Have I mentioned how much I prefer indoor swimming to outdoor swimming?
Anyhoo, I had a nice 5100 yard practice planned out. It was a practice I pulled from the Stroke/IM coach on the USMS forums. There are several coaches who post practices on the forum year round, and I've pulled some of their practices for my non-team swims. I only managed to get through a 3150 of this one today (I posted the reason as to why I didn't swim the whole thing on facebook), but I noticed three big things:
- After having done some free work with Katie in a lesson and having been spending a fair amount of time swimming/pulling free with paddles, I *think* my right arm pull is starting to improve. I found out during my freestyle lesson with Katie that when I catch with my right hand, instead of catching with my hand flat in the water, it's actually turned inwards a bit. So then when I try to pull straight back, while I am pulling straight back from where my hand is facing, it's not facing the wall behind me. It's facing the wall off to the left and behind me, so when I pull straight back, I'm pulling across my body. Not as much as I used to in high school, but still pulling across. Blast it. Anyways, I've been working on proper hand position at the catch and pulling wider, as well as working with paddles. Sans paddles today, it felt like I was pulling more at the correct angle. I'll have to have Katie or one of the other coaches verify it, but it felt a lot better. On the flip side...now my left arm pull feels out of whack. I don't know if it's because my balance in the water has changed or if I somehow screwed up that pull. Again, I'll have to have one of the coaches take a look.
- With all that focus on hand placement and proper pulling, my freestyle is rather slow right now. I'd say a good deal of that is due to my not training at all for freestyle this summer, and my lower aerobic base compared to the spring (I was doing 6-9 practices a week then, compared to the 3-4 I've been doing this summer). Part of my practice was 8 x 100 free (3 on 1:25, 3 on 1:20, 2 on 1:15), twice through, with some other stuff in between. I had to push to make the 1:15s, and the 1:20s weren't a cake walk, although I made them without breaking a sweat. I'm pretty confident that I'll get back into the swing of things pretty quickly and make the 1:15s be pretty easy not too long into the season.
- I was flat out surprised with my backstroke speed! I haven't been focused on my backstroke times in practice all summer, and wasn't at all impressed with my times at the Hains Point LCM meet in July. I'm much more attuned to SCY, though, as everything else seems all wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. Back in the spring, as I was deep in the training before Nats, back when I wasn't doing much backstroke training at all, I was hard pressed to break a :35 in a 50 back from a push. At an all out sprint, I hit :34 once that I can remember. Today, one of my sets was 12 x 50 backstroke from a push on :45. I held :40s for the first 10 without breaking a sweat. On the last two, I bumped it up to about 85% effort and did :36 on both. At a full sprint, I'm positive I would've easily been under a :34! And this is with me only having really trained technique all summer, not having built up much of an aerobic base! I'm super pumped about that! With a good hard month and a half of training before the first important meet of the season (last weekend of October, the first local SCY meet), I should be able to break both my 50 and 100 back marks I set in the spring. With a full season of training, I should be able to make great strides towards reaching my old backstroke times! I'm almost beyond excited now!
Oh, and in a side reference to #3: Don't blink.
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