Swim Project - Week 4 Update

My initial objective of this swim-focus was to hire a coach to work with and confirm I could swim with proper technique. I didn’t want to blindly go for volume without making some changes first, or at least have some confirmation that it was OK. I hired Brian Heise and so far, we are making good progress.

His initial assessment was that I was swimming in a very “shoulder-driven” manner, which in-and-of-itself is not necessarily bad, particularly for an open-water event. However, he suggested to make long-lasting improvements, I needed to learn how to swim more from my hips and get the connection between hips and shoulders. We approached this by focusing on kicking – speeding up my kick and slowing down my upper body. He also said a stronger kick would help me develop a better catch and more feel for the water at the front of my stroke. The kicking was certainly a new idea for me in the pool --- I did one year of swim team when I was a kid and none of that included any technique assessment or kicking. At that time, we pretty much just went back and forth across the pool any way we could.

In starting with Brian, we focused on basics – kicking on your side in a stream-lined position, side-kick- and six-kick-switching (with finger-tip drag), etc. This evolved into catch-up, sometimes with a kickboard and sometimes without, and then six-kick-switching with tennis balls/fists and “finger drag.” All the kicking definitely high-lighted the fact that I had not done much of it before and was not metabolically efficient at all… I was gassed after just 25 or 50 yards of kicking on my side! However, I continue to plug away and work on developing a stronger, more efficient kick. When we tried catch-up with a kickboard, however, is where things started clicking. I was making it across the pool doing catch-up with a kickboard faster than I could regular “swimming” before. It also felt different and the water seemed to be “thicker” during my pull and I started feeling a nice rhythm with my hips/core helping me move through the water. I also did a fair amount of side-kick switching (with tennis balls or fists), which helped me get a feel for the timing even more, in addition to forcing me to catch/pull more with my forearms. We would do it with tennis balls and then without immediately after to see what the feel was like (you have a lot more sensation on your fingers).

Once we got the kicking going, the next thing we progressed to was working more specifically on the catch. We reviewed several of the various sculls and figured out together that some front-sculling with one-arm-drills helped start to alleviate some left-arm weirdness I have in my stroke. It will still be a work-in-progress and hard to get rid of old, highly-engrained motor patterns, but it has definitely made a difference and I will continue to work on it to develop new motor patterns.

Thus far, through 4 weeks, I’ve been in the pool 21 times and covered 25,000 yards with about 16,000 of that being some form of kicking or focused drill. Not a lot of volume yet, but good frequency given my limited time. From a benchmark standpoint, I have two to review: golf and the broken mile.

Golf	With fins	No fins	No fins total
6/20/2011	16 – 17 – 35	19 – 21 – 43	83
7/21/2011	14 - 16 - 37	18 - 18 - 42	78
10/7/2011	N/A	18 - 19 - 44	81
12/1/2011	12 - 13 - 37	15 - 15 - 40	70
12/2/2011	N/A	12 - 13 - 39	64

Broken Mile	Time	Rest in-between	Comments
6/20/2011	0:29:52	0:00:10	Right before CDA '11
12/21/2011	0:24:58	0:00:10	Benchmark with fins

The most glaring thing is I went from the upper 70s and low 80s in golf to a best of 64!! And that was after 1 week! A big chunk of that improvement came from just lengthening out my stroke, but it also made me faster. My distance-per-stroke made a huge improvement. Now I need to continue exploring the continuum of DPS / stroke rate to see what works and how it feels. I can’t swim catch-up style all the time, mainly for 2 reasons: (1) I’d be completely worn out (I’m not efficient at it yet) and (2) it’s not practical for open-water triathlon swimming. But being able to do this is huge because now it provides me the awareness I need and understanding of how it feels and I can at least start exploring it.

With respect to the broken mile, it’s not really a fair comparison because I had fins on for the most recent attempt. We are using it for my “first” benchmark and now the objective is to get to that time without fins! Nonetheless, it’s still interesting to compare. I good almost 5 minutes off a broken mile I did in June. Once I am better able to sustain the “new” technique, it will be interesting to see how much I can cut off without fins.

Good progress and it keeps me excited to keep working at it!

2012 Swim Project

My most recent Ironman swim was a 1:17. Granted, I did not have much of a swim focus, but not only have I not improved this year, I have actually regressed when it comes to AG placement out of the water. In my first IM, I was at 72% in my AG and had made it up to 30% 2 years later in Louisville (and that was with a swim where I had major leg cramps). However, now I’m back down to 64% in my AG as of Florida 2011. Ouch. The swim is a relatively short portion of the day, but it still has an impact on race performance for several reasons:

1. Coming out of the water quicker allows easier transitions. This year in Florida, the change tent was crammed and it took me 7+ minutes to get out on my bike. So getting through the swim quicker will make this easier and save double time – the time savings from the swim and the resulting time savings from an easier transition.
2. It gets me further along in the 140.6 miles in a shorter time, leaving me more capacity for the run. Even if this is only a few minutes, it can have a large positive impact on my run. Feeling better later and later into the run makes it easier to dig deeper.
3. If you are a good swimmer, the 2.4 takes less out of you physically, resulting in the same effect as #2 above.

All of these things will have a positive impact on race day performance, which is ultimately everyone’s objective, right?

There are those that suggest investing large amounts of time in swimming over the winter does not yield a good return on investment in that you need to invest a lot of time to yield just a few minutes improvement in swim time. For a busy age-grouper, they would say this is not a good use of time in the winter. I agree with this in principle and practiced this last winter, focusing on running and hitting some early season running races for fun. I had a good time and it kept me motivated. And I would argue the ROI equation for most AG’ers probably points to a more bike and run fitness approach in the off season.

However, I am also a big believer in working on your weaknesses and probably the biggest thing I need to improve to continue making advances up the AG results curve is my swimming. I have always been a pretty “strong” swimmer in that I can swim fine and am very comfortable in water. However, I am not a FAST swimmer. I am egregiously slow compared to others in my AG. Surely I have the aerobic capacity to go faster than 1:17 over 2.4 miles.

So, to continuously work on my weaknesses, I have decided to take some action! I am creating “Swim Project: 2012” and doing a little experiment.

My Objective – Make a focused effort for 5 months to improve swim technique and fitness and get back to 30% AG or better in competitive races.

How I will measure improvement – Benchmarks in the pool and race times in Open Water at Oceanside (half) and St. George (full). I will choose some from the following list:

• 3x300 TT (30 sec rest)
• Broken mile with 10 sec rest (with fins initially)
• Swim Golf
• All out 50, 100, 200
• Average Pace / 100 in straight 30 Minute Pool Swim
• Half IM swim time – PR = 36:04 – Auburn Long Course 2009 or 32:11* (20% AG) Vineman 70.3 2009 (* I consider this a bit of an aberration – it’s an easier swim)
• IM swim time – PR = 1:14:23 – IM CDA 2010
• IM swim percentage – 30% AG and 29% OA – IM Louisville 2009

My approach – I am attacking this problem in several different ways, primarily with a technique focus, but hopefully improving fitness while improving said technique:

1. Hire a swim coach for a weekly session on technique – I have had a tri coach for a couple of years now, but have decided to hire a swim coach instead of a general tri coach. I will be writing my own plans and handling the bike and run myself and working with a swim coach in-person to focus on swim technique. For additional, supplementary technique focus while not working with the coach, I may consider adding the Finding Freestyle program to my agenda, but will consult with the swim coach first.
2. Swim frequency – my intent is to swim as many sessions a week as I can reasonably accomplish while maintaining bike and run fitness and within the constraints of my life (i.e. spending time with my family, going to work, making sure my wife has time to train, etc.) My weekly goal will be 5 times a week as a minimum with 6-7 as a stretch goal. A session will be defined as 30 minutes minimum. Since I am going to focus on technique and quality, I am not going to outline any distance goals. However, having said that, I expect to ramp up the volume as the months progress and will be tracking as best I can, both time working on technique and distance.
3. Accountability – since I won’t be working with a tri coach, I will use my blog to track progress and document my experience.
4. Swim volume – I won’t be focusing so much on volume initially, at least not in distance covered in the pool, but perhaps in time spent and number of sessions. I am not going to just do mindless volume since my goal is to “imprint” some new technique and not just slog through long yardage with my “bad” form. We will monitor this as we go.

So here's to some new swim adventures in the "off" season and the 2012 race season!