Monday, April 28, 2008

Swimming lessons

It is the utmost height of extravagance, but I have just had an amazingly helpful swimming lesson with Jim Bolster. It is not very frugal of me, but I am going to have another one next week--we spent the hour doing deceptively simple (but actually quite difficult, it is not that I can do the things properly at all!) stuff and then at the end when I swam some lengths it was fairly extraordinary how striking an improvement had taken place.

It's all about body position (neutral head position, leading from the hips)--I fear I have been persuaded that I must switch to bilateral breathing, I was breathing every 3 strokes for the last bit (which I never do, I have a strong preference for right-side breathing) and with the other minor adjustments my stroke count had gone down from 19 to 17 without me even thinking about it, that's crazy...

A lot of stuff to work on by myself, too, though I know it's hard to find the mental space for it. Just this simple exercise of holding a nice straight vertical body position underwater and moving from that into a regular streamline position makes me hugely more attentive to what I'm doing. Craziness!

5 comments:

Danielle in Iowa in Ireland said...

The guy I took a lesson from wasn't nearly as helpful I don't think! So now you'll be able to give yourself even more spare time for the bike at FL 70.3!

Jenny Davidson said...

Hmmm... I am still poring over cutoff times just to make sure I will not get pulled from the bike course!

Leah said...

I can't imagine that you will. Even if you haven't been riding outside a ton, you HAVE been riding on the trainer and you are very fit!

Jenny Davidson said...

Yes, I think it should really be OK...

Unknown said...

And three cheers for bilateral breathing!!