swim #3
hit the pool today. It feels great. i can’t believe i haven’t been doing this before. I did about 1km of swimming today, doing various drills. mark did about 1km before i got there ;)
today we did some more arms-only swimming with the floaty peanut-shaped thing between the knees. I have very little upper body endurance right now. My legs are great…i can kick forever (which is a vast change from the last time i swam, maybe 6 years ago). We also did a few lengths swimming with just fists, so i could learn how to use my entire arm to paddle instead of just my hands. I can feel progress on feeling my pull through the water. I can tell more when i’m just slipping through instead of pulling properly. I just have to get my muscular endurance up a bit more so i can keep that pulling up longer. I’m also trying to rotate my shoulders more so i can get more full-body motion going on.
We worked on breathing a lot today too. I was having trouble doing a breath every 3 strokes (which is desirable so you don’t get lop-sided). A lot of the time, i was falling back to a breath every 2 strokes, always on my right-hand side. I discovered that it’s mostly mental, just like riding my bike up a mountain. We did a drill where we did 1 length of breathing every 3 strokes, the next length breathing every 5, then every 7, then trying to go a whole length without breathing. I did 3 just fine, but then for the 5 length i ended up doing mostly a breath every 4. Strangely, when i tried to go every 7 i did mostly 7s with a few 6s and 5s. For the entire length without breathing, i managed to just breath every 8 strokes. This seemed quite incredible for me, since i was having trouble with 3 earlier. It’s (almost) all in my head.
Unfortunately, they’re upgrading the gym for the next 2 weeks, so no weights until march 6th. I’ll have to do some pushups and curlups at home for now. Maybe i can up the number of consecutive pushups i can do and get some endurance going. I also need to get some more cycling in. Today after the swim, i raced mark back to his house (although i had a head-start because he had to walk across the parking lot to get his car, and my bike was right at the door). I discovered that cycling isn’t so bad after a swim. I didn’t have much juice to do hard acceleration, but if i accelerated slowly then i could still get up to about 37. I tried to stay above 30km/h the whole way, but due to a couple of stop signs my average turned out to be 29km/h. It was only about 3.5 kilometers, but i ended up beating mark by a few seconds. I think i’m gonna make a habit of that, and extend the distance a bit. maybe head out to Deltaport and back or something, which would be about 15-20km total. we’ll see.
Ride hard, ride free
February 20th, 2006 at 19:36 pm
wahoo, you’re going to do a tri! nice! do you know which one yet?
careful not too train too much at first - you could injure yourself which would suck. especially with the running - good to build that up slowly - lots of people hurt themselves by running too much too soon.
there are great resources in the public library. i liked a book called “swim bike run”.
lucky you, you have someone to swim with. the pool here sucks - and is badly managed for folks who actually want to train. lots of slow lanes, and only one fast lane, which isn’t even fast.
February 20th, 2006 at 23:54 pm
The plan is to do the Squamish triathlon, and perhaps the vancouver one after that too.
As for training, i’m doing mostly swimming right now. I’ve got plenty of time to get everything together, and the swimming should help my cardio a bunch. I squeeze in a run or a bike ride when i can. running 5km feels pretty easy, endurance-wise, but maybe i’ll stick with that distance for now just to ease in.
the pool here isn’t spectacular, but it’s not too crowded. they usually have 2 lanes set up and use the rest for aquasizing or whatever. it’s worked out ok so far. Definitely the best part of it so far is not only having someone to swim with, but someone with coaching experience ;)