As a teacher, or a health care professional I’ve heard, you notice that people go a little nuts around the full moon. And boy is that true in an elementary school… I start every day (post meetings) with breakfast duty, and we have some pretty high expectations for our kiddos during that time, but man they were pushing all sorts of boundaries. Things went downhill from there, students refusing to follow directions, getting all crabby, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I get it, Tuesdays are hard. Especially when it feels like it should be at least Thursday by now, right? But it made it all the much harder to go to the pool instead of heading home to the couch for some quality cat snuggles (Maybe the full moon was affecting my mood as well a bit, eh?).
Alas, I pushed through.
The pool I’m using isn’t open from 3:00-5:00 because of a local team practice, so after finishing up some paperwork at school, and twiddling my thumbs for a bit I headed over there. I was actually a little excited to try my new tracking plan for counting sets. I am terrible at keeping track of my laps (which I still need to find a solution for), but also terrible at keeping track of which rep I’m on in a set. So I made these little trackers to clip onto my water bottle.
After each completed 100, 150, or 200, depending on the set, I can move my baby clothes pin to how many I’ve completed. This will be especially handy when I try the workout that has 8×50 built in. I also used a little clip to show which set I was on in the work out. I just cover everything in packing tape to make it semi waterproof to keep by the pool. Cheap laminating you may say. I pulled my workout from a past Triathlete Magazine. My goal is to work up to the Level B workouts by May or so… but the C will work just fine for now.
Today was a good practice day for the tracker because none of the sets had more than 4 reps, but I got a feel for if it would work. As a teacher I know that even though something works well once it doesn’t mean it will work all the time, so we’ll see, but it was great today. Let me know if you have any sure fire ways of keeping track of laps within a longer distance!
Tomorrow we ride!
The Average Triathlete 
Hello! From high school! I’ve also picked up triathlons in the last couple of years, so reading your blog is a good motivator for me. I am also super terrible at counting laps and sets. Your clothespin trick is super neat! I would not have thought of that. For longer swims (or days when I just want to swim laps and let my brain go, but still know how far I went) I use this lap counter:
http://www.swimoutlet.com/p/sportcount-combo-lap-counter-and-timer-4027/
It’s pretty basic, and not perfect, but it gets the job done and definitely helps for doing long distance in training for a tri. My only other trick for lap counting is to vary effort by 50 within a set distance. So if I were trying to swim a 600, for example, I would swim the first 50 easy, the next 50 build, and the next 50 fast, and then start over and repeat. I find I can count how many times I’ve sprinted better than anything else, so I just have to keep track that I need to sprint 4 times. That being said, I have been known to forget midst lap whether I am supposed to be building or sprinting, so I still usually use the lap counter for anything greater than 200.
Good luck!
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Hi! I’m definitely going to look into that lap counter. I will say that on the sets that said to breathe every 3/5/7 strokes, changing every 50 made it way easier to keep track. But I wouldn’t want to do that over a 500 or anything like that. I’m going to have to try the effort trick too. Thanks for the great ideas! Happy triathlon-ing to you!
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