154 Days until IRONMAN 70.3 Chattanooga
Form Is King
The title of this post is not quite right. I don’t want to suggest that anyone is swimming ALL wrong. The point here is that swim form can fall apart if you don’t have someone help you monitor it.
Swimming in an endless pool makes it easy to video swim form
Going to the pool twice each week to nail the swim workouts was always focused on time and pace. I just figured that the form I built years ago would stay with me, but watching myself in a video really showed how wrong I was.
For the last 10 years, swimming has been my strongest sport in triathlon. I would usually place in the top three or five for the swim split in my age group at the local sprint and olympic races. Not so much lately.
Swimming isn’t taking a back seat just yet to biking and running, but it has been getting worse. I can still swim 1:25/100y but it takes so much more effort than it used to.
All coaches I know say form is king when they talk about swimming.
Change Is Not Easy
I have to come to terms with this process of changing my stroke. After all, isn’t that why we train: to create new habits? I realize that performance is likely to suffer and I can accept that because it will come back better than before. I really believe that now.
There was a time when Tiger Woods was a decent golfer, and he knew he could do better. While he worked on changing his golf swing, he fell out of the headlines for a little while. When he came back with a new swing he became king of the fairway.
All of us can do this. We just have to have faith in the process. An old cowboy once told me,
Make a plan, then make it work Bud Williams
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