Trent's Monday swim session

I arrived a tad late due to some wombat running his truck into a rail bridge at Graceville and for some reason that affected all trains.  It was a good day not to have my QR badge visible to the public.... again.

Anyway, I only missed the first 10mins.  Trent said that they were doing 100mtrs of 75m swim 25 kick so I jumped in and managed to do 3 or 4 before the next set so at least I was semi-warmed up.

The next set was 2 x 100m, first 50m building to flat out, the 2nd 50m what Trent calls a "mini-max" session.  So this is where you swim as fast as you can and keep track of your stroke count.  You add the two up, ie: secs it took to swim 50m added to the strokes you took to swim 50m.  The first one for me was 97, the second was 98.  So, the aim of the game is to reduce that number.  I am going to pick out a random number and say that I want to break the 90 barrier.  This would involve swimming the 50m in 45secs with a stroke count of under 45.  I think this is achievable. 

The next set was 3 x 600m; first 600m swim, 2nd 600m 100m swim, 100m pull, 3rd 600m was all pull.  This was good, it was a nice aerobic session and it was certainly nice to be in the pool without the dreaded paddles.  I'm beginning to have a love/hate relationship with them (mainly hate!).

Trent gave me some tips on the catch part of my stroke.  I tend to have a very lazy stroke, almost a catch-up stroke, Trent has said to visualise a high elbow under the water reaching out over a barrel before invoking the pull.  I have heard this before, but have never really 'got it'.  I played around with it and it certainly changed my stroke, I tried less gliding of my stroke out the front and trying to pull it through a bit quicker after entry, pretending that I was grabbing a barrel out in front of me and pushing it behind me.  I think this worked ok, I'll continue to play around with it and fine tune it a bit.  It felt a bit awkward to begin with, but settled in OK.  I might arrange for Craig to videotape my stroke, we are probably both due and now would be a good time to get it sorted seeing as we are both going to be swimming a fair bit over the coming months leading up to Ironman NZ.  Yikes!!