In general (excepting last week, what with vacation around Thanksgiving), I've been doing much better at practices. I've been averaging from a minimum of 4 practices a week up to 9 practices in a week. I'm hoping to hit my stride around 7-9 practices a week (there are 12 I can possibly make in any given week).
I'm generally improving a fair amount in practices, although sometimes it feels like I'm going backwards. In our larger practices, there are five lanes of swimmers: fast lane, either another fast lane or a slightly slower lane (depending on how many are at practice), a medium lane, and then two consecutively slower lanes. When I started out a few months ago, I stuck solely to the middle lane, and it was fairly challenging at times. Now I stick to either the second fastest lane or one of the fast lanes in the big practices. That is, when I'm only doing one practice at a session. On the days when I do the back to back practices, I'll swim in one of the faster lanes for the first session and then move down a lane for the second session, since I still don't have the endurance to make the intervals in a fast lane for a 2 hour practice.
We don't do much stroke work on intervals that really matter--that is, when we do stroke/IM work, we often do sprints on really easy intervals, so I can't guage how much I've improved in those strokes.
However, my freestyle speed has improved in practice pretty substantially. When I first started out, quite embarrasingly, a 1:30 pace for multiple 100s free was a chore if we were doing it towards the end of practice. Lately, though, I've been able to do 1:20 intervals pretty easily, although some practices kick me hard enough in the butt to make me struggle a bit towards the end of practice to make that pace for more than a 100 or two. Still a far cry from my previous swimming days, but hey, I'll take what I can get!
I have no clue how my backstroke is--it never felt out of whack, and doesn't feel much different now than it did a month or two ago. Don't swim much breastroke and have no interest in it, so I don't pay attention at all to how I do in that stroke.
Butterfly is quite interesting. Apparently I'm a MUCH more efficient butterflier when I swim at speed than when I swim at my normal semi-loafing practice pace. Two weeks ago we did a big IM set that involved a bunch of 200 IMs, the first round just making the easy interval, the next round sprinting. We did that twice through. By the end of the first, easy round, my shoulders were killing me on fly. But when we switched to sprinting, I had no shoulder fatigue at all. Given, after four sprinted 200 IMs, I was pretty darn tired anyways, but I thought it was interesting that I went from struggling to do a 50 fly at an easy pace to more or less effortlessly sprinting a 50 fly within the space of about 3 minutes.
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I've got my second swim meet this Sunday. With the exception of Thanksgiving week, I've had almost a month of pretty regular practices to prepare for the meet, so I'm expecting a much better performance than the last meet.
I was only allowed to enter in four events, so I entered in the 50/100 back and 50/100 fly. This is a 25M meet, rather than 25Y, so it should be interesting to see how my times compare with the last meet (I swam the 50/100 back and 50 fly in that meet). Given how terrible my backstroke times were at that meet, it is possible that, if my backstroke has improved due to my increased practicing, I could potentially go around the same times in the two back events this time.
After this meet, I've got two meets in January to train for. Should be a fun two months of swimming!
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