Another reason to learn flip-turns

Crank your googles tight and keep your head down I find that my big ugly aquasphere draggy googles stay on better then my speedo vanquishers.

Make sure you tuck your chin to your chest so your goggles don't fill with water.

Chin down and stay in the air as long as gravity allows. You don't have to do the fly, that's a blessing.

Head down, streamline, propel yourself off the blocks with your legs. Arms go in first, not stomach or head. Getting a few practice starts in before the actual race is highly recommended. Consider yourself lucky--one day a few years ago I showed up to what I thought was masters swim and found myself roped into an alumni vs. student meet instead (wait a minute, I didn't even go to HS in that state!). Drafted for all the fly, free, and IM events.

We'll see if the video makes it to YouTube. I have a couple of pictures. Nobody timed my split, but I can assure you it's somewhere under :30 (lol). Our fly was sick today and they let us sub a 12yr old.

I get extremely light headed and need to stand still and chill for 30 seconds if I try a flip turn. I have no idea what causes this or how I can even practise flip turns when I almost pass out every time, lol.

Any tips?

My swimming is not too bad, just the upside-down head position seems to mess me up

Is it possible to post a picture of my perfect form using the bt mobile app?





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I think we got 2nd out of like 5-6 teams. As I'm sure you already knew I carried the team. (<--- I crack me up!)

They have a 50m pool, but run this meet sideways, which makes for lanes 1 and 2 being fairly shallow. I think it was like 5 feet where I dove in, so in order to be safe I thought the belae floppe maneuver would be most prudent.

Seriously, though, we did briefly discuss cannonball entries, but due to the shallow nature figured that would be worse than bad diving. I was the only one on the team that had never "raced" before. Everybody and their grandma had to tell me during warmup to NOT breath every stroke on my left. I said "listen, when you are as slow as I am, you only stroke once with your left arm every 10 seconds, that's pretty much the same as what everybody else does!"

I did masterfully execute a flip turn, though it's reported that I slowed down significantly to do it. I asked if there were any sideline snarky comments or gasps as I swam, but my wife assured me that there were none.

In my picture you can see multiple cell phones taking pictures, that kid on the right was taking video, and the year end pool party is on Friday, so I'll see if I can obtain it so that it can be used on the forum as an instructional video for those wishing to obtain my level of awesomeness..

Obviously this event was on the equator, and so it worked out just fine.