Swimming Lessons

I am 40 years old and am taking swimming lessons for the first time since elementary school.  A woman I run with is an excellent swimmer.  She coaches the kids club and the adult masters swimmers.  This week she is offering an adult swim clinic from 7:30-8:00pm Monday - Thursday (for $10 btw - yes, $10 for the whole week).  The time of night almost couldn't be worse for us (the start of bedtime) so I am grateful to John for making space for me to go swim.

Last night was our first clinic.  Tiffany had us warm up (demonstrate our technique?) with a 100 meter swim, then gave us drills and instruction based on what she saw.  I will confess I went into this feeling a little self conscious.  I know I am not an efficient swimmer.  I know I have been practicing my bad technique for years now.  Despite being in reasonably good shape I am sllloooowwww in the water.  I approached this clinic believing I would be making a bit of a fool of myself.  And wondering if I would be able to internalize any improvements.

After the 100 m warm up we did kick drills to practice kicking on top of the water, keeping our hips up and our butt almost out of the water.  She emphasized kicking with your whole leg, from the hip and keeping your ankles loose.  She told us to make some noise with our kicks.

The next drill we worked on was arm placement in the water.  We did arm strokes with our faces out of the water so we could see our arm placement.  Then we dipped our chin into the water to practice sighting and keeping our bodies aligned.  Finally we did what she called the 10 kick drill.  Basically we were laying stretched out on our side, one goggle in the water, 10 kicks and switch.  This was by far the hardest of the drills for me.  I felt clumsy and awkward.  Which probably means that drill was emphasizing the things I need to work on the most.

Tiffany's daughter was on hand to help us and to demonstrate.  That kid is such a fish!  She has taken my Spinning class a couple of times with her mom so I told her she couldn't laugh at me in the pool!

We ended the clinic by swimming the full free style again. Tiffany told me to try to take 4 strokes (instead of my usual 2) between breaths.  I was able to do that much better than I expected (I only slipped up once or twice).  Even with just 30 minutes of instruction and drills I felt better on the last 100 m than the first.  Tiffany said I actually look pretty good in the water, but my arms are basically a mess.  She said I am technically fairly accurate and graceful (ha ha, me?) but I am just not grabbing any water, so my stroke is inefficient.  She said tonight we would do some work on that.

I don't know yet what I think I want to do for triathlons this summer.  I will probably do at least one (this one very close to my house with the shortest swim ever?) but if I get over the hump of the swim who knows?  There is still a part of me that would like to do the Y-Tri this summer.  That race is sort of the marker for me on becoming more fit, learning to push myself, learning to compete.  I've had real improvements on that race each year I've done it, making me wonder if I could keep doing better?