Let me tell you about my "rest day"

According to Jamie & Andrea's schedule, I was suppose to have a rest day and walk the CapTex course. That didn't happen. Paulo Sousa is in town this weekend to hold some run and swim clinics and then to get his butt kicked in the CapTexTri sprint on Monday. Lauren had to do a 3 hour ride and invited me to go along. I love riding so I figured I would take my road bike out since I had better gearing for climbing and I'll just go easy. It was a good ride. I just took my time and spun up the hills without pushing myself too hard. We did the Dam Loop with the ATC ride starting at 8:30. It was a good ride. Of course Lauren and I got dropped almost immediately on Southwest Parkway because we weren't hammering. That was fine though and I was trying to have a nice easy ride and I did. I accomplished my goal of just spinning up the hills and not pushing too hard. There were a couple of points that I picked up the pace or powered over the top of a hill, but it just feels good to do that from time to time. At the end of my easy ride, I checked my avg speed and it was 17.8mph. Last week, I average 17.9 and I was pushing hard too. The difference was that today I was on my road bike and last weekend I was on my tri bike. Yeah, I'm definitely faster in the hills on my road bike. After the ride, I had about 3 breakfast tacos and my legs didn't feel tired at all. It felt like I had gone on a nice easy ride and I was ready to run a half marathon afterwards.

After the ride, we went back to Lauren's place to hang out until 2pm for Paulo's swim clinic. Then, we went to the swim clinic. It was good. I learned some things and some new drills. I'll just take all of that information and incorporate it into my repertoire of swimming knowledge, pick it apart, and apply the things that I think I work for me. I asked him by Big Question when it comes to swimming and I think asking this question is very beneficial for me. I asked him "What is the single biggest problem that I have that I can work on to improve my swimming." His answer was "Just swim more." I've felt for awhile now that my stroke is pretty good. I admit that it isn't perfect, but for someone that's been swimming for just over a year, I think it's pretty good and my times reflect that. I don't think it's worth it for me anymore to work on drills are changing my technique that much because I'm not going to get that much benefit from it. For me to get faster, I just need to swim more and swim faster. His answer just confirms what I've been feeling about my swimming for awhile now and I now have a firm plan on how I can get faster in the future.

Also, to anyone what my key to swimming is, I'll tell you. It's mental discipline. When I'm in the water, I'm thinking way too much. I'm thinking the entire time about good catch, strong pull using my lats with elbow up, end the stroke short, rotate with high elbow recovery, enter, and extend. I'm always thinking about everything, but I'm not stressing about it so it appears that I'm really relaxed. Also, when a coach says something like "Try to not drop your elbow when you pull.", I don't try to do it, I do it. I have to use a lot of mental concentration to do it, but I start swimming that way really quickly. What I liked to do is when I was with TNT, we started out with 500yds warmup and 100yds cooldown usually. For each of these 100's, I would break it down into first 25 I would work on body roll, second 25 would be a good catch, next 25 would be high elbow recovery, and last 25 would be strong pull. By doing this, I practiced with awareness how each of these small steps feel and muscle memory started to kick in to make it easier to swim.