Swimming again
On Friday, while Daughter had her lesson, I put in a few lengths of the pool. I wanted to do two things to see how my shoulder is shaping up - swim 400m in a single go, and concentrate on breathing bilaterally.
I’m fairly sure that there’s something in my stroke that’s putting too much strain on my left shoulder when I breathe to the right, and wanted to see if I could actually swim like one of those guys who seems to know what they’re doing (instead of my usual drowning man doing lengths routine).
OK, so first the good news - it turns out that I can breathe on both sides, though to the left feels wrong (like folding your arms the wrong way round), and has some obvious wrongness in it too - I’m either lifting my head too much, or taking on a lungfull of water a lot of the time. I also didn’t experience any pain, though there is some minor discomfort now - the sort of feeling in my shoulder that tells me all is not quite right.
The bad news though . . . well, I was only cruising this, but even so, 10 1/2 minutes for 400m is scarily slow. Either my technique’s completely fallen to pieces over the last two months, or my swimming fitness has gone AWOL.
So here’s my plan - I do need to get back in the water on a more regular basis. But I don’t want to damage myself. So I’m going to start going along to the NE31 Tri Club’s swim sessions again, but demote myself back down to the ‘learners lane’, and work really hard on fixing whatever it is with my technique that’s caused this shoulder problem to surface AND getting really slick at breathing on either side.
There’s a date with a half ironman race in my diary for seven months’ time, and unless I can get through the swim without injuring myself, that just ain’t gonna happen. And the time to start working on that particular problem is NOW!
Workout:
- Type: Swim
- Date: 11/18/2007
- Time: 15:01:15
- Total Time: 00:10:30.00
- Distance: 400 m
- Average Pace: 2:37.53/100m
