Challenges

After my initial time of 34 minutes and 32 seconds I gave Round 6 (1,500m – 60 lengths of 25m pool) another two goes. Sadly both attempts were non-starters. On my second attempt I just didn’t seem to have any energy, I kept starting 60 lengths but seemed to set off too fast and felt knackered after just 4 lengths. It was so frustrating but I didn’t have 60 lengths in me. The third attempt didn’t even get that far, on Sunday evening just before the round closes I went along to a local pool to find that it was really busy. Too busy to attempt 60 lengths of front crawl, each lane (of which there were only three) had at least three or four people in them. So slightly frustrated and a little bit relieved I didn’t manage to attempt 60 lengths again to improve my time.

Unfortunately I really wanted a good time for Round 6 to get into the top ten in the rankings.  It may be too late now to get that high in the rankings but I have decided to put all my efforts into a final push for my best time in the final round to do the best I can.

Round 7 (the final round) is 400 meters (16 lengths). During the WinterSwim challenge there have already been two opportunities to record times for the 400 meters distance. Firstly to register for the WinterSwim back in November 210 you had to submit a base time for 400 meters. Doing my base time seems like such a long time ago! I remember it was the first time I had been swimming in years and it was the afternoon of the evening of the deadline (after having run a cross country race in the morning). I had to swim quite a few lengths in breast stroke in order to keep going, I couldn’t sustain 16 lengths of front crawl – it was exhausting!

My base time was 8 minutes and 59 seconds (222.7% of the Olympic Record). In Round Four of the WinterSwim challenge (my second attempt at 400 meters) I managed to reduce that time to 8 minutes and 12 seconds (203.3% of the Olympic Record). In Round 7 I have managed to bring the time down further, I did a swim on Monday in 8 minutes and 3 seconds and then yesterday I managed to bring that down further to 7 minutes and 53 seconds (195.5 % of the Olympic Record).  My technique in the last length was a bit mental and I nearly gulped a ton of water but I was determined to go as fast as I could.  What is really great is that back in November I couldn’t swim 16 lengths in front crawl and now three months later I am able to swim 16 lengths in front crawl as fast as I can.

I would really like to try and reduce the time further still as there are still more points up for grabs, the greatest percentage difference recorded for round 7 so far is 35.3% improvement compared with my 7.8 %.  I’m not sure I can manage such a huge difference but I definitely think I can speed up.

I think the biggest thing that would help my time would be to learn to breathe properly. With front crawl I think the idea is to create a bow wave with your head in front of you that creates a trough or pocket behind it from which you take in air.  i.e. keep one eye in the water and lie with your head low along your arm.  However, whenever I try this my mouth seems to be half in the water too so it feels as though I’ll take in water as opposed to air.  At the moment I turn my head so that I am almost looking at the ceiling as opposed to looking to the side.  I have found some interesting tips on the internet on breathing so I am going to try and put them into practice and get down to the pool as often as possible before Round 7 closes on the 6th March.  Fingers crossed for quicker times!