Swim at Last

I'm about to admit a very uncoach-y reality. But then, you are used to that.

I had given up on swimming.

Not the act itself, the the act of getting faster while doing it. For two years, I swam 12,000+ yards a week and didn't get much faster. Technique, speed, threshold, alternate strokes, swim meets, video analysis, you name it, I did it. I finally decided that for the time I invested not getting faster at swimming, I could just bike more, get faster at that, and be done with it.

So for the last two years, I've gotten in the pool about once every month or two, just to make sure I could cover the distance, whatever that was. And while I did get slower, I didn't get MUCH slower, so the tradeoff seemed worth it. As every triathlete worth his or her salt knows, the swim is about 10% of Ironman in terms of time, and with a wetsuit on, it's about 1% of the effort.

Then I had ankle surgery. And coming back from that, I've realized that my run has met with a certain ceiling of volume and speed that it simply cannot exceed if I am to remain ambulatory. So the bike and the swim have become emminently more important.

Well, ok, the bike is really not much more important than it was before. It just gets more attention now.

I know what to do to make my bike leg stronger. So I'm doing it. I also knew what to do if I wanted to swim faster. But I couldn't do it alone.

So I called up Craig Lewin of Endurance Swimming. I knew that he'd be my last ditch effort to find some speed in the water.

For better or worse, I'd been stumping coaches for years. You look pretty good, they'd say, I don't know why you're so slow. Or they find the technique flaw (my sweeping catch and pull), but all the drills in the world wouldn't fix it.

So honestly, I wasn't all that hopeful.

But he made an observation that changed everything...it wasn't my catch and pull that were the root of my problem, it was my RECOVERY.

Wha????

It got fixed (with a TON of patient drill work), the sweep disappeared, and after three months of being back in the pool I've dropped 27 seconds off of my 200, and over 2 minutes from my 1600, setting PR's for distances across the board. And I'm swimming 2-3 times per week, 1800-3800 yards per workouts.

For those of you keeping track, all that translates to a 5 minute savings at 2.4 miles. Best of all, with the new technique, I can nail my lats all day long and not be cardiovascularly taxed...which means I can swim closer to threshold at Ironman and not impact my bike and run.

And it's January 2nd!

I'm excited to see what I can continue to accomplish before August. I would like to swim a 1:05 at IMMT...we'll see if I can pull it off. I won't compromise my bike and run for a couple of minutes on the swim so it will have to come naturally, but I'm optimistic. With the giant improvements I've seen in my strength-to-weight ratio on the bike this fall, I'm getting pretty excited for IMMT.

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