El Andalous - Swimming Frustrations

El Andalous Beach - Unusually Rough Waters

Having taken swimming lessons in Switzlerand and Mallorca (how cosmopolitan!), you’d think I’d be zooming ahead. It has, however, been a little bit depressing.

After my lessons in Mallorca, I felt confirmed in my decision to change my crawl technique to a more “catchup” style (where you always have at least one arm stretched out in front rather than windmilling).

I think the two most useful things I took away with me from the Mallorca lessons were that (i) I needed to focus on getting the “over” water stroke right first (ie, using the catchup style, high arm recovery) before thinking about the catch and pull through “under” the water stroke and (ii) my arm was always dropping on my breathing stroke resulting in me losing out on an entire stroke a third of the time (which is quite a lot, as my trainer said).

The problem with watching swimming videos online is that there’s so much you could focus on, you are never very sure where to start, so at least the Mallorca lessons gave me a focus point and some kind of order of learning. When I asked how I could train in open water, she suggested I stop each time I feel myself starting to do it wrong.

I took this advice on board, but found I could swim only short distances. I had to focus so hard on what I was doing that it took up an immense amount of energy and I was exhausted. This in turn chipped at my confidence levels and I began to think I’d never swim longer distances again. Doubt ate at me. Even before Mallorca I’d started to wonder whether training myself to swim faster and faster was just too much effort and taking away from my enjoyment of swimming; now I was struggling to swim 50m. It was depressing. My confidence was in shatters. I’d lost everything I’d been working on – my speed and my endurance!

I persevered. After about 5 weeks of practicing my breathing stroke and employing a catchup style (daily, and in the sea), I decided to try and work my way up to an entire km. I put the pressure off myself to go fast, so I did it as relaxed as I could to give myself more confidence with the longer distances. I was able to achieve this, but my swimming speed went right down to 3:09-3:12.

I wished I had a personal coach who could give me some encouragement that my style was indeed improving when all my data showed me that I was declining dramatically. My original aim was to attain the average swimming speed, which is 2:00 minutes per 100m, and sustain it with ease over 1km; after my first set of lessons in Switzerland, I’d originally worked my speed up to 2:16 for 1km in a pool, but now, here I was, taking up to 3:12 minutes (albeit in open water)! I was a snail. I did feel I was swimming more correctly, but I began to wonder whether there was any point to it or indeed if I was deluding myself about my improved style when my stats were so bad. Confirmation from somewhere that I was doing the right thing would have been good.

My subjective impression is that my catch and pull improved as I worked on my stroke timing and breathing stroke without even having to think about it. I wasn’t able to put the two together in Mallorca, but as I got used to the new style, I was somehow able to put some other bits into place, too. I was a bit scared that I would drift back into my old style of swimming, but on each swim I did try to focus on a single aspect of my style to improve on and sometimes (time permitting) I would do drills afterwards.

After a while of acclimatizing myself to a slow 1km swim, and getting rather despondent about my lack of speed, I decided maybe I was slow because I was no longer putting in so much effort (since I was building up my confidence for the distance and focusing on improving style rather than thinking about speed and strength).

From there I almost immediately increased my speed to 2:48-2:55 per 100m for a sustained 1km, which for the first time in a long time was a measurable improvement and a lot better than my previous 3:12. This speed isn’t so far off where I was in May (my open-water 1km speeds then seemed to be about 2:38 to 2:48 and 2:57 for 2km). Only now, in order to achieve that speed , I’m needing only 20 strokes per minute, whereas before I used 27 strokes per minute. My swimming must have become more efficient! That, at least, is some reward.

I am continuing to focus on my style rather than increasing my strokes per minute at this stage, though, because I know from seeing other people’s data that it’s possible to swim at my target speed with 20 strokes per minute, so my style obviously still has some major flaws (and I can think of plenty of things to work on!). But at least, finally, I’m able to feel that I’ve made some progress even if I’m only just returning to my original starting point.