Total Immersion

Since today is part of my taper for the tri on Sunday, I did an easy swim this morning. Since it was easy, I decided to work on some new techniques from the book "Triathlon Swimming Made Easy: The Total Immersion Way for Anyone to Master Open-Water Swimming" by Terry Laughlin.

Most of the exercises in the book I did as part of my training with TnT (same drill names, so I'm guessing they got it from this school of thought), however this book goes into more detail and theory, and also adds some new things that weren't covered in my initial training.

One of those things was "Front Quadrant Swimming" where, if I understand correctly, one starts the pull of the front arm only when the lagging arm passes the head and the lagging hand enters the water just past the head, not when fully extended. This creates the strange situation of having two hands in front of your head for a brief moment but also means you maintain an "extended vessel" (i.e. length) for a longer period of time.

How did it go? Well, it took about 6 lengths for me to finally get the timing down, then another few lengths to get the hang of the timing while breathing.

The result? I swam much easier, didn't have a need to breathe as much (although once I picked-up the pace I was back to breathing every 3 strokes), and felt less fatigued. My very first lap in the pool, after diving in, required 29 strokes to complete and I was out of breath when I got to the end. My very last lap required 19 strokes to complete in 25 seconds (most of my laps take about 32 seconds) and I felt just fine.

The verdict? I'm going to practice this like crazy! Once I'm done with the tri this weekend, I'll be doing the drills as they describe in the book and trying to get my stroke count down to about 15 or 16 with the same speed across the pool.