The swim stroke

Last Friday I was at the pool for one of my sessions. Each of the lanes had only one person so it was a pretty good time to be there. Enough people for a slight distraction, yet not so many people that they would disturb me. Anyhow, on the lane to my right, there was a woman who “looked” like she was an experienced swimmer. She had the racing suit, head cap, goggles. She looked the part. But then during my breaks between sets I noticed she had horrible form. She had short strokes, which even to me looked inefficient, and then she did this weird thing with her left arm every fourth or fifth stroke. It seemed her arm would shoot almost straight up and seemed to do like a salute with her elbow up in the air, then she would resume the stroke. She did this wicked fast, so that at first I couldn’t tell what it was. No matter what it was…it was poor form. And offensive to my sharply trained eye ;)

With all of that effort she was making you would think she was going fast, but at one point I was taking a 20 second breather when she came by the wall and started out. She was halfway down the lane when I started off. I got to the wall first. That’s how much energy this woman was wasting. Clearly this was a person that could really benefit from lengthening her stroke, and getting rid of the patriotic salute during the swim.

Although the swim is not my favorite event, I do seem to feel a lot better at it, and more comfortable. I also know not to salute while I’m swimming. So I guess I have learned something afterall.

Swim workout

Today I had a 60 minute swim workout on plan.

Actual: 65 minutes, 3000 meters
WU 6x75
2 x 200
1x100 Mod
2x300
1x100
2x400
1x100

6x75 C/D

It was a good workout and nice to get 3000 in. But I really felt like I was fading on my second 300, I can tell because my flip turn starts to look light a right angle turn.

Then I started to employ my "push through" strategy of focusing on a small item. For me it was to focus on doing my flip turn nicely. Once I started to get that right and miraculously I got a second wind. I started to feel real good, felt like a shark coming out of the turn, imaging myself as a streak of power with the push off flowing smoothly into the stroke. Somehow this brought me back.

Then a new swimmer hopped in next to me and made me feel like a sea turtle. This guy so effortlessly just floated past me on every lap. I decided to look at his form underwater and he looked like an instructional video. straight as an arrow, just slipping through the water.

Seeing him just made me conscious of my own form. I am curious how I would look. Maybe I should consider getting a video analysis done. Something to think about.

Workout planned for today:

swim 60-70 minutes, endurance swim

Actual
Swam 73 minutes, and 3000 meters( Finally broke that milestone!)

Swim T-time

Well back from Chile, and amongst the first workouts back is to establish my T time in the pool. This is done with 3 x 300 with a small rest period in between. The get the average of each of the 100's done. The idea is to come up with a pace that is fairly consistent. In other words the last 300 should be within 15 seconds of the first 300. Also manage to do this while doing them as hard as you can.

Well I did my first test today, and don't really know if I did them correct. I was pretty consistent 1st 300 was 365 second, 366 seconds and last 300 was 375 seconds. The average was 122.8 seconds per 100 or 2:02. Which I believe is pretty slow. In fact if I look at the chart for T1 times in "Workouts in a binder" it is literally slower than the last sample in the chart which was 2:00 per 100. YES folks I have my work cutout for me!

Workout: Swimming - T1 test 100 warm up 3X300 total 1000 meters