Tonight I absolutely NAILED my swimming lesson.
Which has made me think about my progress. When I first started the TriSquad swimming lessons, I felt slow and useless. Everyone was WAY better than me and it really bothered me because I didn’t think I was THAT bad…but I was, and it was a bit shit.
Initially I just got really grumpy about it and annoyed. But that doesn’t solve anything and as you can probably predict, it didn’t make me swim any better!
Once James started with the TriSquad too though, he wanted to buy all of the swimming aids that everyone else has. I didn’t see the benefit in those at all – I mean if i can’t swim properly, why would I add fins and pull bouy? Surely they would just lull me into a false sense of security?
Well, I can tell you now…as soon as I put the fins on, I realised that my legs weren’t kicking properly…which led to me thinking about how I was kicking. Once I was kicking properly, my arms seemed to do what they were supposed to be doing, which led to me be able to breath properly…which led to me swimming better overall. Even so that when I took off the fins, I felt like my swimming was better overall.
And this was just in the space of a 1 hour swimming lesson.
So, I tried them again in the week and found that they were useful. If they’re useful, maybe I should try James’ pull bouy…
Funnily enough that made a difference too.
So much so, that todays session I went with what everyone else was doing:
Today I did not manage the full 1700m, but I did get to 1300m…So I managed the warm-up, which was 100 freestyle at an easy pace, then 100m using a kick board and fins. Finally, 100 freestyle, getting faster with each 25m length.
I also managed to drill, which was 300m overall, but each 100m was a bit
different. We started with 100m of ‘catch-up’ wearing fins. This is where you
swim freestyle, but you wait for one arm stroke to be completely finished
before starting the next stroke; one arm is always trying to catch up to the
other. Next was 100m of swimming with fins, but with our fists balled up – this
was HARD! Finally 100m of freestyle…decidedly easier than the last two!
I managed the first two parts of the main session: 300 freestyle, at an easy pace and 300m freestyle, at a medium pace. Although, to be honest both were pretty much the same pace. I did only 100m of the final one…again that was pretty much freestyle at a medium pace!
Overall I swam 1300m!
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