Well, it is a conundrum - I know that training hours spent swimming are significantly less directly relevant to triathlon than the biking and running hours, especially the former - but swimming is so beneficial for my mental and physical health, I feel I must keep on doing more of it than is perhaps strictly speaking required!
It was a very good one, my head feels sort of back to normal for the first time in days...
JB is a genius of swimming teaching, because even though my turns still have much room for improvement, I properly understand how to do 'em now! It is incredibly gratifying, it makes me so much faster - I think it will be the solution to the problem I have at TNYA workouts where I can't really descend all the way from 1:55 to 1:40!
(To my inner hilarity, I stopped after the 1000 freestyle and somehow ended up giving a mini-lesson on turns to another fellow in the lane who was, he confessed, striving to work on the flip turn!)
freestyle ladder with FLIP TURNS: 50-100-150-200-200-150-100-50
100 free, 2 x 100 fly as right arm, left arm, 3-3-3, full stroke, 100 back, 100 breast
50 fly, 50 fly-back, 50 back, 50 back-breast, 50 breast
1750 yards total
I haven't decided for sure about the morning lane swim for the semester as a whole, but there's a 2-week "bridge" option for phys ed intersession (i.e. just Mon.-Thurs. next week and the week after - regular voluntary phys ed classes start at the end of the month) that I think will be so beneficial to mental health that I must just do it, even if it is not sensible triathlon-wise! I have work-related conflicts for both Tues. and Thurs. evening this coming week that will prevent me from going to either of those TNYA workouts, and I have the Little Red Lighthouse swim on the 26th - more to the point, though there is TONS of work I need to squeeze in somewhere and though I need to do serious bike and run hours too, I just think that the mental health benefits of starting my day with a swim are more immediately apropos!
[ED. Because when I find myself coveting a spot in a long-vanished mental asylum, it is partly because of the Pavlovian force of the words "swimming pool"!]
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For a variety of reasons there is a tendancy among many triathletes to skimp on swim training. What is "strictly speaking required" is often just enough to get through the swim in reasonable shape. The irony here is the only way to get better at swimming is by swimming. And it is the only way to maintain swim fitness.
It is extraodinarily difficult to measure the difference swim fitness has on the subsequent legs of a triathlon. You may, in fact, make minor gains in swim times but major gains in amount of energy left to expend on the bike and swim.
And as you are also doing what is for all intents and purposes a marathon swim in two weeks, it is really not the time to back off swim training!
(I love that you were teaching flip turns! They do make you faster -- but also more hypoxic.)
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