On swimming

I think I said it before, I got into triathlon via the swim. Strangely enough I found later this is the one discipline that most people struggles with. Today I skipped my morning swim which meant I crunched a midday/afternoon solo session.

And goodness, what a nice session it was. It was  the workouts, it was that marvelous feeling of having most of my body under the water, not hearing anything but my hands breaking the water on each stroke and the rythmic breathing of a good sinc'd stroke. Swimming, on a day like today connects me with my inner self and al lot of good memories of being in a pool during my young years and being in the sea on my NZ years so once I knew it was one of those days I decided to improvise a longer session focussing on something we've been training for the past 3 weeks.

The coach is putting a great deal of effort in gettin all of us to master the most difficult thing in swimming, which is the high elbow catch. For one thing or the other, it is something that I've seen very few people (normal people like me, I mean) succeed. In my particular case, i've tried in the past and the result was a sore shoulder for some time. I think this time I am more willing and eager to get this right, but it's oh-so-difficult to train the brain to coordinate that bit with the whole other lot that swimming involves (nice 30degree entry, good kicking, good rotation, etc), someone said that it may take somewhere around 200 thousand strokes to get it right, which seems quite a lot but achievable nontheless. Anyway, I was feeling so good that I decided to do the full session a high elbow catch session and it worked out OK!

So with a high morale I went back to work and tackled the few things that separated me from freedom, picked up Nat and got home to my next workout (the back yard half marathon) and dinner, oh.. yes... and blogging my 20th post.

Date: 21Apr

Sport: Swim /// Run

Time: 75min /// 90min

Dist: 4km /// 19km
Comment: loved it! /// loved it too!