Swimming (I suck!) and training in DC

I've had the privilege of being at a 4 week radiology conference over in Washington DC. It is a very enjoyable time, and considered one of the highlights of radiology residency, with a good selection of high quality lectures to attend (8 hours per day worth), no weekend obligations, and lots of friends and like-minded folks to spend time with.

My friend from my earlier years who now lives in DC convinced me to sign up for two races here. One was last week's half marathon, and the next one is the upcoming Cherry Blossom 10 miler at the end of this week. It has been difficult training specifically for these runs due to my triathlon-type multisport training, but things have been going more or less well despite the decrease in run volume.

I was expecting my training to drop off like a rock in DC, especially the swim and bike, owing to lack of facilities, but a bunch of folks including myself found a local YMCA and joined for a month. It has excellent swim facilities and spin classes to help stay in cycling shape. Coupled with nice runs through the DC national monuments, it hasn't been hard at all to stay in shape.

I have dedicated a lot of time in particular to swimming, as it turns out that I'm likely a lot lousier of a swimmer than I could have ever imagined. The pool at the YMCA here is an official distance pool, and it turns out that I have been overestimating my speed due to a short pool length at the pool I use in LA. I'm swimming an incredibly slow 2:30-2:40/100m, with 20 strokes per 25m, which is surely in the bottom 5% of swimmers in a triathlon, let alone pure swimmers. Very discouraging.

I signed up for some swim lessons here to examine my form, and also asked the instructor to use my camera to videotape me so I could self-analyze my stroke further. I'm clearly making some big errors in excessive body roll and an ugly kick, both of which were remarkably hard to self-diagnose without the camera. Still, even with correcting these two items, there has been no sudden big burst in speed by technique alone. I suspect that the truth is, that my swim muscles are simply underdeveloped (no experience, go figure) and will require another 6 months to a year to build up to respectable strength. Quite discouraging considering the decent effort I've put in, but I'm not about to give up any time soon. The worst part is that I'm nearly always one of the slowest people in the pool. This is always a surprise to me, as I have always been significantly faster than most women and most older folks on the run and bike, even before my high volume training. For sure however, swimming is a whole different ballgame, and I definitely am not bringing any special talents to the plate. It's going to take a lot of hard work to get up to speed, and I will likely dedicate the next 4-8 weeks specifically to swim training before embarking on a fall triathlon.

A big part of the problem for swimming is undoubtedly my lack of adequate volume of training. Despite my best efforts thus far, I have been spending far more time on cycling and running than the swim. I’m not sure if I will have the mental dedication to increase swimming at the cost of the other two disciplines, but for sure, this is what will be needed for a short period of time until I can achieve a better balance amongst the three.

As for now, it's lots and lots of swimming, and a sprinkling of running and cycling thrown in for good measure. I actually managed to complete a nearly 5 hour day at the gym last week, with 2 separate swim sessions, a spin class, extra cycling on the stationary bike, and a 5-6 mile run on top. Didn't feel so hard from an endurance standpoint, since there's a lot of dead time between the different sessions, and the fact that I can't go that hard on the swim makes things much easier. Tri-training can be quite consuming!

There's nothing more honest than a video to assess your swim technique. All your mistakes in their ugly glory, are out for you to see - despite the fact that your brain may be INSISTING that you're "doing it right!"

This is a link to a swim video of my typical swim form used for a fastish swim for me - I would not be able to keep this pace up for more than 10 minutes in the pool:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3EB-xjFEY0

It's not horrendous, but it's also not good, either. The errors are obvious, even to a non-expert like myself, but fixing them has proved to be remarkably difficult, despite my full knowledge of the problems at hand. Amongst the things I will be working on:

- Over-rotation on the breath. I'm flopping my whole body over just to get air and altering my stroke. In a perfect world, my left/right strokes would be equal, and breathing would not disrupt the cadence.

- Arm going to midline instead of out to shoulders on the reach. Despite my best intentions, my arms seem to always end up in the middle, which ends up rolling me over like a log. When I splay my arms out wide, I lose a lot of power. I will need to do a lot of drilling to correct this.

- Ugly kick - My legs are way outside my body cone. Strangely, I am completely unaware of this while I'm swimming.

My next drill that I'll be doing in an effort to fix my form, is the "Tarzan swim drill", recommended by some triathletes on the triforums. This is a really tough drill, in which you swim with your head completely out of the water, and basically do freestyle. Your neck gets sore, your arms pump like crazy in an effort to stop your legs from sinking, but it does get your arms to reach to the correct width. It's going to be ugly out there in the pool for me.