SCAM

I joined a swim team of sorts called S.C.A.M or "Strawberry Canyon Aquatics Masters" for the summer. I made a 3 month commitment, although they swim year round. It is a year-round swim program sponsored by U.C. Berkeley for adults 19 and older. This program is available to the community at large, but is mostly attended by those with some university affiliation. Their goal is to provide training, coaching and the opportunity to participate in swimming. They also hope to encourage interest in competitive swimming. So, for $30 a month, I joined. They have 6 different workout times 5 days a week, so it gives me a lot of flexibility in terms of fitting a swim workout into my schedule.

This is only my second week attending practices, but I really like it so far. Don't get me wrong, the practices totally kick my butt. As usual, I am a resident of the slowest lane, timing in at a workout pace of 1 min 50 sec for each 100 yards of swimming. I am however the fastest person in this lane, of course I'm also 20 years younger than any of the other members of my lane! I hope to move up to the 1:40 lane within a month or so, at least there are some 30 year olds in that lane! Despite being slow, we still manage to swim over 2500 yards (more than a mile!) during the hour long workout.

I feel like I'm becoming a real swimmer now. I am starting to own enough equipment now that I probably appear better than I am. Other than the standard gear (suit, cap, goggles) I have a swim buoy now that helps to float your legs while doing drills where you just pull with your arms. I also own training fins-called Zoomers-so that I can practice my butterfly for more than 25 yards at a time! I still want to get hand paddles to help improve my freestyle pull, and probably will get them in the next week or so. All of the pools have kick boards, so I don't have to worry about buying that, although it's probably the cheapest of all the equipment (which is probably why all the pools have them). The SCAM workouts actually require/suggest most of the equipment I mentioned, although they do provide some, but not all, of them and it depends on which pool you swim at (there are 4 pools on the Berkeley campus).

There is a bit of a learning curve to this new swim practice. I really like the structure that they give you, but it is very confusing to learn the shorthand. Each lane (organized by time/100 yards: 1:15, 1:30, 1:40, etc) has a workout posted at the end of the lane. A sample workout:

1:50 LANE

* Warm Up: 300fr + 100n.f + 100 buoy
* 4x100fr drill(25fists/25r-arm fist/25l-arm fist/25fr)2:00
* Kick 3x150 1-2)free 3)non-free 3:35
* 50 easy
* 4x250fr descending 1-4)4:35
* 50 easy
* Pull 400(every 4th 25 breathing every 9 strokes)
* 100 easy

When I started last week, this might as well have been in Greek. I totally didn't get it. And each workout so far has added new terms, so I feel like I'm taking a language class as well as a swim workout. Even when someone explained the shorthand, most of the drills I had never done before, so I had to figure out how to swim the drills as well. The above actually means:

*Warm up: Swim 300 yards (12 laps) freestyle, then swim 100 yards (4 laps) in any stoke other than freestyle and then swim 100 yards (4 laps) with the swim buoy, pulling only with your arms.
*Swim 400 yards (16 laps) doing the following in a repeating pattern: 1 lap freestyle holding your both hands in a fist, 1 lap freestyle holding right hand in a fist, 1 lap freestyle holding left hand in a fist and 1 lap regular freestyle. Each set of 4 laps should take less than 2 minutes (2 min interval).

You get the idea. Add this complexity with the fact that I lead the other swimmers and am responsible for counting the laps, switching to the next set on the right interval and just not screwing everyone else up! My fellow swimmers are for the most part very patient and understanding, although they don't hesitate to let me know when I'm doing something wrong. Most of them have been swimming in SCAM for over 10 years, so I'm sure I'm messing up their routine. I'm sure it will get easier, but for now I feel stupid, out of shape and slow.