If I can do them (5k/10k) so can you...

I completed all five postal swims in 2005 and have completed three of the five so far this year. The killer for most people contemplating the postal swim series is clearly the 10k long course swim. It's essentially the swimming equivalent of a marathon. Note, however, I don't think you need the kind of training for the 10k postal swim that you'd need for a marathon (you're not working against gravity for one thing). Consider my "preparation". I swam the 5k on 7/20 (1:32:02, 5:53 faster than in 2005) and the 10k on 8/31 (3:13:37, 7:50 faster than in 2005). I believe I swam a lot less this summer than I did in 2005. I didn't keep a good log of my workouts during 2005, but I was clearly working on building up to those distances, especially after kind of burning out in the 5k. This year, thanks to the magic of Go the Distance (thank you once again Mary Sweat!) I've been tracking my workouts very carefully. July and August provided 62 possible days to swim. Two of those days were the two events. That left 60 possible days of practice. Of those 60 days I didn't swim on 27 of them. During the two months I only swam longer than 4000 yards seven times. Two of those were the swims themselves. You can hardly accuse me of "overtraining". I worked a lot on technique this year. Besides improving my stroke a lot I believe it gave me things to think about when I got tired. Heck, I think I might have improved my flip turn significantly just from all the practice I got swimming the 10k! I also went into both races with plans. I split each one up into 500m chunks and had target paces in mind. My first 100m in the 10k was 1:45 (even doing open turns *). I immediately knew I was going way too fast and slowed down to a better pace immediately. In 2005 I probably would have just kept churning away and burnt out later. So, if I can do it, you can too. Think about it for next year... Skip Montanaro (*) I treated the first 200-300m as a warmup and did open turns to loosen up my back before switching to flip turns.