Swim Lesson

Genine was unable to make it to the lesson. When the Coach Q found this out, he gives me an option. Do I want him to coach me through a workout. Or do we continue with tweaking my technique. I wish the answer wasn’t so simple. Even tho’ I haven’t had a coached swim workout in 9 months or so, I had to stick with the technique help. He agreed but then added that he was going to have me race a 300, then a 200, then a 100 at the end of the hour and he was going take my splits.

I swim 100. I get to the wall and he asks which is my stronger arm. I say my right and mention the fact my left has some tendonitis. So I wouldn’t be at all surprised if my left is doing something crazy to compensate. Oddly enough, he tells me my left side is my good side! It’s entering wide, catching properly and staying wide through the pull, maybe not finishing. He says my right side, being the stronger arm, looks to be trying to power its way through the stroke rather than go with the flow. The result: A bit of a crossover in front, a pull that is underneath me, which leaves me nowhere to finish.

All this time I thought my left was a problem, turns out it could be in pain because it’s doing most of the work! (it never hurts during the swim by the way. It’s when I’m not swimming that I notice it)

Back to corrections: He has me put on hand paddles to give me huge feedback on how my hand travels. First I’m supposed to work on keeping the hand wide. Which I do quickly, then that turns into not enough depth. Still not enough depth because I’m entering too far out in front, keep the entry closer. (my brain is now on overload trying to do 3 things). He has me swim a bit like this while he goes and changes into his suit because we are going to add more.

He hops into the pool and watches from underwater. He spots even more cheating from my right arm. My left side has a decent high elbow. The right side collapses almost immediately. The list is now. Width, Depth, Entry, High Elbow.

I get this one rather quickly too, I just focus on reaching over a barrel.

(I now realize why I couldn’t count laps when I first started to swim. I had too many other things I was thinking about!!!)

The coach comments about how quickly I’m able to make these changes. I’d like to think it’s something I’m doing but really I think it’s because he describes the feel of each thing so well. I just make the adjustment and think about his description. I think my feel for the water is good, the trouble has always been figuring out what the goal is.

Because I’m picking these things up rather quickly, (Getting them to stick around is going to be the hard part, that’s why I’m writing all this down.) he’s going to add more. I’m finishing my stroke at my waist and I also push up on the water (some) instead of back. So we drill a bit where I hesitate at the finish before starting recovery.

Speaking of recovery… He mentions that if he were only to look at my stroke from above the water, he wouldn’t think I was much of a swimmer. My recovery is rushed whereas my stroke is actually quite smooth. He explains how my rushed recovery is forcing me to do more work with my shoulders because it’s leading the rotation. BOOM! (the sound of my mind blowing up) This might be the biggest comment of the night for me. I know that I end up leading with my shoulders the majority of the time, I just never had any idea of how to break myself of it. My recovery makes it nearly impossible to do otherwise! I could go on and on here about how much sense this makes. I can now think of the days when I’m really swimming smooth and I can picture how my recovery stroke on those days was much smoother. Heck I do this better every time I swim with a pull buoy!!

Wow… I LOVE when I get something like this. (By get, I mean understand, and get meaning receive. This makes the money spent well worth it).

We work on this a bit. I have a feeling that I’m going to be asking him about improving my recovery every time now.

Obviously there is quite a list of stuff to be worked on. Yet he still wanted to see how I pace myself, so he didn’t let me escape from doing the 300, 200, 100.

The 300 he just let me do my own thing. My first 50 was faster than all the others but the rest of the 50’s were basically the same. (I honestly don’t remember what the splits were). He seemed to think it was pretty good. I was happy that I wasn’t falling further behind every 50.

The 200 he told me to think negative split. That didn’t mean sandbag the first 100. That meant push through the second 100 fighting against the fatigue. I finished that a second faster than he had expected. (sorry no numbers again).

Now to the 100, he had a metronome and played the cadence I was swimming for the 300 and 200. He tells me for the second 50, he wants me to up the cadence to push for the negative split. The first 50 felt pretty good, as I push off for the final 50 I notice he’s pushing off as well and swimming along in the next lane… effortlessly (or so it seemed). He was watching to see how much of all the tweaks we worked on were still there during a sprint. This 100 was 3 seconds slower than a few weeks ago. 1:24. I’m not surprised, the other time I focused hard on finishing every stroke. This time I was focused on faster turnover and I was not in my rhythm. He still thought the time was good. His point was this, to get faster, I will need to work on increasing my turnover.

We’ve created quite a to do list. It’s unfortunate that I don’t have a coach to remind me of what I’m doing wrong during my workouts. The challenge will be to stay focused on these things constantly during my swim workouts. If I do them right for a few weeks they should start to become automatic. My swim volume goes up starting Monday. I’ll dial back the intensity a bit and focus on this stuff. Fortunately my next lesson is less than two weeks away.

Side note: Bob was at the pool Wednesday morning. He joined in on my workout... and crushed it. Some things never change.