Gotta swim - help from Claude

I didn't start running until 2008, when I was 43 years old. But once I got hooked, running became my obsession. Seventeen years, tens of thousands of miles, and dozens of races later, I still love it. But over all those years, doctors of various academic stripes have told me my knees weren’t holding up to all the pounding. So last summer, I announced my ‘retirement”. Only I haven’t truly given it up; I still cheat. But my weekly mileage has gone from about 20-30 to about 5, with some power walking mixed in. I also do a lot of HIIT workouts at Orangetheory Fitness, and once or twice a week, I’ll bang out a couple of fast miles on their high-end treads.

My real problem with my knees is that, for some reason, they never bother me when running. But the doctors have shown me I’m doing damage anyway, and that I may not respect the decisions I’m making for myself running at age 61 when I no longer have functional knees for walking at age 70.

Now that I’m at SMU, I have access to a world-class on-campus fitness center, with an indoor lap pool. I tried swimming before, usually when I was laid up with a running injury, but I always hated it. It’s slow, it’s boring, and there’s no social component to it. But I need to swim anyway.

So I asked Claude/AI to put together a beginning lap-swim program, similar to the wonderful “Couch to 5k” basic jogging-running plan, to suck me into enjoying the sport. I realize I may not love swimming as much as I love running, but I need to figure out some way to enjoy it.

Claude built a program for me that includes a multi-week workout regimen with some gamification elements as well. The pic here shows the gamification part, along with the first week’s workout. Here’s the link if you’d like to try it out for yourself.

Claude's "Couch to 5k" Swim Equivalent