike into it and drove to the rental center. The direct ride home would have been about three miles. I extended it to five and rode hard enough to make it feel like a workout rather than transportation.

That could have been the end of the day. Instead, by the time my work day ended, the ride had not satisfied me. I wanted to swim.

A youth team occupies most of my regular pool in the evening, and all the open swim lanes were full, so I began in what I think of as the shoulder lane, a half-sized lane squeezed against the wall. My quads still burned from the downhill 5K. I rarely notice my legs when I swim, but every kick reminded me of the race.

When a full-sized lane opened, I moved over and swam a straight 1,650. It took a little more than 20 minutes, which was not particularly fast, but uninterrupted distance was exactly the kind of work I needed. I followed it with several 200s pulling with paddles and finished my workout with 2,750 total yards.

The workout itself was unremarkable. Completing it was not.

I had missed the planned morning practice and still turned the day into a bike ride and a swim. In years past, one missed alarm might have given me permission to abandon the day. Now it made me search for another opening.

The routine was no longer dependent on one alarm, one practice time, or one version of the plan.

A familiar shoulder and a different decision

I went to bed earlier Monday and woke easily for Tuesday’s practice. Scott was there, the broken 200s were waiting, and the fast 100s gave me my first real encounter with the pace I need for the 1,000.

They also left me with soreness in the outer back portion of my right shoulder.

My right shoulder was the only persistent injury problem I had during college. Back then, I regularly swam five to six workouts a week at 6,000 to 8,000 yards per practice. There were days when I could barely lift my arm over my head afterward.

Taking 15 years away from competitive swimming appeared to solve that problem, but the truth is more complicated. My current swimming volume is much lower, and I now regularly do the shoulder and physical-therapy work I largely neglected when I was younger.

Still, the location of Tuesday’s soreness was familiar enough to get my attention.

I completed my PT work that evening but avoided loading the shoulder heavily. Then I stayed up late talking with my wife and son.

When Wednesday morning arrived, I was tired, my shoulder had just absorbed an intense practice, and swimming for a third consecutive day felt unnecessary. I planned to swim again on Friday. Forcing another practice was not the only way to prove I was committed.

I went back to sleep.

This time, I didn’t spend the day treating that decision as a failure.

Travel days are workout days

Wednesday afternoon, I drove more than an hour to a customer meeting, went to dinner with the customer, and checked into a hotel ahead of a golf tournament the next morning.

The comfortable choice was waiting upstairs. Instead, I put on my running shoes and left the hotel.

The first mile was rough. My shins burned, and I probably would have stopped if the mile had ended back at the hotel. Fortunately, I had made the strategic decision to run one mile away from the building. Returning required another.

I stopped briefly to stretch, completed the second mile, and went directly into the hotel gym for about 30 minutes of lifting.

By then, I had nearly forgotten about my shoulder. The discomfort had faded after a little rest, which was reassuring. I completed a normal session without making special accommodations and returned to my room proud that one work night had produced both a run and a lift.

I also recorded parts of the workout with the plan to turn the footage into an Instagram Reel. Creating this blog has added another form of accountability to my journey: I don’t want to sit down at the end of a week and explain why I did nothing.

If sharing the imperfect work also encourages someone else to leave a hotel room and exercise, that gives the recording a purpose beyond self-promotion.

Of course, recording and editing videos also gives me one more task to fit into the same crowded life I am writing about. The irony is not lost on me.

The work around the workout

Thursday began early at a customer golf tournament. The event placed two foursomes on each hole, which meant I was in for about six hours on the course in relentless heat.

Golf was not a workout in the sense that swimming or running was, but it was not rest either. I had to remain socially engaged with customers, concentrate on a game I don’t play often, and spend most of the day in the sun.

That customer time mattered. Chasing an athletic goal does not reduce my responsibility to excel at my actual job. If anything, the discipline I’m trying to build should make me better at managing my energy and following through everywhere else.

By the time I reached home Thursday evening, I was finished for the day.

My Friday schedule allowed me to choose the 10:30 a.m. practice instead of forcing another early wake-up call. The group was different, but the workout gave me another opportunity to test the pace that had encouraged me on Tuesday.

The main set began with three descending 100s. Then we were assigned six more at the fastest average we could hold.

I went 1:03, 1:02, 1:02, 1:01, 1:01, and 1:00.

I had rest between them, and a sustainable 1,000 pace will eventually need to feel smoother than these 100s did. But I was able to keep accelerating as exhaustion grew. During the final repetitions, the set became as much mental as physical. I had to decide repeatedly not to surrender to the fatigue I was feeling.

That is where I have always been strongest. When I can see the end, I know how to empty the tank.

Afterward, we repeated the structure with 50s of stroke. I chose backstroke and was holding around :30 to :31 until the sixth one.

I pushed off the wall on number six and my right calf completely seized.

My leg cramped up so badly that it forced me to stop immediately. Only then did I notice how little I had drunk during practice. I stretched my calf, finally used the water bottle sitting beside the lane, and resumed with number seven.

I finished the set, but I had to stop driving hard off the walls and made sure to drink between repeats. The lesson was simple. As the effort increases, hydration needs to increase with it. Ignoring the water bottle during a difficult set was not toughness. It was carelessness.

Eleven openings in a crowded week

Saturday brought another customer golf tournament at the same course. Two of my Colorado customers had scheduled their annual events during the same week, which gave me two long days of golf in three days.

When I returned home Saturday evening, my knees ached, and my left side was sore from repeatedly twisting through the golf swing. I was already hot, tired, and sweaty.

I ran a mile anyway.

I had agreed to race another 5K with my family on Labor Day, and I wanted at least a little running in my legs beforehand. The mile was ugly, but it gave the day something golf had not.

Sunday morning, I felt surprisingly good. I put in 37 minutes of work in the home gym and then rode my bike 11 hard miles. The trail I chose climbs gradually away from my neighborhood, which makes the first half more difficult but guarantees that the return trip will be easier.

By Sunday evening, I had completed my busiest training week yet.

The total mattered, but not because eleven should become a new minimum. Some weeks will not allow that much work, and chasing a count can become its own bad decision.

What mattered was how the eleven workouts happened.

The week included an overnight work trip, two customer events, long drives, a shoulder that needed attention, and legs still recovering from a downhill 5K. I missed two intended morning swims, but neither missed alarm became permission to stop.

Exercise is beginning to feel less like a chore I have to negotiate with myself and more like a thing I do. Saturday’s run was something I wanted. Friday’s swim was something I wanted. Even after Sunday’s lifting session, I wanted to get on the bike.

That desire needs judgment attached to it. I eased the strain on my shoulder when it felt overworked. I changed the effort after my calf cramped. I balanced swimming with lower-impact cycling, short runs, strength work, and PT.

Consistency cannot mean treating every opportunity to do more as an obligation. It means continuing to find the right work.

The life I am unwilling to trade

There is another reason I sometimes sleep through my 5 a.m. alarm.

My son is 13. During most of the day, he often has little interest in extended conversations with his parents. Then 9 or 10 p.m. arrives, and he suddenly wants to talk.

He’ll stay up with my wife and me watching shows, asking questions, or philosophizing about life until well after midnight. We love that he still wants that time with us, and we know enough about teenagers to understand that we can’t assume the invitation will always be there.

So sometimes I stay up too late.

I can improve my bedtime discipline, and I can’t use family as an excuse for every missed practice. But Chasing My Limit doesn’t mean surrendering meaningful time with my son so I can claim perfect attendance at the pool.

The swimming goal has to coexist with the rest of my life. Sometimes that means moving the workout to the afternoon. Sometimes it means running or biking instead. Occasionally, it may mean not working out at all.

My life comes first. Training comes second. The challenge is making sure second no longer means expendable.

My goal was never to build a life in which training always came first. It was to build one in which training no longer disappeared whenever something else did.

Tuesday showed me the pace I need.

The other ten workouts showed me something just as important. I am beginning to build a routine that can pursue that pace inside the life I actually have.