Night Swimming

I returned about an hour ago from a great swim in the pool. Another 108 laps, or 1.5 miles, which replicates what I did on Tuesday and has kind of transformed my "long" days into something that I can repeat 2 or 3 times a week.

Both Tuesday and today I was in the pool for an hour and 40 minutes and did the 108 laps nonstop without any break. Back in my running days, running for that long a time, on the clock, was close enough to a "long run" that I certainly was not doing anything that long more than once a week. That amount of time on the clock meant a run of 10-12 miles at my leisurely pace, and that was as much as I did except in the final weeks of training for a marathon, when I trained properly as I did in '78, '93, and '94.

So the astonishing thing, at least to me, is that I have been able in a little less than two months (since I first jumped into the pool on May 19) to build up my conditioning as a swimmer to the point where I can sustain a workout of one hour and 40 minutes without a break.

I just looked up the relative calorie counts of swimming and running and they are pretty close: I am probably burning off a little over 1200 calories during a 1.5 mile swim, or about 120 calories per 10 minutes. If I run for an hour and 40 minutes I will burn off 1500 calories, but the problem is that I will also be on crutches in the morning.

During my best workouts on a treadmill or elliptical machine over the past few years, I might have approached burning off 1,000 calories, but not often.

So this swimming thing is working for me.

Don't get me wrong. It wears me out, even when Marilyn is not there, and I sleep like a baby. But it doesn't beat me up, so the result is that I can do these long swims a few times a week, and get into better and better shape.

For each set of three 1.5 mile swimming workouts I do, that's 3,600 calories. And 3,500 calories equals one pound of body weight, gained or lost, for us humans.

I can do the math, and I'll keep coming.