It was good - I was feeling rather sluggish, and decided after the warmup that it would be a good day to work on a few things with the kind assistance of Coach Henning. I think this will be the way to keep a lot of pool time during my marathon taper, too - figure on the Monday and Wednesday morning sessions as technique work.
Warmup: 500 choice (I did 100 free, 100 back, 100 free, 100 IM, 100 free)
75 kick - drill - swim fly for a bit of feedback. I feel that this stroke is actually working pretty well right now, especially after that great lesson with I., but that there is one thing I do not really get yet - Henning singled it out, but I'm not sure quite how to work on it. It's the upper-body part, that ballistic motion where arms fly forward and you really come up out of the water. He says - go to the gym! But I will ask I. this Saturday if we can do a bit of work just on that - I am fine for now, though, I'd say.
Then I did 30 minutes of flip turn practicing! Hmmm, as a drill I am definitely doing better with these than I was in the spring. (It really is helpful to push off on back so as not to worry about the turn part of things.) But when I did 225 swim with turns in the last bit of time I had, they were pretty awful again! It is just going to take a lot of work. I was thinking - if I could have a magical fitness-related wish, it would be that I just somehow already know how to do a good turn for free and back. Then I thought - well, if I am willing to sink 30-40 hours in it, it will be boring but probably I will be able to do them perfectly well at the end!
100 back to finish
So: not much actual swimming, but some very useful time spent thinking about stuff.
900 yards total plus 30 minutes flip-turning
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2 comments:
I would suggest that perhaps you think of it more as going forward while undulating rather than coming out of the water.
Here is an edited clip of Michael Phelps 200 fly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlXuJP_9DjA
The push at the bottom of the stroke + second kick is what gets your arms out of the water ... and the push is not unlike that at the bottom of the freestyle stroke.
In the video clip take a look at how low in the water the whole field is. On final leg, the swimmersecond from the top illustrates this particularly well because he is breathing every two. The head lifts but the body does not come out of the water.
Let me know if this does/does not make sense to you.
30 min of flip turns?!
I think I would have been quite dizzy. One thing I've found, for some reason, I can do flip turns better when I'm doing breastroke (though I know in races you don't do a flip turn when breastroking) than when doing freestyle. Not sure if it's because of the slower swim speed or because of the body alignment. Perhaps both. I know I'm not pushing off on my back, though.
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