When I showed up for practice tonight, the warm-up was 10 x 75 yards on 1:10. I immediately decided it was going to be another long practice. I started thinking that Tuesdays were the long days and Thursdays were the stroke days. But I was wrong. We ended up doing more stroke work and then a bunch of kicking.

We ended the workout with something our coach calls “animal kicking”. We split into groups across 4 lanes to do 10 x 50 kicking. Each lane has it’s own speed and time limit. The “animal” lane was the fastest, sporting a 1:00 time limit. The next 3 lanes were 1:10, 1:15, and 1:20. If you come in with more than 10 seconds to rest, you get to (have to) move up a lane. If you come in after the time limit then you get bumped down a lane. I knew this would be trouble for me, so I started myself in the 1:15 lane. I came in at 1:00 on the first 50 and had to move up to the 1:10 lane. After another 2 or 3 rounds (and most everyone getting bumped all the way to the 1:20 lane — and still not making the time), the time limits increased by 10 seconds on each lane. We finished up that way.

Only two people ever made it to the “animal” lane: Chelsea started there and never got bumped out, and Charmaine moved up into it after the first round, but got bumped back down into my lane sometime after round 3. The coach promised we’d be adding that workout to our mix at least once a week, so we’ll see how it goes next time.

After practice he sent out an email to the group with some links to videos on YouTube that demonstrate freestyle stroke technique:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dJs0ToB_z4
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_M7P_jmgBE
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlNpFAvt1wk

After watching the videos, I ran the groups email addresses through Facebook and added a few as friends.