Tonight we did a lot of stroke drills. I think this is to make sure we all know how to swim each of the major strokes. I’m sort of afraid to find out how long and hard the workouts will be once our coach is convinced we know what we’re doing.
The first 600 of our warm-up consisted of nothing but kicking. That was a bad sign. I hate kicking. Of course, I also love kicking, but mostly I hate it. I brought my longer fins tonight, because they are a bit smaller and fit me a little better. But it didn’t matter, because we were kicking without fins. We started off doing 4 x 150 kicking each 150 a different kick, in IM order (fly, back, breast, free). After that we did 4 x 100 IM on 2:00.
After warming up, we worked on backstroke flipturns. These have changed a lot since I was in high school. Gone are the days of guessing where the wall is and flipping directly over from your back to your back. Now you take a couple strokes past the flags, then turn over and do a freestyle flipturn (without twisting, so you come out on your back). I seemed to err on the side of caution, never getting quite as close to the wall as I really should, causing me to have a fairly weak push off the wall.
When we were all making good turns, we had a little head-to-head competition… starting from the middle of the pool, 2 people would race backstroke to the wall, flipturn, and then back to the middle of the pool. It turned out to be much closer than I expected.
After several heats and re-races (when people tied), we moved to our main set. This consisted of 8 x 50 stroke drill on 1:00 followed by 100 easy for each stroke (fly, back, breast, free). We ran out of time and cut the breast stroke out.
For the fly drill, he had me do left-arm, both-arms, right-arm, both-arms. Supposedly it’s a drill that Michael Phelps uses. It’s a killer. By the 6th 50 I could barely breathe. I do feel like my fly is improving a lot though.
For the back drill, he had me focus on rotating my hips with my shoulders. I think I used to consciously try to keep my hips flat and only rotate my shoulders, so I’ve got some work to do to un-learn that bad habit.
At the end we did 2 x 50 free fast on 1:00 followed by 4 x 25 underwater kick on 1:00. He made us a deal that he would bring donuts if we all made it the full length of the pool all 4 times. These were with fins, so it was relatively easy for me. A few people missed a few times, and each miss cost us a donut. From our dozen, we lost nine. So I’m sure we’ll be doing this exercise again and again, each time adding a few donuts to the pile. When we get to a dozen, he’ll bring them in.
I’m really impressed with our coach. He’s doing a great job making us feel like a team, not just a bunch of old people trying to swim. He sends email out to the entire team and has us work for things as a team, etc. It’s really a lot of fun. The $30/month price tag is a bargain!
