T-minus-Eighteen...

The exhaustive workout schedule I set for last weekend was only mostly about the food. It was also about me looking at the calender and realising that I only had three weeks to go until the sprint triathlon in Guelph. And I'd been slacking off on the training.

My goal time is to finish in under an hour-and-a-half. My time at the 2008 Owen Sound Sprint Tri was 1:40:41. I'm a better cyclist and runner than I was a year ago, which I'm hoping will contribute to slashing at least three minutes off my run and cycle times. Experience should shave off at least thirty seconds off my transition times. The bike course is only 19K -- one kilometer short of a regulation 20K sprint tri distance -- and even if I just maintain the cycling speed I achieved last year, that should be good for knocking two minutes off my time.

Which means that most of any improvement in my time will have to come down to the swimming.

That's going to be tricky, especially since my swim on Saturday was my first time in the pool in close to seven months. Back at the beginning of November, I suffered a re-occurrence of the shoulder injury that hampered my swim time in the Owen Sound Sprint Tri. Six-and-a-half months later, the shoulder's now completely pain-free, but the rest and rehab meant a long lay-off from any swimming. It took me twenty-three minutes to swim 850m in the pool on Saturday. My stroke rate absolutely sucks, and is nowhere near where it has to be for even a sub-twenty-minute 750m swim in open water.

With only eighteen days to go, I don't have a lot of time to improve my swimming performance. The only way is to spend time in the pool -- time in at least twelve of the next fourteen days -- doing sprints, tempo intervals and long swims. So I've got to start 'two-a-days', a swim session in the morning before work, following by a run or a ride in the evening.

It's a lot of swimming in a short period of time, but I have to push. Even though I was suffering from a shoulder injury, my swim in the last sprint triathlon was downright embarrassing. I was 191st out of 212 competitors out of the water. My 153rd and 145th rankings for the ride and the run weren't great either, but at least I was out of the bottom quartile.

If all goes well, top 75% here I come.