Let's talk swim

I figure why not just go discipline by discipline until it's all caught up.  The swim...my nemesis..my Achilles' heel.  It was reason it took me so long in the first to even attempt to do triathlons.

Sometime early in 2010, I finally figured out what all the swimmers meant when they said "high elbows".  I applied this "ah-ha moment"(in memory of the Oprah show) and immediately my swim started getting faster.  It's still been a slow process but my times keep getting slightly faster.

Just last week I swam my fastest 2400 yards ever in the pool and a month before that I swam 3000 yards in the pool at my 2008 Ironman wetsuit pace.  Both these were big time for me.  Perhaps, if I can slowly keep improving I can get out of the water at Arizona and not have to deal with the massive crush of swimmers in the transition area and to start the bike.  At Canada, there was so many people in transition after my swim my toe got stepped on by someone's cycling shoe.  It was one big bloody mess post marathon.

Today was a different story.  I struggle to even come within 3 minutes of my PR in the pool.  I just felt blah.  When you feel blah on the run or bike, you can basically just trundle along but swimming it feels like you're a steel anchor just wanting to sink to the bottom of the pool.  I was going so slow my flip turn timing was off and a couple of times was barely able to get any push from the wall.  That's another part of my swimming improvement, I started doing flip-turns post Baltimore marathon and have been doing them ever since.  I was surprised at how easy they were.  I wish I had tried them before because they really help you keep some momentum.

Overall, I've made my goal at Arizona to be a 65 minute swim.  This is 1:32 per 100yards.  It will be a wetsuit swim which is good for at least 5-10 seconds per 100.  You take away that and add sighting and battling the mass start swim with 2100 other folks and it's about right.

Coming soon the bike and who doesn't want to hear about my diet or as I call it Dorito-less.