Swimming Breakthrough

After swimming over 15k yards last week, I thought for sure I would finally start to get faster in the pool. For the last couple of years, I have steadily made solid gains biking and running, but for swimming, I only got slower and not slower. No matter how more I swam, or how much harder I swam, I just couldn't actually swim faster than I did when I first started triathlon. I did, of course, gain endurance in the pool. But at no time did I ever gain speed. My fastest 400m swim to date is still the second triathlon I ever competed in. At the time, I was swimming more as a cool down to my weight lifting routine. Last winter, when I put in huge time in the pool, and was hitting bigger and faster workouts, I was still slower over 400m in a race. Though all that swimming did take my running to a new level. And such was the case. The more I seemed to swim, the faster I ran, but not swam. Of course, my longer swims did get faster, but that was more from overall increased endurance and improved ability to swim in open water, and not because I actually gained any swimming speed. Through all of this, I knew there had to be something, some part of my stroke, that was hindering me. Every time I swam with others that were at my speed, or even just faster, it seemed like their legs were sinking in the water and their overall posture terrible in comparison. Certainly, there was some major part of my swim stroke that I just wasn't getting. Well I was right. So very right.

Throughout the last couple of years, as I seemingly fixed some part of my stroke, and correspondingly felt faster in the water, I was convinced that I had finally done it. But each time, the fix was correspondingly quite small, and often, quite inconsequential. From all the time spent working on the "connection" between the lower body and upper body in the stroke, to just recently when I finally learned how to perform a full 6 beat kick with no deadspots (turns out I've always had a great 4 beat kick, but aside from the opening sprint at the beginning of a race, I need to be focusing on a 2 beat kick). Each time, from keeping my head more still in the water and letting it rotate with my body to correcting my hand entry to entering right near my head instead of throwing it out as far as I can, the actual differences in speed were quite minimal. Even one of the big ones, where I flattened my hand out and kept my fingertips from creeping up to the top of the water without my wrist going with it, didn't actually shave a large chunk of time off. So what was the tip that finally did it?

High elbows. Only I had already been working on that. High elbows in the water AND out of the water right? However, I didn't really understand fully what that meant, and that in the water was by far the most important. Sure, my elbows were "high". But not near high enough. In order to grab and "catch" as much water as possible, the hand needs to start going straight back as quickly as possible. And what this means is that elbow actually stays at the top of the water during the entire pull phase of the stroke, as the elbow bends and the hand moves as straight backward as possible. Not diving immediately deep and pushing the head up out of the water as I had previously swam, virtually my whole swimming life. Now high elbows out of the water means good rotation, which is important, but not nearly as much as how much water you can actually catch and push behind you to propel you forward. Combine this with a tip I got from local pro, Daniel Tigert, at the Tri-Okc expo, to push my stroke out, away from my body (how it feels, but not what is happening), so that my hands don't cross my centerline upon entry, and I finally gained significant speed in my swim stroke. Out of the approximate 15 seconds per 100 that I had needed to shave off my swim stroke in order to at least be at the back of the pro ranks on the swim, 10 seconds had dropped virtually overnight. Swimming with the pros is now that much closer of a reality and I now have the confidence boost my swim training needed, knowing that the big question, "when is my swimming finally going to get faster?" has now been answered.