Swimming (Freestyle) Revelations

So I've been swim training for 11 years now. Through today, in that time, I have swum 4,852,056 yards. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? Nope. Let's take a conservative daily yardage estimate for a high school swimmer of 5,000 yards. That's 35,000 yards/week. How long did it take the high school swimmer to hit my lifetime yardage?

4,852,056 / 35,000 = 138 weeks, give or take a few days

So that high school swimmer finished my yardage (and then some, probably) by third quarter of their junior year, assuming 2 weeks off per year. Now, that swimmer only got to be on the high school team because they had been swimming since, oh probably the age of 8. So I won't even begin to try and calculate what their accumulated yardage was before they hit high school.

All that I am pointing out is that when a typical triathlete (even ME) says, "I am swimming a lot," well, not so much. Swimming well and fast takes years of ingrained technique coupled with kinesthetic awareness (they are probably the same thing), so that when the coach standing on deck says to do X with your hand or Y with your feet, your brain and hands/feet are connected in such a way that you can actually just COMMAND yourself to do those things.

In my short years of trying to learn how to swim better, I have had lessons along the way. Initially I took some Total Immersion lessons, and I think they are great for getting down some of the basics of balance and body roll. Some people will develop that mind/muscle link much more quickly and acquire good swimming technique in a short amount of time. I am just now beginning to "get" this, in part because I am spending more time in the pool (I believe that despite what some people say that you DO need to put in the time), and feel like I have already sufficiently developed my kinesthetic awareness in biking and running.

I have had a swim coach observe me and tell me that I am doing a few things well:

• I am on top of the water, i.e., my legs aren't sinking.
• I have a non-intrusive kick (i.e., my feet/legs are in correct position even though my kick isn't particularly propulsive).
• When I breathe, it is just my head following my upper body, not actually turning my head. This is something I worked very hard on last year, and I know how much I've improved because I rarely have actual neck soreness for "all" the yards I put in lately. Plus when I switch over from road bike to tri bike, my neck muscles aren't going WTF from the combination of lots of swimming and holding my big stupid head up.
• I can breathe bilaterally, and in fact, I spend much of each workout doing so, even though I swim faster when I breathe to my left only (more on that later).
• I have a ton of endurance. DUH.
• I have decent body roll--at least I am not swimming flat like a barge.

Along the way, I have received tips about whether my fingers should be open or closed, hand entry position, underwater sweep, etc. The open/closed fingers thing is pretty easy for me to implement. Doesn't take much thought. When you move into hand entry position, catch and sweep territory, though, despite it sounding like you are just being asked to do something with your hands and arms, it is much more than that.

The revelation I had two weeks ago (and this is probably written down in some swimming book somewhere) is this:

Swimming well and fast is about using your legs, hips and core (call this your "roll") to put your body into an optimal position so that you can push the maximum amount of water back with your arms.

In other words, if I don't have that roll down, or I don't synchronize that roll with what is going on with my arms, I am not going to be able to move as much water as I would if they were working well together.

So, yeah, you want your hands to be in a certain position and enter the water in a certain position and your elbow to be high underwater as you begin your catch and then oh, it would be nice if you made that nice "S" underwater during the sweep. Easy to say, but the only way to achieve all that is if your feet up through your core are putting you in the position to allow you to do that.

Thing is, I know what it feels like when it's all connected and working properly, but now I can talk to myself and focus on getting that position right and feeling how that affects my ability to get my arms in the right spot, does that make sense? That is just how this works for me. Other people, like I said, might have their body/brain "get it" much more quickly than me.

For the last 9 weeks, I have been doing triceps dips (other stuff, too, but not important here) before I swim on Mondays and Wednesdays. I was already on the chin/pullup thing, and it has the bars to do dips, so I figured, what the hell. I developed this habit of watching my arm position in a mirror while I do these, because I know what good form is for dips. A nice right angle occurs at some point, and guess what it's just like the high elbow thing in swimming.

I have known for many years about the high elbows thing in swimming not just above water but also below. I think I've got the above water thing down pretty well. The last 2-3 years, I really worked hard on my left side form, because I am right-handed and I figured my right side was doing a good job so I should spend some quality time with my left side. And I made improvements to the point where when I swim breathing only to my left, I swim faster than my formerly faster right side. It has puzzled me as to why this is. Hang on, I'm getting to the point.

So last week I'm thinking about this and why have I now become faster breathing on my left and combining this with a hyper-awareness of my body position so that I can pull more effectively and it dawned on me since I had just done triceps dips before I got into the pool that maybe my right arm doesn't have that high elbow thing going on underwater like I thought it did. So now I'm swimming and I change around my breathing patterns and pay attention to what is going on with my left arm vs. my right arm, and BANG there it was--all this time I thought my right arm knew what it was doing I was wrong. When I breathe to my left side, my right arm is doing a pretty good job, but when I breathe on my right side, my right arm is all lazy and pulling almost with a straight arm. So there you go--when I breathe to my right, I am not moving the maximum possible amount of water back. But it's more than just the arm motion--once again, in my quest to improve my left side, when I rotate to that side it is the "proper" amount, and I am lazy when rotating to my right.

So...I have started focusing on my right side, and it is not just the high elbow but rotating to that side enough so that the high elbow feels natural and ends up causing that nice "S." It all started coming together yesterday. I did my usual pullups, dips, pushups, bridges, dead bugs and jump rope before I swam, and then I was determined to work on my right side in the pool. I could now feel, in my head and in my arm, when I had my arm in the right position (because I rolled properly to begin with), and during my warmup, part of my right triceps actually hurt a bit. But then it settled down, and all was good. I did not use yesterday's session to try and see if I am getting faster--that will take time--but the mind/body connection is being made.

So I guess what it took for me was to start doing something outside the pool that created a connection in my mind that I was able to carry over into the pool. How great is that? This is exactly why I think there is value in doing things besides S/B/R if you don't have that varied a sports background, because you will do things with your body that will train your mind in a way that can enhance your chosen competitive sports. I think that the more of the muscles in your body that you can sense in isolation and link in your brain so it knows precisely what is going on, the better rounded you will be. I remember back from when I was into the bodybuilding thing and how you are supposed to really focus on a particular muscle when you are doing a movement to isolate its primary motion. If you get that right, you can really sort of just become that muscle momentarily, and it's a great feeling.

I am not going to get super fast at swimming any time soon, but I have hope that I can at least move farther into that all important kinesthetic awareness, and since I'm spending lots of time in the pool, I have lots of time to practice!