New View on Racing and Goal Setting

I've "finished" a lot of things these past two years; 3 Half Marathons, 1 Super Sprint Tri, 1 Indoor Tri, 2 Sprint Tri's (one was not USAT sanctioned and I could keep my feet down I was so close to shore, so I only count it as having had the guts to get into the water).  Somehow, I find myself turning a new chapter, looking for the next level of motivation.  Finishing the race doesn't do it for me anymore.  I have that "been there, done that" feeling when I think about "finishing".

I set out early in the fall determined that this would be the year to track my "personal bests" and keep beating myself, and I still intend to do that, but I feel a bit redundant in the goal, since each of the previous event times and statistics have been better than the one prior...

Tonight I pulled out the overall stats from the Tri's that I've been in.  Before I began to review them, I had devised this objective in my mind that I was going to finish 2 of the 3 Sprints I enter this season in the top 10 of my gender/age bracket.  As I began to review the papers in front of me, my heart sank.  My God, the swim legs for the top 10 finishers in the events I've previously entered are so fast, more than two thirds less than my times!  I could probably beat the bike and run times today for each of the my previous Tri events, but the water, the swim, how am I going to knock my time by two thirds just to give myself a shot at the next two legs and a top 10 finish.  How am I going to build that kind of speed?  That means I have to be in the thick of the activity in the water, I have to swim on the inside and wrap around the buoys as tight as I possibly can so I'm not swimming more lake real estate than necessary, I'll be swum over and probably have to swim over others in order to accomplish this time.  I'll be in the wake of the other swimmers, rough water, dark water, all those things that I could not fathom only two short years ago.  I'm not worried about the doing of the distance, I can see the light at the end of that tunnel; I can count the laps at the pool and see that I'm able to get more distance already.  But speed, how am I going to manage that?

The question of speed kept floating around my head as I studied my records, "how am I going to pull this off, to get my swim leg done in under 10 minutes on a Sprint?  What kind of training do I have to put in?"  Finally I turned the question around to "How will I best accomplish this goal?"  Maybe now that I'm not trying to justify the insanity of my goal anymore I'll be able to follow the path to accomplishing it.