Swimming: It's complicated!

I have great plans of mixing swimming in with my marathon training program. The program as I've designed it now has room for swimming on MWF, which are zero or low mileage run days. I'm thinking if I want to get some low miles in, I can somehow pack up my swimsuit, goggles, and a small towel, and run to/from the gym for the swim (or, I could bike there). This is all very optimistic, of course. In practice I always have a habit of taking rest days when I should be cross training, mostly because I *hate* going to the gym (which is one of the reasons I like running--I don't have to go to the gym!). Whatever motivation it takes to get me out the door for the run, it takes like 3x as much energy to make myself go to the gym.

I've (literally) only been swimming since January. I'm happy with my swimming progress, because at the start of January I was petrified of going underwater and couldn't do anything resembling swimming. But I've had a person who really knows swimming teaching me to overcome those fears and how to swim, and I can swim a passable crawl stroke now with halfway decent form and sort of correct breathing. I just need to build swimming endurance. This morning I was looking around for a structured program that would help me do just that, because I have no idea really whether I should be focusing on building distance or doing short fast intervals or what. The answer seems to be: neither. Check out this article that talks about the differences between how you train for running and how you train for swimming:

http://www.beginnertriathlete.com/cms/article-detail.asp?articleid=269

Apparently, you don't approach swim training like you do running at all. This same website has a beginner swim program that's 3 months long, with training 3 days per week, that schedules out the drills you do and how far you go, etc....so I might try that. I'll post my swimming program once I figure out what I'm doing, along with the marathon program.

Meanwhile, M. is going to sometimes show up to try to teach me new strokes besides freestyle so I can mix it up a little. He thinks I should just be swimming 100s constantly with 15-25 second breaks in order to build endurance and efficiency, so maybe I'll do some of that too rather than just this program I found, since he seems to know what he's doing.

I just want some goals for swimming so it doesn't feel pointless and futile. If I'm going to bother going, I may as well be making it count.

Also I'm thinking about finding a way for runningahead.com, where I upload my garmin data sometimes, to send that info to my blog so I can keep myself honest with the training. I don't know.