Swimming 101

Since November 2006 I’ve spent roughly 150 hours swimming about 250,000 meters. I now know two things for sure,

1. I still don’t know how to swim properly.
2. It’s going to take me a long time to figure it out and swim properly.

Most of the swimming I did back in 2006 and 2007 was at the Markham YMCA, where I would get in the pool and swim back and forth for anywhere from 60 to 160 lengths (1.5 km to 4 km) I didn’t pay much attention to my stroke, I didn’t think it was too bad and it seemed to the job. I managed to get my 4k time down from 1:32 to 1:20 and I swam the 4k distance 10 times in the pool.

So along comes the Ironman and in the water we go. The water was warm, 84/85 degrees and a bit of current both ways. My time was 1:17:46 which placed me 77th out of 187 in my age group. Not bad. The average for the group was 1:20:51. To give you an idea of the spread, the fastest guy was 59:26 and the slowest swimmer came in at 1:58. All in all, I was pleased with my swim. Open water swimming is very different than following the big black stripe on the bottom of the pool at the Y. It’s very easy to swim off course and add a few hundred meters to your swim and of course there is always the pushing and shoving of a mass swim start or just swimming in a group of people.

This year my swim training has been all different. Tim and I joined a Masters program in Stouffville. I wish I’d done it years ago. Since October we’ve been coached by Yorrick Tong. Yorrick has coached at the university level and he is a great coach. I can safely say that there is absolutely nothing remotely similar to my current stoke compared to the way I swam in 2006. Basically, everything I was doing was wrong. Arms, legs, hips, shoulders, head, breathing, catch, pull, push, everything. Wrong, wrong, wrong. All moving in the wrong way at the wrong time!

Most of the swimming we do with Yorrick is swim drills. Drills isolate one part of the stroke at a time to allow you to concentrate on that only until it is corrected, then on to the next problem. Yorrick’s goal for us is to correct our stroke so and allow us to swim efficiently and with much less effort. Less energy expended during the swim means more energy to use on the bike and run. We’ve come a long way in the swimming department. I’ll swim 4k this Sunday am and see where I’m at. Whatever the time is, I know it will be much less of an effort that it used to be.