Today was a rinse-and-repeat of yesterday. Are you getting bored with this yet? I am not. I am making progress, though it is inches and I have yards to go still.

90 minutes, working on breathing with a variety of drills, roughly 3000 yards, 587 active calories.

Adult Swim Club. 1650m
Warm-up 100 kick, 100 Free

3 x
50m Shark ( 25m Left/25m right; works on your roll & kick )
50m Touch - Touch/Shark ( Lead Hand Stationary: Pull, Touch Lead, Recycle above Water to Hip)
50m 6 kick ( Slow Pull/Fast Kick )
100m Free incorporating exaggerated Body Roll, Slow Pull with Fast Kick tempo

2x
50m 2 Arm Back Stroke - Ensure Arm's are balanced and equidistant on centerline
50m 6 Kick Bk ( exaggerate Body Roll, Slow Pull/Fast Kick )
50m 1 Arm Bk - exaggerate Body Roll & Fast Kick
100m Bk - Put it all together

3x
25m Virginia Drill; Kick against wall until whistle, flip & sprint

125m Easy Cool down

MAN, I miss swimming when I haven't done it in a while! Today was the first day in almost two weeks-- conferences, travel, Spring break, more conferences.

Got in about 70 minutes

1 mile @ 57 minutes

Two people I tend to split the lane, more than two you have to circle.

MonkeyMel21 wrote: »

@girlwithcurls2 do you circle swim with two people in a lane, or just each take a side? Just curious how others do it and why!

Unless they are my friend and I know we swim the same speed or don't mind waiting, I split the lane, which is the same as just each taking a side. Circling is for well matched people who are working together.

4000 yards @ 75 minutes

Okay this whole changing your stroke thing? Harder than you might think. My elbows like the change though and so does my breathing. It feels easier physically. Now to make it the habit and not have to be quite so mindful of it.

Adult Swim Club. 1600m While walking to the Pool I just knew that I was going to struggle today, 5 km run with our local Running Club Yesterday - Hills and a few more Hills.

Warm-up
100m Free, 100m kick

2x KICK
50m 6 Kick Switch
50m 6 Beat
100m Free

5x Free
100m, 1-3 Descending, 4 Pull, 5 Sprint 10s RI

2x Breast
50m Scull -Pull
50m Kick
100m

100m Cooldown

juliet3455 wrote: »

@MonkeyMel21 With 2 people it's usually split the lane. Unless you have a person with control issues and insists on circle swimming even when he is the only person in the lane ( we have 1-2 of these special people ). I always try to negotiate with who ever is in the lane. Nothing worse than constantly catching up to a slower swimmer and then they start to lane block preventing you from passing.

This. We split, but she didn't wait to make any kind of contact with me. I wear glasses, so I don't see who is at the other end of the lane. I do have commercial prescription goggles (so they're not perfect), so I can see if there is a body down there, but she should have waited until I returned and then asked to split. She's a really nice gal, I talked to her in class one day, but clearly she doesn't understand etiquette...

I'm always open to learning better etiquette! I feel like I have totally just jumped in lanes several times before, when needed, with someone without making eye contact! But I don't think I've ever put anyone out or blocked anyone....I try to pay attention to what's going on. I have commercial rx goggles too and hated swimming before I got them! I've never had to circle swim, yet, but I worry about when that day comes because from what I see I swim faster than 80-90% of the others at the pools I go to.

One trick to entering a lane is to sit on the edge with your legs dangling in, because the person is going to see that when the turn, if they don't stop they should take the side the want and then you can slip in and get on with your workout.

The other is to wait for them to pause at the end and simply ask to share. Both work.

@girlswithcurls2 - odd...I always prefer an empty lane to sharing.

girlwithcurls2 wrote: »

The problem is that if I had gone bombing up the center of the lane and she had come down one side, we would have collided. It wouldn't have taken anything off her swim to wait and ask, "Can we split?" I'm not sure at all why she didn't take the empty lane next to me, lol.

Yeah, I always get excited when I get my own lane, lol.

4 miles yesterday.
1000 years warm up
3 sets of 2x50 sprints with 500 paced after each set,
2x100 sprint to finish the first 3000.
3000 paced
50 sprint to finish the 4 miles.

@fishgutzy "Active calories" is a term the Apple Watch 2 is using. They figure that there are rest calories--calories you burn if you are just sitting at a computer--and active calories--the calories you expend from exercising. So for a 670 active calorie swim of 90 minutes, I probably had something like 850 total calories burnt, 180 of those total calories were rest calories.

This is one of the nice things about wearing a watch that continuously measures your heart rate. If I am pushing, I will score a lot more active calories, but when I am just cruising, I do not. I think it is probably a lot more accurate than the various calculators that are out there.

Saturday I was back in the suburbs swimming for my coach. First a review in the pool of what I have been working on the last two weeks--breathing--and then most of the time I was swimming in the tank and then finishing up in the pool.

A tank is great because it lets your coach stand next to you as you swim and see what you are doing from multiple camera angles, but it is a pain to swim in because there is a lot more turbulence than in the pool.

Swimming the first review 25 in the pool, my coach says "your breathing is 1000% better, but..." so mission accomplished on breathing, which is still not everything it needs to be, but is better. When I can swim a fast 100 or 200 and then continue into active recovery with no break and feel my heart rate come back down to something reasonable, I will know I am there with my breathing. I am still using up too much energy to breath, but it is getting better.

Improving my breathing is literally transformative for my swimming. When I am breathing poorly, my feet sink and my leading hand drops when I take a breath. This causes a lot of drag and I expend a lot of energy to push myself back up to the surface.

When I do better with my breathing, like in that first 25 on Saturday, I feel myself gliding through the water at a speed that is unusual for me, and I really am not working that hard yet since it was the first 25.

The bad news is that everything else fell apart, which is to be expected. I was too narrow with the hands up front, too wide with the hands underwater and my kick was overlarge. These are all things I have worked on before that I will work on this week. Because I was thinking about my arms and my kick during the training session, I picked up an old hitch at the front of my stroke. My coach told me what she has told me at least 100 times before (always very nicely): "go more flow-y".

My coach and I have a number of made-up words we use, which works for us because we are both visual learners: "over the mountain", "Annie get your gun", "beach balls", "funky chicken", "more flow-y" or "no catch-up-y" means the stroke, "more flow-y kick" I hear also and "more pop" (your elbow). For me, "left" and "right" do not compute underwater, as strange as that may sound. "Watch" and "no watch" works great for my twisted brain because I can see my arms and I can see where my watch is. It also works great for video review because you don't have to figure out if the image is reversed or not. Do you do anything strange with naming what you are doing in your swimming?

Since we stop and talk after every 25 or every short swim in the tank, the yardage is short on these 60 minute sessions. Active calories were just 360.