Long swimming

Having watched a competant swimmer last week, this morning I combined her style with some of the tips I have picked up reading triathlon magazines. While I have manged to improve the entry of my swim stroke, I learned last week, using the paddles that the most efficient way to extract my hand from the water is to slice it sideways, losing the drag generated by lifting the dead hand flat out of the water. A tip in the magazine to touch a pool-buoy between the legs morphed into me concentrating on withdrawing my hand at the full extent of its stroke, paralell to my thigh. A rather impressive swivel of the wrist and elbow leads to a slicing re-entry of the hand in front of my head.

It certainly felt faster - the swim being smoothly executed without the jerky decellerations that I'm used to at the end of each stroke.

The swimovate Poolmate (love it!) meant I didn't have to bother with counting my laps although it either lost or gained one because my odd / even count was out. Either that or I teleported to the other end of the pool at some point.

The final speed was up compared to last week but the efficiency was down so I'm going to hazard that the poolmate dropped a lap, not added a lap. Still, I erred on the side of caution and did one more lap than I needed. While I was still absolutely baked at the end - foot cramp, feeling sick, the lot - I managed 2km in the morning and that's a lot to be happy about.

Alternatively, when I sprinted to pass someone who wasn't going to let me have an easy time, I probably dropped the stroke efficiency through the floor resulting in a lower average.

I'm not quite up to the speeds I was recording in January and December prior to my week off for skiing but I'm getting there. I just hope those record speeds were due to lax counting.

I'm not quite sure how the top men and women manage to swim 1.5 - 2km every morning. By lunchtime and knackered and my sinuses are still full of water but, I might as well have a go at getting somewhere near to that.

Amazing what happens when you read the instructions. Efficiency is an index figure (not a percentage) which should go down. At 51, I am at the better end of the "average" index of 50 - 70. I can look forward to being "above average" soon, I hope.