In the area of Sweden I live, week 8 is our winter break, or a direct translation from swedish is sport break A large portion of the people in sweden use week 7,8 or 9 to go skiiing every year. The country splits up this week off so that only 33% of the country try to go up north skiing each week during the winter break.

Since we don’t ski and we really can’t do much of anything right now I have decided to try to swim 50km this week. I had planned on 10 swims which meant I would have to swim doubles. Needing to average just over 7km a day or 5km per swim made it easier for me to focus on just getting to the pool to be able to swim.

The first swim of the week was Monday the 22nd and I managed to swim 50×100 in groups of ten.
10x 100 75fr/25back start 1:40
10x 100 IM with fins start 1:40
10x 100 pull with large paddles and fins start 1:30
10x 100 kick with fins st 1:30
10x 100 pull with XL paddles start 1:30
Not very fun, but manageable when swimming alone. (5,000 / 50,000)

Tuesday I was able to get to the pool for a late lunch swim. No need to make things exciting so I swam mondays 50×100 as 25×200 for another 5km. Tuesday nights is IM workouts so it is not easy to get in as many meters, but we swam 4100m before calling it quits. (14,100 / 50,000)

I purposely kept my Wednesday lunch swim to a short 3km with 500’s of the same above with the only exception being 10×100 pull with XL paddles just to come up to 3000m. The reason for keeping this swim short is because wednesday nights is my hardest practice of the week. We usually swim anything from 5400-6000m with very little rest. But this week we had a sprint workout.
400 fr + 4×50 mini IM + 8×25 various sprints + 100 choice
30x 50 MAX start 1:15 ( I started just over 34 holding back just slightly because 30 is a lot, but after 2-3 of them I started dropping my times to get down to 32.9, but a majority of them were 33.2-33.5. It fel really good after, but it hurt the last 10m of the final ten 50’s. )
8x 50 recovery start 1:00
16x 25 max start :45 (I had nothing left. I went from 15.4 down to 14.9 and then could hold around 15.4 with one going up to 16.1)
300 EZ

So all that rest only allowed us to swim 3500m. This made me nervous as I was not sure where I would find the time to swim the extra 2km. After swimming the four of us in the Lane 1 group went out for a late burger and fries. (20,400 / 50,000)

Thursday lunch I went with 40×100 skipping the kicking set and followed that up with 4300m with my masters team. (28,900 / 50,000).

Friday at lunch I was joined by Josefin. So we did a relative short sprint workout with lots of 25’s. It felt good to see I could still swim fast after all the hard swimming on Wednesday. Since we only swam 3100m and I needed to get closer to 35km for the week I went back to the pool when Iris had practice instead of going to Crossfit and swam another 3500m with something very similar to my previous solo swims.
10x 100 free/back
10x 100 IM with fens
12x 100 pull with XL paddles
3x 100 kick with fins
Since I forgot that she swam 90 minutes I got out of the pull after 55 minutes so avoid any crowding on the pool deck. It was not until I got to the car that I realized she was going to swim another 30 minuters. I wish I would have taken the opportunity to swim or kick a few more 100’s. (35,500 / 50,000)

Saturday I didn’t want to skip Crossfit again and since the pool didn’t open until 10:00. So after a tough Team WoD with Josefin I made my way to the pool. Since I had plans to swim 10km Sunday morning I only had to find the ernergy to swim 4500m. Since my shoulders were starting to get sore and I was really tired after Crossfit I did a new variation of this weeks theme.
5x 100 fr/back
5x 100 kick
5x 100 IM with fins
5x 100 kick
5x 100 pull large paddles and fins
5x 100 kick
10x 100 pull XL paddles not wanting to have to swim anymore after the last kicking set I decided to double these.
5x 100 kick
(40,000 / 50,000)

Knowing that I only have 10km left to reach my goal and feeling good about having Masters and Hampus with me in the pool I knew I would have a real good chance to reach 50km this week. The first 90 minutes or so Sunday was Masters. So I got to share a lane with Ola while Hampus and Josefin swam in the lane next to us. There were about 10-12 others at practice. It is hard to tell if it is the winter break effect or if it is one of the effects of the Covid-19 situation. Either we started late, or we took longer breaks than I planned, but we didn’t finish my Masters program in 90 minutes, but continued with the last 400m of my program before swimming the last 5000m that Hampus put together. Sunday’s swim had a little of everything

400 ss
400 ben
400 tek/ss

3x
200 arm BPI
2x 100 ss BPI+5
4x 50 prog 1-90% BPI+10
rest 30 seconds

3x
4x 25 90% / a3 st :35
2x 50 @100 st 1:00
100 fast in the red the rest a3 BPI+10
100 recovery
rest 30-60 seconds

400 Hx 3/5/7/5/3
4x 100 BPI+10
3x 3×100 st 1:35 Prog 1-3, 2-4, 3-5
4x 400 pull st 6:00
4x 300 free with fins / kick st 4:30
4x 200 IM prog 1-4 st 3:40
5x 100 fr 1-2-3-2-1
(50,000 / 50,000)

I did it. It took eleven swim sessions, but I reach 50,000m in a week. The first time I did a 50km in a week as a Master was in June 2009 with Daniel swimming Open water. Then in Oct 2015 I swam 62,400m in a week thanks to a 54km 24 hour swim. The only other times I reached 50km were in Aug 2019 and Aug 2020. Thanks to having a good week of practice followed by a long swim on Sunday.

Looking forward to my day off from swimming. I most likely won’t get back into the pool again until the weekend.