Journey to Kona Day 189: Less is More

I had a major breakthrough in the pool today.  Putting together everything that I've been learning about my swim stroke over the past few months, I put it all together and found myself using fewer strokes to swim faster.  Wow!  It makes sense if you start to break things down.  If you're swimming inefficiently, each swim stroke accomplishes less, so you end up with more strokes, but actually going slower.  For perhaps the first time in my life today, I swam faster while using relatively fewer strokes.  One of the things that my swim instructor has been drilling into me is the timing of my hand entry in relation to the rest of my body position.  Today, I focused on making sure that my timing was completely synchronized.  I then focused on making sure that I was getting as much force as possible with my "pull" through the water, without worrying about my speed.  In getting my timing right, I was actually maximizing the "glide" one gets after the hand entry, and avoided the tendency to rush getting on with the pull.  In fact, there's a level of patience that I realized that I needed, and that I think I achieved for the most part.  I put it all together and deliberately did try to swim faster, while maintaining the form that I've been working on.  The result was that I was swimming faster while using fewer strokes per length and fewer strokes per minute.

I know that I have a lot of work to do in order to lock this in.  However, I think I'm in the right place to start.  After my trip to Colorado, I'll get to work on repeating long sets of swimming where I focus on this.  It's so easy to want to "cheat," but all cheating does is to slow you down.  The only thing that will hold me back is strength, as the greater focus on an efficient pull will in fact take muscle strength and energy.  I know that part of the answer to that is to better engage the lats in order to utilize some very powerful muscles to more effectively move through the water.

In many ways swimming faster is counterintuitive.  On the other hand, it's obvious that flailing away in the water takes a tremendous amount of energy that doesn't translate into swimming fast.  What I've learned is the ultimate representation of these principles.  Sometimes you have to do less in order to achieve more.  Ironman is a metaphor for life, and so is swimming.