My friend Kyla invited me to go swimming today. Kyla is a really good swimmer and is helping me improve my swimming. We met up with Kyla's friend Brent at 9AM at the Fitness Center (a local corporate gym.) I wish this was open to the public but it is worth the $8 guest pass to go and swim with such great swimmers. We did an easy warmup and then some drills and kicking. The main set of the workout was 200's (150's for me) and 75's. The workout concluded with 8 x25m sprints doing all strokes twice. We even jumped out in the deep end to do dive starts for those sprints! My total was around 2500m for the day.
The big lesson for the day...I don't have the rhythm! Even though I'm primarily doing swim training for triathlons I am doing all strokes in workouts. I joined the Arkansas Masters swimming club this year and intend to take part in all of the groups events including a swim meet on June 12th. I haven't done any organized swimming since grade school and a semester of swimming in college. Last year my tri training was to just swim freestyle so I'm essentially relearning all the strokes. Today I asked for help on the butterfly because I was struggling to get my arms out of the water. Brent and Kyla reviewed my stroke and we determined that I don't have the dolphin rhythm. We talked about some drill options that will help me work on this and when I tried them out I did get a glimpse of what it should be.
I'm so lucky to have such great friends and training partners. Thanks Kyla!!!
Stick with swimming, the rhythm will come, and so will the other strokes. There are still some days when I feel off, but it's usually just one a month or so.
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