I find swimming to be the most
challenging of all tri disciplines. Perhaps there are a lot of us with the same
problem.
I think of myself as a reasonably
good swimmer - I was swimming in lakes as a kid and had some swimming lessons
at young age. I think the best teacher I ever had was my grandmother. At age of
86 she’s still swimming, looking a bit like a big cuddly hippo (don’t tell her
I’ve said that, after all she’s a lady). She had a good method to teach me how
to breathe properly for breaststroke. And I am quite good at it. But that’s it!
I have never done swimming as a sport! I’ve run, I’ve cycled, but swimming has
always been just for fun.
When talking about front crawl,
breathing always has been my problem so I never really done much of it.
It’s was always just too much trouble to
learn. Now, however, I need to get good at it if I want to finish my first
triathlon and move on to doing more reasonable distances!
Breathing problem number one is that
to begin with I was only able to take a breath on my right side. Thanks to Ben
Hallam (yes, he’s very helpful and resourceful) I now can take breath on my
left side too. My reason for wanting to learn was simple; two strokes were just
too short for my breath and four were too long. So I needed an option of
breathing every three. Another reason is that sometimes in a race there might
be splashing next to you on one side or sun may be in your eyes. The drill Ben
showed me was simple enough so I tried it and it worked! It goes like this –
three strokes, a breath and glide for a while on that side before switching.
This is close to what I do: http://youtu.be/Fn_vL74OSKg
Looking back to what I was doing
wrong, I think it was just a bit of fear so I tended to rush and ended up
choking. When doing this drill there is a bit more time to spend on the same
side as you breathe so you can calm down and prepare for next set. Now that I
have improved my breathing within 3 weeks I was able to do 200m without need to
stop and rest. So happy!
Looking at other people in the pool,
it looked like it’s much faster to turn around using tumble turn. I started to
consider learning it, but then decided not to. Even thought my first triathlon
is in a pool, rules state that tumble turn is not allowed.
Other thing I was struggling with was
finding swimming goggles. Had to throw my old ones away,because they where
fogging up. Tried few things but nothing helped. I am now trying my third pair
and they are good so far. Now I know not to buy very expensive ones straight
away, because there might be need to go for a new pair soon.
I have invested in a pull buoy too.
It is a good way to get your legs floating so you have more time to concentrate
on your arm and hand action. One minus of it is that it doesn’t allow hips to
rotate as well, so I don’t spend a lot of time using it.
While doing a bit more research on
breathing I came across this video: http://youtu.be/X4APU3XMip8
I found it very helpful.
This is it this time!
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