I've been regularly swimming at Corona del Mar State Beach and I've been slowly improving. Last Saturday I did a 1.06 mile swim (new distance PR!) which is two laps of the outer buoys at the beach. I was BEAT the next day. The difference in swimming and running is that usually I feel tired after a long run but after a long swim I feel fine for a couple of hours but then I gotta take a nap! I think I need to look into my post workout fueling plan to see if there's a deficiency there.
Yesterday was a rest day for me, so I contented myself researching how to swim out from under large waves. Unfortunately I managed to freak myself out a bit watching the video of Mark Foo's last surf O_o This master surfer died from an 18 foot wave. I'm not about to go try to swim under some 18 foot waves, but I still remember the early days swimming in Huntington Beach getting rolled and spun every which way and goggles flying! I need to start practicing controlled dives or something so I don't panic when swimming out from under waves...
Of course I couldn't go to bed on the note of watching some water tragedy, so I looked around youtube for some instructions on strokes so I can feel less like trashing around in the water and more like swimming. I found a bunch of lessons from Terry Laughlin's Total Immersion Swimming and it seemed to me that I could not possibly swim faster when using a slower stroke and limp wrist held not at water level, but since I wasn't going that fast by myself anyway (and tiring myself out very often trying to stroke faster and harder), I thought I would give it a shot . So I spent about an hour studying the videos and various lectures he gave and gave it a shot!
At first I thought I was going slower than usual, and definitely had to redo how I do my breathing since the strokes were less frequent. However, I did notice I was moving towards targets faster, and require less breaks overall. Also, I made less mistakes veering off course than usual. When I got back on the beach and checked my watch, I improved my time from my best time (last Sunday) by nearly four minutes a mile! I swam over 100 more yards with with nearly 100 less strokes for the entire way (stroke efficiency improvement!) Overall still quite slow, but I'm happy that with a bit of studying I was able to improve so much in the span of two days! One downside is that I managed to strain my left wrist a bit (only noticed it when I was taking off my wetsuit) but it's feeling a lot better already so I hope it's just minor pain.
I bit the bullet and registered for the Huntington Beach Pier Swim on June 9th! I'm intimidated because it is a no wetsuit swim! O__O I'm sure I can do the half mile swim, but I'm not sure how I'll fare with just a swimsuit. I'm hoping that the water temps will be at least 65 so I don't die XD Oh man! I've been spoiled by a wetsuit!
I'm also going to visit my parents in Northern California (San Jose area) next week for a week and change and there are NO good places to swim outside within a 30 mile radius! I have to trek to Pleasanton or Santa Cruz or Live Oak to get some swimming in (yes, I know there exists Half Moon Bay, but there's NO WAY I'm swimming there. Apparently it's cold and the waves are insane!) So I think I'll just have to rely on some pool workouts to tide me over until I come back.
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