Saturday, January 31, 2009

Saturday clinic

Freestyle/turns clinic at Baruch.

Not bad - I think the turn business is something I am only going to resolve by starting to practice them very regularly, I am certainly not naturally good at it but I think I have enough of a handle on the fundamentals that the only way forward is work rather than magical solution from outside, ugh....

I would have liked to stay for the workout, but I couldn't afford the time - I spent an hour before I went to the clinic WRESTLING with this software that I am hoping to use to transcribe the huge heap of manuscript pages I've been writing - it is Dragon Naturally Speaking - I used it a bit a couple years ago, and put it aside for various reasons - but now I can't get it to work at all. The microphone just isn't functioning - and after swimming, I went and bought a new one, and that isn't working either, so it's something to do with settings that I can't figure out and don't have time now to get help on. I can feed the program files from a digital audio recorder, so I'm going to have to try doing it that way instead - after I get off the computer, I'm going to go and read some pages and then see what the Naturally Speaking program can do with them for me...

AMANUENSIS!

We did quite a few lengths of swimming (arghhhh, I am under-exercised these last 3 days though), including a lot of catch-up combined with finger-drag and alternating lengths of free and back or free and breast; then the last 15-20 minutes were spent on turns. Maybe 1000 yards total?

(I have to revise my swim distance goals for the year - I said I would try and swim 10,000 yards a week, but I think it is not realistic, I will reconceptualize it as 30,000 yards a month and aim for an average of 1,000 yards/day, which is either one nice little short swim in the evening nearby or else 3 real workouts in the week or some combination thereof - I would like to be swimming more, but the hours are so tight on pool availability, and I would like to be running more miles also, and who knows when I am ever going to ride a bike again, and I am not doing enough strength-training work either! So 10,000/week is not going to happen....)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Yes, the truth is, you only get better at flip turns by doing them!

Reconceptualizing is a very good plan! I only managed 28,000 metres this month, but it is what it is!

Good luck with the transcription issues.

ShirleyPerly said...

Well, reading what Wendy wrote, looks like I'm not going to get much better this year (my new coach is not a big fan of them).

I think my husband tried using that software before to transcribe meeting minutes and also mentioned some problems getting it to work. Good luck with it!