Swimming for Hammers and Spoons

Last night decided to do a session based on earliuer discussions here, which was n x 5x50 (SCM) as easy, hard 12.5m into easy, 25m hard into 25m easy and just reapeat until I ran out of time. Quite enjoyed it TBH. Did 2km like that and then not enough time for another 5 so used paddles for a few 100m

That’s got me thinking now. I usually end up at a public session most Christmases, when one or both of the pools we use is closed, and I find a continuous swim easier to manage in a shared lane than a more structured session.
I can feel a Christmas Eve and/or New Year’s Eve IM swim coming on.

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Shouldn’t that be “sh1ts and goggles?”

I’ll get my coat.

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Very funny. Now…MOVE IT DIRTBAG!

Trying to resume a bit of swimming whilst away. Shoulder and chest feel awful. Stroke also doesn’t feel great, but doesn’t help jot knowing how long the pool is. It says 30m on the website, but no way am I swimming a 1.30/100m 1500!


Right arm in particular seems to be crossing.

That said, I guess it’s a reasonable starting point to just be able to get in and swim for 20+ minutes continuously, two days in a row, when I’d not seen the water regularly in probably a month

Yeah I assumed from your Strava swim of 1500 at 1:29 average it must have been 20m or something!

Right, just ordered some new duds. Back to swim briefs after a 2 year or so absence.

#speedo

Could just be the recording, but the loud splash makes me think you hand/arm entry could be improved? Although I have no idea if that is the case - or whether a quieter stroke translates to a more efficient stroke. I just like to focus on a stroke that is clean and smooth.

I’m fairly confident it was a lot longer than 20m! That would then be a nearly 2.15/100 average pace! I’d guess about 27-28m

No, I mean I just presumed you swam the requisite number of lengths to get 1500 i.e. 75.

Ah, no. Pool was advertised as 30m. I did 50 lengths. It wasn’t 30m almost certainly so didn’t do 1500m

So while I’m planning on only swimming once per week…I’m thinking of looking at learning butterfly…partly from the ST thread on the individual medley.

I don’t really know anything about butterfly, what’s the story?

Not read the thread, initial 2c worth quickly:

Can be very useful for strength development
I do a lot of medley work, but that’s more for enjoyment than triathlon training. I’m about to spend 4-6 weeks trying to get back to comfortably swimming 100 fly, as currently drop off badly at 75m as too weak.

That said, the benefits for adult onset swimmers in terms of improving triathlon are probably unlikely to outweigh the time spent trying to learn.

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Don’t discourage him, we want to hear the long-term results!

In that case, butterfly is piece of cake. Julie Bradshaw swam the channel with it, so we need to HTFU.

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Cool, I’m booking a lesson.

How hard could it be, right? That time I flopped about like a fish out of water and got cramp after half a length must’ve been lack of sleep or something.

@Jorgan if by “long term” you mean this weekend, I’ll update on Saturday. :wink:

I actually got to use these at the Icebergs pool in Bondi. My best mate is a proper gadget nerd, more so than me, and had bought himself some for the local leisure centre swims he does in Sydney. He let me use them when we went to Bondi.

General visibility is poor. Its like looking through a toilet roll. To create the HUD, the shape of the lenses eliminate nearly all peripheral vision. Proper tunnel vision. The water was also quite merky, so I really felt rather blind.

As for the HUD, it was so so. I started to get used to it, but you really have to shorten your focus to actively look at it. It’s not “just there” hovering in from of your eyes. Having more accurate split info was nice, rather than what I generally rely on which is a fixed interval vibration on my watch. When comparing to my Garmin lap splits as well, I’d say the goggles were more consistently accurate with real lap splits (in a 50m pool, there was too much variability on the garmin, and as the lap split pops up immediately in the goggle you know its registered).

Detail on the app was good, although annoyingly it doesn’t give you interval times. It shows time per lap, cumulative time, and rest time, but not interval time. That would be a big issue (for me) if I was trying to analyse a proper session.

Comfort was actually very good. Probably the most comfortable, non leaking, goggles I’ve worn.

Would I get a pair? No. But they were fun to try out.

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Okay, so fly is a bit tricky but I think I get the basics after the lesson today. I suspect it’s going to take a while to get used to…

Not an easy cruising kind of affair though is it? :sweat_smile:

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Fly is all about timing of the kicks. Two dolphin kicks per arm cycle, one in, one out. Common error is kicking both kicks together, continuous at either entry or exit. Do single arm fly to try and learn timing.

As for medley I started a study of it during my L3. Bottom line if swimming 5 days a week it may be advantageous, certainly some IM drills will help. 3 times a week or less stick to Crawl. Maybe some back or IM to raise HR or even limited drills for variety but dont spend too much time on learning them properly or st the expense of Crawl yards

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I feel backstroke useful for improving body position too, people normally more aware they’re sinking. And pretty much the only thing I do in life that doesn’t promote rounded shoulders!

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