Swimming with Billy

From my last post, you can see that I was pretty glad not to be swimming last night with triathletes, rather I was on deck as Gary and Di were/are off on holiday. The tirathletes run a "winter series" of which once a month there's a 400M time trial and that coincided with last night.

I haven't been on deck for this lot for a long while so it's nice to have a change in perspective. And I have to say that overall the technique isn't too bad (and for a triathlete group that swim once a week it's pretty good). I did manage to talk/suggest one or two things to a few swimmers. To be fair most of them suffer from the same set of problems (don't all swimmers) and most of those are the same faults that I (still) have. The funny thing is that I am not sure they believe me because the difference in technique/speed between them and myself is significant (but then I swim 3-5 times a week and have done for a number of years).

But the end result of last night is that I am encouraged to may be write one or two longer articles about bits of technique that I do well/badly but differently to the rest of the group - it might help explain why I am a bit quicker than them.

Yesterday was a killer, a real killer. Due to work/family commitments it worked out that I could do a swim fit session in Stockport yesterday. And I had a word (Tuesday) that I really could do with a bit of 'Fly practice - Darlington Masters and the last Crusader both told me more than I need to know about my stamina and ability over 100M. Which is fair enough because somehow I/we never get around to much fly these days.

So yesterday was different - there were five of us: Dave (super speedie), Martin (super speedie), two lady improvers and me. Craig gave us a choice - IM or fly, I chose fly everyon else IM. The IM practice was grim 10 x 100 IM on 1:30 followed by 2 x 200IM "best effort"! Thank you very much, I'll do the other... It was after the second repeat that I realised this could have been a really bad move:

Warm Up:
1 x 400 EZ
8 x 50 (25 torpedo kick, build to max; 25 EZ swim)

Main set:
12 x 75 fly on 1:30
swum as 1 x 25 EZ on 30
1 x 50 build to max on 1:00

Let's just get it straight - there wasn't much build to max on that one! I did manage the set and I was doing a rather fine impression of an asthmatic fly in a bowl of soup by the end (ok from about repeat 6).

For some reason I asked to do it again next Thursday...