Swimming day 408 - Wednesday 18th January 2012

I was in London early today so no beach or early pool. However midday I met a chap called Dan Bullock from SwimforTri.  A really fantastic guy or had offered to give me a free swimming lesson whilst filming.  I met him at his gym in London and we did an hour in the pool with him looking at my technique and filming me where necessary.  Interestingly he thought that my upper body swimming was pretty good; certainly needs some tweaks, but nothing major.  However my lower body, particularly my legs, were shocking to say the least.  It is not a case of me just not kicking, it is a case that each time I take a breath my legs do some ridiculous splaying dance that looks like a giraffe on heat.  Dan recons I am using my legs to try to stabilize myself whilst I take a breath.  Interestingly all I could feel was me kicking; I had no idea it looked like that!  The end result is that my legs, being the two largest muscles, are basically causing so much drag on the water that each time I breath I then have the arms and legs pulling in opposite directions.

We continued the hour working just on that and he gave me loads of exercises to go away with to correct it.  I simply have to work on that as a priority now as if I can even just get my legs to stay straight and not even kick it could speed my up by 50% and save buckets of energy.  I would post his film online, but there is no way I’ll expose myself looking like that to anyone out there!!!

Now at least I know what I need to do as step 1.

Dan is a great guy and I will definitely see him again to go over this once I’ve made some progress. 

It’s always a good day when one finds out ones faults.