Open Water Swimming

At my lesson Friday Laurie had me use a tempo trainer. This is basically a metronome. It fits on your goggles and you establish your stroke rate based on the beat.

We played around with it and found that somewhere between 1:04 and 1:00 was a good rate for me.

However, today while swimming I discovered something. I'm dropping my hand again when I breathe. Particularly on the left side, when i breathe to the right. So I'm getting only a fraction of the pull that I should be getting. I think that is exactly what I was doing in the race last weekend too. I wasn't thinking about going long. So I think I need to go back into counting my strokes per length again and trying to take that feel into the open water.

I think I'm going to try to go to klineline again Wed and swim some with a wetsuit and then without and see how it feels. It's kind of like swimming with a fist and then swimming with your full hand. The wetsuit takes away so much sensory experience it is really hard. It gives you added buoyancy but if I lose my technique in the process it's not good.