11 seconds in the pool

This weekend is the first race of the season, for me. Last weekend I attended a swim clinic that was amazing and I’m really hoping those gains will translate into open water swimming in a race.

The clinic was 2 days, 4 hours per day. It was broken into 4 sessions, 15 minutes on dryland observing drills and technique, then 45 minutes in the water. I would swim a length, receive feedback from a coach, then do another length. Over and over. You really can’t substitute that type of immediate expertise, but it did come at a price… the pool was FRIGID. I have a new sympathy for all the times I’ve forced one of my kids into a cold pool for a lesson or practice.

The worst part was doing it 4 times each day. The first dunk, you feel the cold, but you can deal with it for 45 minutes. The second time, you’ve just spent 15 minutes getting dry, had a little snack, remembered what it felt like to have circulation in your fingers again, and then you go under. The third and fourth times I honestly wasn’t sure I could do it. The only thing that propelled me in was peer pressure, I was second in our lineup so the first guy would go and I had to follow or else the whole lane would be messed up.

That was just day one.

Day two I knew what to expect and that first submersion didn’t feel so okay. And 45 minutes didn’t feel so short.

But the feedback was incredible. There was pre-work we had to do before the clinic, and one of those was swimming a 100 yard effort all out and recording our time. I swam a 1:31, from a push off the wall. At the end of the swim clinic, I swam a 1:20! I’ve never hit that pace before.

It was very cool to meet people from all over and bond over a common misery, I mean interest. I’m a mostly self-taught freestyle swimmer and have always struggled to know what the most efficient method is. Every time I find something that works, I come across another technique that makes sense and maybe that’s the way it should be done. So this clinic was really affirming, here’s the most efficient way for me to swim and here are several drills to cement this technique into muscle memory.

They call us “adult onset swimmers” – those of us that learned proper swimming as an adult versus those who have been swim-teaming since childhood. It sounds like an illness – maybe it is. A lot of the people I train with are lifelong swim-teamers and it was a nice change to be around other AOSes.

We’ll see how it pays off on Saturday! This race is a sprint distance: 750m swim, 12 mile bike and a 5k run. (I mixed my units on purpose, Hubs.) This is a great distance because it’s over fairly quickly, but it’s also the worst distance because it’s so fast the whole time. I mean, duh, it’s labeled a sprint. You literally have to sprint the entire thing. Except for the swim, because learning speeds/gears in the water is a difficult concept for an AOS. But I’m working on it.