Swimming Update

I have been following a Swim Smooth training program in an effort to improve my swimming and I have to say it is going very well.

With the run up to Christmas I have not been in the pool as often as I should have and I realised that I would be about a week short of finishing the 24 sessions before my training is interrupted and disrupted by the Christmas break. Rather than have a two week break before finishing this program I decided to end this training cycle now and start again at the beginning of next year. Therefore I skipped some sessions and went straight to the time trial that should be the last session so that I could see if I had improved since doing the same test at the start of the program.

Well the improvement is huge. I think some of this is due to pacing myself slightly better this time and some is due to increasing my mileage each week. However I think a significant portion of the improvement is due to me swimming much better. I feel I am much more balanced in the water and am causing much less drag. There are still things I need to work on a lot - my head movement when I am breathing is still nowhere near right for example.

From doing the program I have also learnt a lot about doing the the program (if that makes sense). I know I need to slow down while doing the drills and concentrate much more on the aspect of my stroke that the drill is intended to improve rather than just getting to the other end of the pool. But I am really keen to start swimming again next year as I know there is still a lot of improvement required and just as importantly I know that I have a method that is going to produce that improvement.

For the record my times for the 400m time trial were:
before: 7:38
after: 6:59