You can't tell me this is a coincidence...
With all this talk and work on my swim stroke over the last month I have been looking for some hard numbers to indicate whether I am making any progress. After the disastrous 500 yard swim I had at the Kansas 50 (13:30!!) anything would have been an improvement. But I really have been working hard. Much harder with swimming than anything else. This is not to become a world class swimmer, but more so that I am comfortable in the water and confident that, while I'm not going to come out of the water first, the water won't evaporate before I finish...
I also understand that wetsuits can be an incredible boost in performance. Especially if your difficulty is with balance in the water or sinking legs. So I still have a long way to go in respect to swimming without a wetsuit. Still, most of the swims I do in triathlons ARE wetsuit legal so I need to be comfortable in a wetsuit as well.
So when some group members decided to get together and do an open water swim I tagged along just to see how I was doing. The lake has a straight shot that is right at 400 yards point to point. I figured it was time to find out how bad things were. The group was seven or eight people, all of whom are experienced triathletes and decent swimmers. A couple were MUCH faster than me.
As we took off I tried to just focus on me and my technique, only paying the most minimal attention to things outside my head like other swimmers and sighting. Reach, glide, strong pull, recover. Roll to breath, feel your body in the water, be flat, minimal kick. Sounds like a lot? It is, but it's getting easier. That list was much longer last week. So the first thing I noticed was that the other swimmers weren't pulling away. I swam with the pack the entire time. My tracking was straight except for one slight veer into another swimmer... And I finished the 400 yard leg in 7:20.
!!
All with less percieved effort and fewer strokes. Read that to mean "not tired".
You can't tell me that this is all coincidence or just a result of my wetsuit. This actually would translate into a roughly 8:15 500 yard swim. Over 5 minutes faster than I swam in Kansas. I would even give up a minute for the wetsuit (didn't wear one in Kansas) but that is still over 4 minutes faster. And it was easier. This alone would have put me in the top 25 finishers in Kansas.
OK... I get it. Technique and form rule over power and cadence. Getting that pull buoy was the best training aid I could have purchased. It allowed me to stop worrying about my legs and focus on body position and balance in the water. I don't have to think about my kick so I can focus on the muscle memory building of proper stroke technique.
You know... It's been a long time since I have had to worry about technique in any sport. I have always been lucky enough to be good at most sports. Finding something like swimming, that seems so easy and that others make look so easy, which presents such a big challenge to me has actually been good for me. Instead of all power and muscle crunching like most sports I play, swimming forces you to do the little things right EVERY TIME (as my friend Jeff says, tongue firmly implanted in cheek, "Swimming is easy... Just find your perfect stroke and repeat it a million times..."). And it punishes you if you don't by slowing you down.
