Instead of doing a typical yardage swim, I worked for about an hour on stroke drills and technique. I went ahead and hired a personal trainer to give me some swim lessions. I met Sally at the pool right at 8:00am. She had me swim a hundred yards and then started breaking down my stroke. Sally's very smart and has been doing this stuff for a long time. She's huge into triathlons and has completed a number of Ironmans (pretty awesome). Anyway she had a lot of good feedback and gave me a number of items to work on.
Specifically I need to (1)keep my head down and sight only at the bottom of the pool; (2) reach forward, shoulder width and not towards the middle; (3) stretch my arm out before letting it enter the water so that I can reach further; (4) keep my elbows high throughout, not just during the recovery, but also during the pull rather than down the center of my body; (5) lay my head down flat on my shoulder when breathing to increase my roation to 90 degrees; and (6) angle down so that my butt is out of water. (Yeah, so just a few things...sheesh!) She also gave me some drills to work on before our next session including using a kickboard to keep my head down and a drill where I swim on my side which I'm sure was a chinese torture technique because you feel like you're drowning if you don't do it perfectly.
Overall it was a good session and Sally also gave me some instruction on how to prepare and focus for triathlon, how to train, some benchmarks I should be hitting and how to feel comfortable for my first race. It was very reassuring and oddly enough, she didn't think my stroke and technique were terrible, she seemed to think that I needed to change some things, but that I could get faster and luckily, I'm not totally hopeless.
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