12 days of Christmas swim [Iron Mike's Marathon Swims » Iron Mike's Marathon Swims --]

Over the last two days I completed a 12 Days of Christmas swim. For the uninitiated, this swim involves one doing a length for each day. For example, the swimmer would swim a length on the first day of Christmas. For the second day of Christmas, they’d swim two lengths (two turtle doves) and one length (partridge in a pear tree). And so on.

Now, swimming it “up” like that is heart-breaking. And I just wasn’t ready for the mental challenge this year, so I swim “down,” which basically meant I started on the 12th day: thus, 12 lengths, then 11, then 10, etc. all the way down to that one length for the partridge.

As dear reader(s) know, the pool here on base is limited to 30 min sessions. If no one comes when your time is up, you can keep swimming. This theory has resulted in me swimming as much as two hours straight a couple weeks ago, to swimming a total of an hour, forty over a two hour, 15 min period due to people showing up and filling all three lanes.

Yesterday, Christmas day, I started at the 12th day and swam down through the 9th, complete. Here, with each length being 20m instead of the usual 25, these four “days” totaled 4880m. I couldn’t end there so I did a 120m cool down for a nice and even 5km.

Today I went back and completed the workout, swimming down from the 8th day of Christmas to the 1st day, which totaled 2400m. Did a 200m cool down.

These two days brought my total mileage since getting over here to 99 miles. One more till the 100-mile t-shirt!