a new first and roll back thursday

yesterday, i swam the longest distance to date and felt like a million bucks. i knew this a few weeks ago but now i really know that i CAN indeed swim 2.4 miles or more if need be. i ended up swimming 2.36 miles yesterday, to be exact, and could have continued on but i really had to pee. plus, i had a date on the bike at flatwoods with the j-man. this is what i felt like when i got out of the pool:

another thing that made me feel good was there was a young lady in the lane next to me and when i finished we got to talking. She said that i swim so smooth and gracefully. Hey, cool! I may not be the fastest in the water but i'm graceful and i'll claim that. even though i don't do flip turns (not because i don't know how to, but because i had a bad experience once that almost took me out of a marathon i was training for), i do have my own little turn that i do which allows me to stay submerged and not cheat by stopping at the wall. just like fosbury has a flop, kc has a "special" turn at the wall and it is as graceful as my swim.

since today is roll back thursday, in light of the swimming milestone above, i will post one of my older swimming posts from february 24th, to remind me of how far i've come along. here it is:

i believe in miracles

yep, that's me up there in the middle. well, at least that's how i felt after my swim this morning. i know! far cry from my whine-one-one whambulance call last week moaning about how i couldn't swim 200 meters without needing oxygen to recover. so the remainder of last week after tuesday's swim session debacle, i took a break from the pool until yesterday. it was partly because of the weather but mostly because i was feeling defeated. the great weather this weekend got me feeling much better. i biked a lot and didn't give the pool any more thought.

yesterday was triathlon tuesday. so i got my butt out of bed around 4:15am, had a little coffee, went out for my run and then headed to the pool for revenge redemption. as timing would have it, i bumped into chris, the cute lifeguard (i wonder if he will ever read my blog and see this?) and asked him if he knew anything about the swim classes starting up next week. he said he didn't. then i asked him if he'd be interested in giving me private swim lessons and he said he'd be more than happy to train me from the deck for free. so i said, ok, let's do it and don't hold back because i need to hear feedback-the good, the bad, and the ugly.

here are the 2 things he had me do: first was the catch up drill which for some reason, i was having problems grasping on my own but was able to do it once he demonstrated. i felt like i was going to drown or sink but a few laps like that and some reassurance from chris and erin (the other lifeguard) that i was doing just fine and i was on my way. the main thing they kept emphasizing was to slow down. the second thing that chris explained to me was where my hand needed to be entering the water, not a major adjustment, just a tweak. 24 hours later i was back at the pool, this time the long course was set up and i didn't know what to expect. my intention was to do last week's workout again to see where i was and i wasn't expecting much. first set on my list was a 400. i did my 400....

and just kept going and going and going like the energizer bunny until i stopped an hour later with 2100 meters under my belt. seriously, i was pretty much feeling like a rockstar after that. hard to believe that those two simple things could equal such a great result. i now really believe that swimming is 70% skill efficiency and only 30% fitness. since the next 2 mornings are pretty much below 43 degrees and the pool will absolutely not be open, i'll get my 3rd swim in on friday night. we'll see then if today was a fluke or if i finally found my groove in the pool. stay tuned!

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as a side note, i still believe that swimming is 70% skill efficiency and 30% fitness.
much love and peace out!