Chipping Away

I keep chipping away at the swim times. Last week I had another mini-breakthrough where I cut down another 3 or so seconds per 100. This time, it came from a better feel for the timing of the reach/pull. I have been doing drills for that for months now, but last week, I got the feel of how the body-roll connects to the pull and how that generates power. It's difficult to describe, but before I feel like my arms were initiating my pull and last week I was focusing on my body roll initiating my pull. I also felt like my pull was starting earlier, which was also making a difference.

I had one set last week where I did my 200 warm-up, then my 800 drills. Then for my 3x200 on 3:35, I was hitting 3:05-3:07, which made the set pretty easy. Then, for the 5x100 on 1:45, I did 1:29, 1:29, 1:29, 1:28, and 1:28. Bizarre. I had never done a 100 faster than 1:30 in my life, let alone 5 of them in a row. Then, on Friday, I did a timed 200 and did it in 2:54. That's 30 seconds faster than my baseline back in September when I did it in 3:24. 30 seconds out of 200 yards is huge. That's a minute every 400 yards. It's 15% faster. I think there is still more room to improve, but even if I level off here and simply build the endurance to keep a good pace for a longer time, I will be quite happy.