Swim: Concentration and Patience!

In continuing with the theme of swim related posts, here is yet another…

Over the past month, I’ve upped my swim volume and frequency considerably over my last season “norm” from roughly 3 swims per week for 10-12km to 4-5 swims per week giving 14-16km.  With this increase in swim volume, and more importantly frequency, I’m starting to see the benefits.  At this point, it’s nothing remarkable, just incremental improvements in my swim pace, mostly for 25m, 50m and 100m times, but a couple of seconds here and there adds up to minutes on race day.

First off, the added frequency has really helped to improve my feel for the water and provide a better awareness of my form (or lack thereof!).   I am convinced my form awareness is one of the critical pieces I need to make a step forward in my swim times.  There is no doubt I still have a long way to go to improve my form to where it should be, but at least I can start to tell what I am doing wrong when fatigue sets in.  Typically as I get into longer sets, say 300m and up, my pace starts to fall off.   At first this was frustrating, as the improvements in saw in my 100m pace were not translating to longer sets.  Then last week came the “AHA!” moment.  When I get tired the same flaws were happening: my hips started drop, my stroke shortened, my right arm started to track to the side, and less body rotation causing me to pick my head up to breathe.  All issues I’ve had with my form in the past.  Okay, so I am more aware of what is happening, but the question is why and what do I do about it?   Typically two things were happening.  First, in longer sets when I started to get tired, my concentration drifted away from my form.  As I stopped concentrating on my form, I reverted to my old bad habits causing an immediate drop in pace.  So it’s not just about pounding out huge volumes of mindless meters in the pool; you actually have to think!  Secondly, as I started to slow, I was working harder instead of smarter causing me to increase stroke rate, but at the cost of shortening my stroke.  Again, pace started to drop off.

So where do I go from here?  That’s where the patience part comes in.  In the pool, improvement comes in small steps, a second here and couple of seconds there, and in the end it all adds up to a significant amount of time.  So big improvements will take time, but as long as progress is being made that’s what counts.  Moving forward, I still have to work on my form to improve top end speed and efficiency in the water, but also improve my endurance so that I can maintain my form throughout my race distances.  Easy right?  So overall, I’m happy with the progress I’ve made so far, but I still have a long way to go!