I never talk about Swimming

There’s a good reason I don’t talk much about swimming. I am not passionate about it. Sometimes I have good swim workouts where I feel fishlike. Most of the time I struggle with inadequacy in some element of my stroke or another. I sometimes think about blog topics while I am swimming, but swim technique is so hard to describe, that I can never find the right words when I get home.

Two blog readers, Kari and Ginger, asked what I do for swim training. Here is my swim plan for this week. Pretty much every week of my 20 week half iron training plan looks just like this, with varying distances.

I always print out my plan and bring it to the pool. Having something to follow helps me stay focused at the pool. If I forget, I tend to get bored and quit early.

I don’t like swimming enough to head to the pool 3x per week. See, there’s that lack of passion again! So I only do the Tuesday and Friday interval workouts. I cannot stand to do a long continuous swim in the pool, it’s just way too boring and I can’t seem to stay focused! Those I save for my open water swims. Now that the weather has warmed up, I can swim in Jordan Lake. So, now I drop one of the other workouts, and add the Sunday long continuous swim, at the lake.

Oops, I see this week’s Sunday workout was actually supposed to be a time trial, rather than a long continuous swim at a moderate pace. Oh well, no way I could count that many laps in a pool to get an accurate time trial time, so I don’t do those. I can only count up to a 300. Once in a while, I’ll do a 3×300 time trial test and compare to earlier results. I never see much improvement. I guess at least I know I am not slowing down. So, that’s a yay!

I change the swimming days around as desired: this week I did the Tuesday workout on Wednesday; and I did the Sunday workout on Friday. I try NOT to change the days around for my bikes and runs. I think it’s more important to do those workouts in the right order.

If I have any swim secret at all, it is to get in alot of open water swim training. I think it’s fun swimming in open water, and it makes me feel like a kid again. Add a little current or chop to the mix, and it becomes a challenge, and great training for learning how to swim a straight line in varying conditions. I’m not that fast in the pool, but since I have so much open water training, it really pays off on race day. Last August, I wrote a blog about a particularly great open water swimming session. That was the day I realized I was athletic. 🙂

Another thing I have always done is to focus on one flaw of my swim stroke at a time. I have many! I just pick one, and find a drill that corrects that flaw. I watch youtube videos of great swimmers. I visualize the great swimmer’s technique while I am trying to correct my own.

I am currently working on the proper timing for setting up the catch phase of my stroke. I have always had a bad habit of pushing straight down with my extended arm when I am breathing to the opposite side…doing this to push my body up for balance. Very bad! I have tried to correct this over the years. I actually thought I was doing it right, extending my arm, and then setting up the catch, all while breathing to the opposite side. But then I watched a youtube of Michael Phelps, and noticed that during the entire time his head is rotated to the side for breathing, his opposite arm is completely extended. He doesn’t start the catch until after the breath is completely over. See – that was really hard to explain, and you all probably don’t have any idea what I am talking about.

Today, I experimented with giving an extra little bit of a kick while my arm was extended to help keep my body gliding during that extension. That seemed to help keep me from feeling the need to start the catch until my breathe was done. It also helps to make sure you have completely exhaled while under water. Another thing I am working on!

Anyway, here’s that youtube video. Hope it helps!

Click image for video: