Swim Goals

I recommend incorporating some drills to help with your swim stroke. I think you can find some examples of drills here on the site. Sometimes just showing up for a workout is the hardest and it sounds like you have that mastered. Good luck.

I agree. Things like kick drills will help. Floating face down in the water and practicing systematic breathing to. To me, the main goal is not speed, distance or time spent in the water. It's developing a comfort zone. As soon as you hit the point where you suddenly feel comfortable in the water, where you lose any fears you still may have, a light will go on and everything else becomes easier. It's the same with bike riding. When you get on your bike, you don't think about the mechanics of balancing, you just get on and ride. But at one time, the balancing thing was the hardest part of learing to ride. You reach that same level with swimming and it'll all fall into place. So search for that feeling of "oneness" in the water, where you just enjoy swimming, then start counting laps!

Max

EXACTLY! Max you read my mind. That's what I'm looking for. I know that right now my technique SUCKS! I am floundering and I'm having a hard time concentrating on everything at once. It was like I was telling one of my students (who is going to do a tri with me this summer). With running I can make small adustments while I run and say "Okay yeah, that's better." Same with biking. I can concentrate on one aspect of my form. But with swimming as soon as I concentrate on one thing, other things go to heck in a handbasket. My feet sink, my breathing becomes irregular, I drown. Bad things like that.

Thanks. You have no idea what a help that was. My thought was "Tory, if you just get out there and DO it and don't worry about doing it well...just get a little better each day, it will come together." But then I get into that manic "But your form is terrible and you need to practice good technique! Plus you need to build up your base so you can actually DO the swim! GO GO GO GO GO!" (Man I'd make a MEAN coach.)

Your lesson plan:

1)Student will find three things to affirm about herself and her swimming style before she says another self-criticial thing!

Okay... just kidding.....

For me, the swim is the easiest part. You should SEE my running. Oh my goodness. But a few years ago, when I was getting back into swimming as a fitness activity I was pretty pathetic. I had a general goal of being able to swim a mile by the end of the semester. Finesse was no goal of mine I swam three or four times a week at the time. The first time out I just swam as many laps as I could, and it was something fairly pathetic like 12 (32 is a mile in this pool). I told myself that I had 16 weeks to get up to a mile -that's the length of a semester. It didn't take that long. I increased two laps a week, and I told myself that those two laps could be sidestroke or backstroke if I needed, but they had to happen.

For some reason, the day I got to 24 laps, I thought "for crying out loud" and just stayed until I had finished 32. The biggest thing was just giving myself permission to be a beginner. Swim badly. Swim inefficiently. Just swim.

The next goal was to improve my strokes. I have a shoulder issue, so I don't do all my laps as the front crawl. I do a cycle of 5 strokes: backstroke, front crawl, breast stroke, butterfly, sidestroke. The butterfly has to be the hardest swimming stroke on the freakin' planet. WHO thought that silliness up???? So that's why it's essentially followed by two recovery strokes: side stroke and then backstroke as the cycle cycles around. Once I'm warmed up, I do replace the backstroke with another lap of the crawl. But if my shoulder is hurting, I have to go back to the backstroke.

Once I had all 5 strokes under control, I decided that I had to be able to do the sidestroke on both sides. This was hysterical. By then, I was one of the better swimmers at the pool, but I had to do the "permission to be a beginner" thing again. Trying this stroke on the 'wrong" side caused me to roll over in the water, dunking myself and getting nowhere. Then I would laugh and inhale gallons of water. Ridiculous, all the way around. But eventually, I got it.

Now I'm swimming less, because I'm trying to add biking and running back into the mix. But swimming is my favorite, so I'm missing it a little bit. I've decided that I would like to swim 6 miles a week; my husband has chosen 10 miles as his goal. So, to get that mileage in in the time I have available, I have to work on speed. It's going to be as hard as working on endurance was. But I suppose that eventually the effort will be succesful.

After I get THAT together, I think I might look into learning diving. It won't help with a triathlon, but it's something I'm interested in. I hope that looking at my goals has been helpful to you -but there's no reason they have to become YOUR goals!

Permission to be a beginner.... permission to be a beginner.....


Andrea

Tory, one of the things we practiced when I was taking courses to be a lifeguard was this. Over our bathing suits we would put on jeans, t-shirt, sweatshirt, socks, heavy boots, hat and gloves. Then we had to jump in the pool and swim around steadily for 20 minutes without touching bottom or the sides of the pool. Then while treading water, we had to remove all our clothes and let them sink to the bottom of the pool in 9 feet of water. Then we dove down and retrieved everything and PUT IT ALL BACK ON....while still treading water! Let me tell you, after all that, you really really learned to relax in the water and save energy, because if you struggle then everything increases in difficulty by 20-fold. You learn that your body inherently floats, that you won't sink, that it only takes tiny adjustments with hands, feet, and breath control to maintain equilibrium. Sometimes the best thing to do is to play games in the pool, in water that's over your head. Toss a ball around with the kids, chase each other and play tag. You learn to be a fish. Once you reach that stage, coaching and instruction help a lot with your stroke mechanics, because you are doing what the instructor tells you without fighting all the other things.

Try those float drills, using a kick board if you have one available. Just hold it in your hands in front of you, lie face down and kick from one end of the pool to the other. When you need to take a breath, don't lift your head straight up, that causes your legs to sink. Simply swivel it to the side enough to clear your mouth and take a breath. Do it on both sides, alternating. I am poor at this, through bad habits while racing years ago I developed a single sided breathing pattern , always to my left. It works for me and after 40+ years I'm not going to change, but I would recommend you learn to breathe on both sides. This floating and breathing will help you more than you can imagine. Once it becomes second nature, it'll be lots easier to work on the other stuff.

Max

Edited by max 2004-04-17 12:50 PM