Alex's swim journal

I got in to loosen up after taking yesterday completely off. Did 1500, included some starts... now I feel rested and ready to go for tomorrow's serious pain-a-thon.

I ended February (swam 27 of the 28 days) with over 40 miles and had 99.13 for the year as of today. So I was surprised to see GTD tell me I was just soooo close to breaking the 100 with today's 1500; close, but no cigar. 99.99! Unbelievable... all I have to do is fall in the pool for my warm-up tomorrow and I'll be at 100 miles for the year. Or... I could be dramatic and save the 100-mile mark for the start of my 400 IM... off the blocks, cold... what a warm-up that would be!

Not going to do that.

Well, I'm icing the left shoulder and hitting the Advil pretty hard the last couple of days. I've found the source of the soreness in my technique too (well, that is the technique in the pool when I'm not aggravating it with snow-shoveling and other shoulder-killers). It doesn't hurt during any of my normal stroke phases, but if my streamline is not tight enough coming out of the flip turn I've found it aggravates that shoulder more than any other area... AND, probably more importantly given how much backstroke I've been doing lately, it hurts the most when I'm going from streamline back dolphins into my first full stroke cycle on that breakout. I always pull first with my right arm, but because my left arm is still in streamline I've gotten into the habit of starting the pull with my left arm before my body has rotated fully to the left... just enough torque at the wrong angle... this doesn't happen on a normal stroke where the rotation starts occurring before before the left pinky is even in.

Anyway, I think that's where the soreness is coming from principally, so I'll have to be super conscious of that and remember either to pull with the left first on the breakout or roll to the left before bringing the left hand out of streamline.

Event order tomorrow (for me): 4IM, 2BK, 2FR, 2IM, 2BR. Take that, EKW, I'll finish my check-off before you! Oh wait, there's that 200 fly still... curse you, fly!