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This past week saw us complete our second century ride. Since I’ve attempted 4 organized rides I’m now at a 50% completion rate. Previous two DNFs were a broken off rear derailer and the whole Death Valley wind storm last year. More below on this event. The rest of the week was pretty solid. My body seems to be ok so far with this level of weekly effort since I got through all my planned workouts and was still generally functional.

Swim

1hr 48min (5000yds)

Tuesday

Tuesday’s swim was better than it has been in the previous few weeks. Maybe backing off biking and running a little the previous weekend was better. My arms felt stronger and my legs less heavy. Tuesdays are still a little transitional in that I’m really still just recovering from the weekend.

The set was a ladder, 25 up to 175 and then back to 25 (in 25 yard increments). My first 75 was my fastest ever pace: 1:31/100 yards. It’s nice to see a little ray of hope in each swim. The paces general ranged through from 1:40 to 1:50 depending on the length of the interval.

Thursday

The dreaded 2500 yard straight swim rolls around again. Well at least all I have to do is swim and press my watch lap button each lap. Once I’ve done 50 laps I’m out of there. No drills. No rest intervals. Simple. For the first time I was under a minute per lap for this length swim. 2500 yards took me 49 minutes. That’s the same time as I swam 2112 yards at Boise last year. Of course that was mostly because open water swimming is a whole other thing, a thing I can’t really do. Hopefully at Vineman the river setting won’t test my sighting skills like swimming 3/4 a mile out into a choppy freezing expanse of a lake, but I still should go work on that someday.

Bike

8hr 6min (125 miles)

Wednesday

Another session at M2 and another downward spiral. It’s good to get an hour or so of training in mid-week when I apparently am having trouble getting out on my bike, but I’m a little tried of these spirals. Here’s hoping there’s something new this week. Perhaps something a little sub-threshold.

Still, the workout went well. I got there early so I got some extra time spinning. Here’s the HR graph for the workout.

Saturday – Wine Country Century – 100 Miles. 4600ft gain. 7 hours

Saturday we drove up to Santa Rosa in glorious weather to take part in the Wine Country Century. There was apparently 2500 people in this thing, so we never felt very alone. Not all of them were doing the century.

The first section headed out through some farm land and typically awfully surfaced roads. As we’d started right at 7am we were periodically passed by stronger group riders. Not too stressful though, they were friendly and didn’t really swarm around us like in the first part of the Davis ride. We started to get into some rolling country after a while and then worked our way up the Grafton Rd grade which was actually the highest hill on the course. The road is never very steep though and we kept it pretty easy because 100 miles is still a long ride and this was early days.

At the top of that hill the 200km riders headed towards the coast while we descended towards Monte Rio on the Bohemian Hwy though the redwood trees. Nice descent. I thought we’d probably be overtaken a lot along here but it was okay. Either our down hilling was up to par (unlikely) or we just got lucky not to have to deal with much overtaking on the twisting road.

In Monte Rio we pulled in at the first rest area which was filled with people. It was really hard to imagine where all those people came from, I couldn’t even find a rack spot for my bike. Awesome aid stations on the whole ride though, this one featured hot tortillas that there were fillings for, as well as the usual array of cookies and fruit. I ate two cookies, breakfast of champions, as well as one of the tortillas with nothing inside it. And maybe a strawberry.

We left and headed briefly back along River Rd to Guernville and then turned back into the Redwoods. It was cold in this section after the stop and I wondered if leaving my arm warmers behind was such a good idea. Of course later in the day it was baking hot, so I didn’t really need them but it was chilly and I couldn’t really stop from tensing up from being cold. We took some pretty untraveled back roads and climbed a couple of short but much steeper hills, the second of which actually set a new (in the wild, I’ve done better than that at M2) 1 min power record (330 watts) as I sat in behind a strong looking rider and let him pace me up the steep final pitch. We passed people left and right as people wobbled all over the place. The whole climb was only 5 minutes fortunately and took about 250 watts average. The worst part was actually the descent, the road was in bad shape and at one point Patty was braking so hard I didn’t think I was going to stop myself from skidding into her as I couldn’t really get a lot of stopping power on the rough surface.

After these steep guys the terrain started to calm as we left the coastal hills back east and then north up towards River Road and on to the second rest area.

(Just after the 2nd aid station – Natural Light Photograph)

Soon after the second aid station, more than 4 hours into the ride and the major hills behind me, I decided it was time to get down on my aerobars and put in an hour or so of medium-hard effort to see what would happen. The results were mixed. It was excellent fun and only two people passed me in almost 30 minutes: one guy going fast on a tri bike who I was never going to keep up with, and another guy on a road bike who I followed along behind most of the way to lunch. The bad was the section didn’t end up being all that fast, about 16 miles/hr, because the trip up west side road was into a head wind and actually sloped uphill, although it rolls up and down. My power was around 175 for the first 30 minutes (NP 190, heart rate 160-165bpm), about where I wanted it, but then started to drop off. Eventually I started to get passed which at this stage of the ride (around 60 miles in), means either everyone else sped up or I’d slowed down. Obviously the latter is the correct answer. I took a Gu and then things picked up again and I put in a little more solid effort to get to lunch. My feeling is that the first 30 minutes was still too high an intensity for me 4 hours into the ride. I’ll have to see how things go the next month or so and try again. I need to find a workable intensity which enables me to eat and drink okay, avoids any cramping (my left quad had the beginnings of some cramping right before the lunch stop — dehydration might have been a factor there), but lets me progress through the course in a reasonable time. Also looking at the power graph, I think I hit the early hills too hard. I should have kept my power under 200-210 and not spiked my power do much going into them.

The lunch stop was pretty welcome. My shoulders and some spot between my shoulder blades were crying out for a break. I hung out on a tarp until Patty turned up then we sat around at a picnic table eating and drinking. They had little roast beef sandwiches between two pieces of flat bread that were really good. I may have had another cookie too.

For the last 30 miles Patty and I rode together. With the light downwind conditions it was easy enough to move along, but weren’t really flying either. 16 miles along was the final rest stop which had coke. Is there anything better than cold coke 86 miles into a century (in 85 degrees)?

From that aid station we headed south down though the Chalk Hill area towards the finish in Santa Rosa. The hill itself didn’t seem so bad, I passed a bunch of people on it and thought, like the writing on the road near the top: “What hill?”. Anyway, over the top of it and down the other side.

A picture of Patty coming down from Chalk Hill, pretty happy to have no hills ahead of her, I suspect:

From there it was basically a roll back into Santa Rosa and the finish.

A fun time was had by all.

Run

2hrs 42min (15.2 miles)

Tuesday and Thursday

Ran both days after work, but we kept it really easy and just ran around 3 miles easy each day. Thursday is usually a hill run but decided against that to save the legs for the bike ride.

Sunday
9 miles (1.5 hours)

I was a little uncertain how this run would go after the Wine Country Century the day before, but it went great. Ran along the trails: Sequoia Bayview and West and East ridge trails out and back. Stopped for a few minutes at a bench overlooking the hills, illuminated by the early morning sun and had my Gu. A cute dog came up to me, looked up at me, then his ball at my feet, then up at me again. Charades: 3 words, third word. I’m looking at it. Um… “Ball?” “Throw the ball”. I threw the ball. The dog was happy and so was I.

Anyway, I needed to run back and I worried whether I’d come crashing down, but instead the legs felt good with little sign of the day before and I ran back without taking any walk breaks. Good way to wrap up a great training week.

Total: 12hrs 36min.

Biking, Race reports, Sport, Swimming, Triathlon century, m2, santa rosa, wine country century

Another week and my build continues. We’re out of town next week so I added in a little longer bike this past weekend figuring there’ll be a bit of a fallback next week to recover. I’ve been on the bike each weekend pretty consistently for the past 3 months so it was time to put in a harder longer effort and see what my legs will do about it.

Swim

2hrs (5000yds )

I made it back into the pool two times last week. Every time that happens I feel like I’m making real progress towards my training. I’ve started to see actual progress in the numbers too. For one, I can swim 2500 yards twice a week and my arms only feel a little like falling off. Secondly, my 100 yard splits have improved in both speed and steadiness. I used to be able to swim 1:52 or so early in my set, but after 4 or 5 100s it was back to 2:00+. I’m now down around 1:45-1:47 for the whole set.

Tuesday: 2500yard in the pool

Tuesday I did 8x100s then 8x50s for my main set. The 100s were clearly a lot better than last year so I was pretty excited. Interestingly my 50s weren’t too much faster than the 100s, even perhaps slower. I think this points to a couple of things. The first is that when I try to swim faster, I often go slower because I’m less smooth. Yet another counter-intuitive element to swimming like how my kick makes me go slower. The other thing is I really don’t like 50s, they are more anaerobic than I particularly enjoy while having my head under water most of the time so I fall back to my 100s pace/effort too easily.

For drills I’ve been working on 3-5-7-3 breaths to work on my underwater breath out and general lung capacity while swimming. It’s also good to try to breath on my bad side. These are both fairly clear limiters so I might as well chip away at them during drill time.

Thursday: 2500yard in the pool

Thursday I was running late so swam at 8am instead. The pool was pretty much empty but at 9am just as I was getting out it was being cleared for some group class, so I guess 9am is a hard limit on lap swimming. Good to know.

The set of 10×75 followed by 10×50. The pace was pretty similar to Tuesday, but my arms were tired by the time I was done. I don’t think I should increase my swim distances for a while.

Bike

5hrs 37min (84 miles)

Wednesday: M2 Cycling Class (1hr 10min)

On Wednesday it was back to M2 with a pretty similar workout as last week. I think I went a little hard early on and was generally a mess by then end.

Sunday: 60 miles (4hrs 30)

Sunday we headed out to Clayton to do a loop of Mt Diablo, starting off with the Morgan Territory road climb. Since we’ve ridden this loop a few times before it was good to try an calibrate our fitness against the past couple of years.

The ride ended up being pretty hard. My normalized power was 180ish so that’s quite a bit higher than previous trips around the mountain and pretty solid for a 4 hour ride for me. Part of that was that Livermore valley was fairly windy and so there was some good hard pushes in there that kept the power up. I also pushed up Collier Canyon pretty hard into a head wind and had some fun riding by some people (it took a few minutes of 300+ watts to take out two cyclists but it was worth it, I’m usually the one being overtaken).

By the time we reached Danville, about 40 miles in, Patty had more or less had enough. Her new saddle is not breaking in quick enough and she was tired of fighting the wind. I decided to go ahead and get the car while she rode to Sports Basement. She ended up riding about 54 miles, so probably could have just ridden it in anyway.

In the end I had a pretty good ride. Power agent reports it was a new 30min and 1hr power record, plus I think it was probably a NP record too, so I’m hoping this means my cycling legs are on their way back.

Run

1hr 56min (10 miles)

The week was dominated by extremely wet running opportunities.

Tuesday: missed

Tuesday’s run was aborted because a few miles in Berkeley simply wasn’t worth going out in the middle of a storm. We instead sat in Peets across from the Claremont Hotel and watched a river of water pour off the tennis courts.

Thursday: 3.2 miles hill

Kelly didn’t go to gymnastics as she has her parent’s ability to get injured. Plus, I think she’s tired of it and isn’t really making much progress despite 6 hours a week there. I know I look for improvements continuously so I can imagine it’s probably getting to her a bit. She seems to generally enjoy it though and doesn’t want to give up on it, so we’ll see how it goes between now and the summer.

Anyway, that left us scrambling for a run, so we met at home and did a quick run up Park Blvd and back down the canyon.

Saturday: 1.5 hours (about 7 miles)

On Saturday we headed out in another storm to Redwood Regional Park. Driving there we could see the storm front moving across the Bay towards us — a wall of blackness. It started to rain as soon as we got out of the car and by the time we returned we had run an hour and a half in pouring rain, shin deep puddles and lots of mud, plus the temperature had dropped down 10 degrees. It was a run to remember.

In other running news I have a new running watch. Two years after killing my Garmin I have the FR70. The main aim is to get a HR reading off my Garmin HR strap which I use with my Powertap. That way in a race I can get a HR value on my watch when I get off my bike and start running. It also has a foot pod so I get some measure of pace and distance. It is supposed to be as accurate as GPS, though uncalibrated it was about .2 of a mile different from the cell phone GPS track I made. I’m inclined to think the watch may be more accurate because running in a canyon under redwood trees in a storm is possibly the worst case senario for a GPS device. Anyway, I hope to calibrate it at the track to improve it’s accuracy and then will do some more comparisons.

Total

9hrs 33min

Biking, Running, Sport, Swimming, Triathlon 100s, Biking, m2, morgan territory rd, mt diablo, rain, redwood park, Running, swimming, vineman

A slightly late recap of week 3 of my 4 week build phase. The total hours are a little down partly because of the missed pool swim and partly because I’ve changed accounting of my ride time. I now only count time moving, which on Saturday was actually 25 min or so less than time we were out on our bikes.

Swim: 1hr 56 min

Three swims this week. I think overall my mood was discouraged with swimming.

Monday and Wednesday I did my pool swims as scheduled. Monday’s main set was 4x200yds which I thought went well. Between 3:40 and 3:50 for each of the 200s. I was actually kind of excited about that pace. On Wednesday I came back down to earth with a 2700 yard session at the Oakland YMCA crammed in before I had to be at Kelly’s school for an event. This time my 200 meter swims were at more like 2:00/100 yards, though mixed into a lot more yards. My endurance felt better than the previous couple of week, but obviously it effects my pace quite a bit.

I felt by Friday like it was too late to get faster so I bailed on my so-called quality set. Instead I went open water swimming on the weekend for the first time this year. It felt suddenly great to be out swimming. No chlorine. No black line. No locker room full of fat ugly naked people. It’s like trail running after running on the treadmill all year. Plus, wetsuit buoyancy is always fun. I think this will be the pattern from now on, open water experience will be more useful to me than a third pool workout.

Bike: 6hrs 13min

Another two M2 sessions on Tuesday and Thursday. At Tuesday’s class there was hardly anyone there as the class was riding to Santa Cruz for the tour of California stage finish. On Thursday they all turned up smashed for racing 120 miles with 3 trips to skyline and back to coast, or something like that. It was all super grande burritos this and tacos that. Um, what? Anyway, it serves them right. Maybe next year!!

Our weekend didn’t lend itself very well to a biking. Three birthday parties to take our daughter to! However at 3pm on Saturday we dropped her off at a party and set out towards Davis hoping for a little central valley flat and fast. Patty was pleading for a break from the hills, and I was trying to get a little race specific. As we got out that way the sky filled with dark thunderstorms and the wind started to blow.

It could be like that in Boise. Maybe it would be good experience. Or maybe we’d be hit by lightning or blown off our bikes into the path of a truck. Or maybe we’d just be plowing into wind and rain for hours. We bailed on mental toughness and turned and headed back towards home. Our ride was around the Three Bears loop again. We made about 42 miles or so out of it, with lots of climbing.

This ride was a little discouraging. I felt slow over the hills, as usual, but quick on the flats and rolling terrain. On the hills I worked hard to get up each climb only to look back and see Patty 40 meters back. Three months of bike training over her and I’m just 40 meters ahead of her? On top of that my GPS data would suggest that on the flats I wasn’t exactly going too fast either. I should be able to sit in at 18+ miles/hr given the watts I do these days in class, but instead I average more like 15-16 miles/hr. Perhaps the fatigue runs deep and a taper and race excitement will do me some good.

I’m contemplating getting a Powertap. That would answer a lot of questions. And REI has 20% off right now. There’s only one reason not to get one: money.

Run: 1 hour 55 min

While I’m still not running that much we hit the trails twice this week and loved it. It was great to run in some beautiful places again. The first run was an evening one out in the water district near Moraga, slotted in before an LMJS Race Committee meeting. It was mostly just the horses, the wood peckers, the bunnies, the turkey vultures and us. Running over hills seemed hard but I also felt strangely strong. It was a good run.

On Sunday, again following the theme of squeezing in workouts where they will fit, we dropped Kelly at the third of her parties and went running in Tilden Regional Park until it was time to pick her up. I felt like I wanted to run for hours, but I also felt tired from the bike ride the day before. Not so much that it really got in the way of running, but still it took the edge off the fun. Patty declared that she hated to run after biking and that she wasn’t cut out to be a triathlete. She does seem to have taken a general liking to biking however and we’re hoping to do a century this summer.

Nutritional experiments

I’ve also been experimenting with what to drink/eat on the bike for the race. It’s still a work in progress but I tried just carbo-pro in water (3 scoops) and while it has a slight flour-like taste to it, it’s still easy to drink and I didn’t get sick of it like the Gatorade. This week I’m going to mix in some Nuun for flavor and electrolytes, and if that is vaguely successful then at this point I’ll go with that mixed with pieces of bonk breaker. Unfortunately that leaves me a little short of sodium especially if it’s hot and I have no heat training at all. I tried adding salt directly to the drink mix but the taste took a big dive in the direction of sea water, so I don’t think that’s a good option unless it can be covered up with more flavor.

For the run I’m going to do what I always do, do the Gu. I might up my planned intake to every 3 miles instead of every 45 min. Then I’ll take liquid at the aid stations. Actually I really haven’t decided that, I might run with a bottle.

Anyway, that’s it. In just over two weeks I’ll be loaded up and driving to Boise!

Biking, Running, Swimming, Triathlon

Another big training week, over 12 hours this week. I finally completed plan on the swimming and biking, plus my yoga session, but only ran twice. In theory we were going to run off the bike on Saturday, but our ride went so long we high tailed it back to Oakland to pick up our daughter. In general I’m feeling pretty strong right now and the cold I was sniffling with a week ago seems to have mostly gone away. One more big ride in a week and then I’ll begin to taper. Exciting!

Swim: 2hr 28min (6435 yards)

Three full sessions this week which really increased my distance. On wednesday I fitted the swim into my day by swimming at the Oakland YMCA downtown. They have a 25 meter pool rather than 25 yards so I did my workout in meters. Who knew a meter could be so much longer than a yard? Anyway, that resulted in my longest ever pool session: 2734 yards exactly. It was a messy mix of lane swimmers so I didn’t even bother to log my lap times, but the core of it was 500 meters of drills and 10x100m as fast as I could.

During most of these laps a man with a sleek swimmers body stood at one end of my lane watching us. He was waist deep in water and looking annoyed. Eventually I guess he decided we were not good enough to swim with and he left after doing two laps of butterfly in the next lane over. Sorry dude, we are not butterfly swimming freaks like you, but at least we were swimming laps, and I’m not swimming that slow when I’m swimming 100s. I could see why he might be generally annoyed though, in all the other lanes at least one swimmer was pushing the definition of swimming to include -floating with the current- or -jumping up and down shaking hands above the water-. Sigh, swimming sucks. And not because of the swimming part.

Bike: 7 hrs 8 mins

Another two sessions at M2 and I’m feeling like my biking is really coming around. I now classify hills as nothing but rollers that I can mostly cruise over without too much trouble. Tuesdays class I already blogged about. Thursday I was working at home, combined with trying to get a family of raccoons out of our attic so I had to take public transport (bus, bart train, bus) into San Francisco to take my class and then (bus and bus) all the way home again. The instructor was a fill-in so it was a different style. He had us do a spiral ladder 3min, 2 min, 1 min, 30sec, with power increasing up from 70% – 110%, then reverse the durations but keeping the power high (110% down to 95%). After that I think it was 3x5min at 100-110%. I say I think, because I think I blanked out somewhere in there. The session finished with some sprints. 100% is a 10min max power. By my counting I did close to 15 min (broken) at or above 100%, and a bunch more in the 90% range. Ouch. Still threshold workouts like that are what I need.

Saturday we drove up to Windsor, CA and rode a variation of the Vineman course. In total we rode 60 miles, thanks to getting lost a few times. It took us forever, but included stops at goats, horses, muffins at a cute general store, and a lot of stops to look at a slightly blurry printout of the full vineman course map. A beautiful bike route the whole way, the hills are still very green.

Anyway, I spent a good amount of that time on my aerobars and have gained a lot more confidence. I don’t think I’ll change them again, just go with it now I have something I consider slightly comfortable. While Patty and I generally don’t ride too fast together, I did a few sections at what I considered the effort I hope to use in the race. The result was a little over 18 miles/hr on average over rolling terrain. It would be nice to have a power meter in the race, but it isn’t going to happen for this one, so at this point I think I’ll go off my HR, which I think should be 140 or less. I may go into M2 and ride 70-75% on the power for 1/2 hour or so and see what my HR does to get a final plan.

On the down side I partially pulled out my rear shifter from the end of the aerobar and lost my lowest two gears during the steepest climb of the route, so I’ll have to fix that this week. I did still make it to the top though. That course is super-rough in places, I’m surprised anything is still attached to my bike anymore. Also, my hydration wasn’t too good either as again I got pretty tired of the gatorade. I took in about 50oz of fluid containing about 650 calories, plus 220 calories in bonk breakers and a 100 calorie Chocolate Gu. 1050 calories, or 215 calories and hour. Not enough! However, that didn’t count the muffin, and the muffin was good!

Run: 1 hr 46 min

Still not much running, but I did try. We set off to run 13 miles on Wednesday. Following the longest swim I’ve ever done that morning and a pretty tough bike session the night before, we made 3 miles and gave up. Both of us felt exhausted and hungry and decided instead to just go get hamburgers and extra-salty fries! The next morning I ran to Kelly’s school while she rode her bike for Bike to Work day, then ran home. At least that was a decent run so I can still do it. Otherwise it’s getting pushed out of the way to let my other key workouts happen without being compromised by exhaustion.

Biking, Running, Swimming exhausted, hamburgers, m2, muffins, salt, sonoma, vineman, ymca

Another week of training. Seven weeks to go. This week was around 10 hours of volume, a bit less than last week because I missed two runs, a swim, and we’ll do our weekly yoga session tomorrow.I’m trying to relax about that, work and life are always going to get in the way.

Swim: 1hr 30 min

Two pretty good swims this week. I swam 2500yds for the first time on Wednesday, squeezed in before a day of torture in Agile Development training. By the end of that swim I was dragging and couldn’t really muster much more that a struggling survival cruise pace for the last of my 100s. Oh well, first volume then intensity. 2500yds took almost an hour including a set of drills, so that’s the longest swim workout I’ll do for this event. Now to make it stronger.

Bike: 6hrs 33 min

Patty and I headed off this morning for our ‘long’ bike ride, about 40 miles. We rode Pinehurst and Redwood Roads, past the back side of Lake Chabot to Castro Valley and then followed Crow Canyon across to San Ramon. I’m not sure we’d ride that last part again, people use it to get from 580 to 680 and the speed of cars and sketchy shoulder didn’t make for the funnest riding. Plus, we didn’t see a single other cyclist, a sure sign. Beyond that we stuck to the Ironhorse and St Marys Rd to get back to where we started.

We ride painfully slowly as we spin our way over hill after hill. And then once we were beyond the hills, riding on the recreational trails were congested today, lots of people with dogs and kids with training wheels etc. Oh well. Somehow I’m hoping the high intensity power training on Tuesday and Thursday will magically combine with my weekend time-in-the-saddle on race day.

Run: 1hr 41 min

Hopefully my running can still maintain itself while I get the biking and swimming in shape. This week I ran just once, Friday night. It was a beautiful evening run around Lake Chabot on the trails. It was the first time back there since the marathon. Lots of people. Felt strong even though my overall state is a little fatigued. Anyway, perfect way to end the week.

Garden

When you run for fours hours productivity for the weekend is shot. When you bike, other stuff can happen. Saturday we worked on the garden most of the day. The result was at least two green bins worth of weeds and other foliage. We also mulched the flower gardens, mowed and trimmed the lawns, and planted tomatoes and herbs.

Coffee

And of course there was coffee, to fuel it all…

Biking, Kelly, Running, Swimming, Triathlon

We’ve been practicing our open water swimming here at Lake Anza in Tilden Regional Park (Berkeley). One day Patty will embrace swimming. Today was not that day. For me, things are going fairly well with it. It really doesn’t bother me to be swimming in the green murk and I’m up to 1000 yards continuous swim in the pool. I’m feeling pretty confident about swimming 400m during the triathlon in a few weeks. The main issue now is sighting. Doing it without using a lot of energy is a problem, which probably means I’m trying to get my head too far out of the water, or attempting to do it at the wrong time. Of course swimming around in circles is not good either. I might need to be able to swim 1000 yards!

Swimming lake anza, open water, swamp monster, swimming, tilden

This winter I’ve been trying to learn how to swim. This is kind of a big deal for me since I’ve always hated being in a pool. Sure, I can swim a bit. Breaststroke here or there, thread water, generally save myself in an emergency. But actual graceful swimming, effortless fishlike swimming, as in something I might do for exercise. No. Never.

So right before Christmas I joined the YMCA and started going there with a friend from work. She was a high school swimmer and pretty much does swim like a fish. So much so that it amuses her how bad I am at swimming. At one point I finally demostrated what I knew of free style. It lasted a few strokes before I stood up shocked at how much water had just gone up my nose. She thought for a moment and then declared that I was lifting my head to breath and my legs were sinking. Hmmm, just one of the problems. I stood mid-pool dejected. How could I suck at this so badly.

As the winter continued I concentrated on the drills in my teach yourself swim video (Total Immersion (TI) if you must know). Satisfied I could glide around OK, I got as far as what they call skating. You glide along on your side with the bottom arm outstretched towards where you’re going, head looking towards to bottom. This was the first a-ha moment for me. I could balance in the water, kick gently, and move along like I was almost swimming. When I needed to breath I rolled onto my back to breath, took a couple of good breaths then repeated. It was a big deal actually being in a lane and moving along with the other swimmers even if I had this wacky TI drill thing going the whole time. For fun, if I put on flippers, I could actually swim by my work friend. Completely cheating, but still, when it comes to victories and swimming I was willing to take anything I could get.

The next break-through came in the shallow kids pool where I was relegated due to packed lanes. The life guards hate me for using it because they have to get down from their usual tower and come over and watch me as well. And watch me they do. But they pretend not to. I know they do. And they contain their laughter too. I know they do. Anyway, I started to incorporate a stroke into my gliding and actually found a rhythm with using the entry of my hand into the water as the clue to do a body switch, pushing the hand forward in front of me in counter-action to the other hand pulling. It was just the way it was supposed be, at least how the video described it. It’s supposed to be a core action, the hands and arms just follow along with the program. At last, something in this stupid video was making sense.

For all the victories (ha, so far between victories), for a long time I was still left with a disconnect. I could skate, I could switch, I could roll onto my back for air, but somehow when I tried to put it together then it didn’t work. While the solution wasn’t obvious at the time, what was happening was when I took a breath my body would essentially fold under me, sending my butt down, head up, and sinking, spluttering, flailing resulted. The life guards would pretend they weren’t panicked each time I did this, but I could see them reaching for there floaty life saving thingeys. It wasn’t pretty, and it was discouraging.

Finally I had the breakthrough I needed, and initally I did it by cheating. I didn’t go out of my way to cheat, but it was still cheating. I broke with the TI rules and I started to pull with my offhand as I rolled to breath, rather than keep it straight out. It got my head to air. Then, after breathing, if my head almost dived back under following my arm into the water I kept some form of stability in the water and could stroke and breath again the next time up. For the first time in this long process I was swimming. It was crappy swimming, It was cheaters swimming, but I was swimming. I headed into the lap pool, put on fins for some extra help, and right then swam my first pool length. Then another. And another. Then I got out and quit while I was ahead.

I got back to work and hit the internet, then headed to the book store. One of the first things I read was in ‘Going Long’, the ironman book. It specifically mentioned my off-hand regression, that it was common for swimmers to push down with their hand to help them breath.

Off side arm — in an attempt to push our heads out of the water, many swimmers will push down with their offside arm when breathing. Remember to let the leading hand float for a little bit when breathing.

Hmmm, it’s good to see I’m not alone in this discovery. It didn’t have any solid advice about how to fix it, but I did get the idea it was to do with not having a proper roll. Next step was to watch swimming videos on YouTube all night and I noticed one thing which give me the final clue I needed. I had the idea to use my stroke to help with the roll, one hand entering the water to push that side down, the other hand pulling back and to my leg to pivot that side up, all the while turning my head to the air. Next time I was in the pool, family day at the local city pool, I gave it a go and it worked! No more off-hand regression, in fact it was necessary to extend my offhand to make it work right.

That was a couple of weeks ago and I think my stroke has come a long way. I can now work on specific parts of it as I swim rather than working on it for a couple of strokes and then standing up to breath. Within a week I’ve progressed to being able to swim 50m at a time, an official lap (not just a ‘Peter lap’ which equals 25m), and swimming a total of about 1000m over a session. The next goal will be to do 100m at a time and then keep working up my distance from there. Hopefully the improvements will keep coming with time in the water.

It’s been pretty amazing to get this far since it’s been something I’ve always hated and thought I was born to suck at. Now I don’t really suck at it much more than the next guy, and I’ve grown to really enjoy it as a form of exercise.  Now, if I can just figure out the effortless graceful fishlike part of it I’ll be all set.

Swimming swimming