Of Swimming Bondage

In many of my freestyle races over the last year or so and very often in workouts, in spite of sometimes swimming decent times, I have felt like I was losing my marbles trying to find my stroke, trying to catch the water in the right way, trying to connect arms to my hips to my kick. While I tried to do some technique work on my drills and tried to focus on my technique while training, I felt like I wasn't getting the stroke put back together again. I needed professional help and finally managed to squeeze in a lesson with Anne Wilson, the TI-trained coach who I worked with quite frequently in 2009 (recognize the guy doing the drill here -- http://www.camelbackcoaching.com/swim). It was well worth it. I had a number of complaints going into the session mostly centered around feeling like I had no control over my left hand and arm; some twinges in my left shoulder of late helped reinforce that I was doing something wrong. Anne noticed a lot of things to work on and we set about doing a mixture of drills (skate, zipper skate and zipper switch) before settling into some focused work on sculling. The work was very elemental, but Anne gave me a great way to think about holding the water on my sculling -- trying to imagine I had marbles in the palm of my hand and that, as I sculled, my goal was to not lose the marbles. This really crystallized feeling constant pressure, getting continuous "grip" on the water as I sculled. We almost never do any full swimming during these hour-long sessions, but I did finish up with one 25 (actually about 30M given one extra long lane at the pool she trains from) of swimming. As Anne noted and I felt, my stroke was already crisper and more connected. I'll only get in one more session before Nationals (time and $$ constraints), but I've got some very concrete ideas to work on during my drills over the next 3 weeks. So glad I did this ...