Friday, January 12, 2007

So I'm not as good as I thought

I had what I thought was a very nice swim this morning. Almost 45 minutes of straight swimming made up of sets of mainly 200 yards full swim, kicking and pulling. The woman who joined my lane about 30 minutes in is a co-worker who's training for an iron distance triathlon in September. I saw her workout sheet on the side of the pool and noticed she was supposed to be 8 x 50 yards of stroke count. I thought I'd give it a try for a few 50s. I've never counted my strokes so I had no idea what I was shooting for while I counted. My 100 yard time was consistently 2:00 flat and that felt pretty comfortable, I incorrectly assumed that I must be doing things relatively close to correct. My stroke count was 22 per 25 yards. I looked that up later on Google and found a link that stated "If your stroke count per 25 yards is above 20 you are woefully in need of stroke repair". Bummer, I thought that was the one area I was at least okay.

Overall, a decent workout week. Four mornings out of five I made it in for a good workout, I'd like to get a treadmill workout in over the weekend just to keep up my 5 days a week streak. It's still early in the year to blow the streak.

Pregnancy status: 9 weeks, 5 days. 212 days to go.

4 comments:

Triteacher said...

Hey, don't feel bad; when I first learned that counting strokes was an indicator, I was at 25. I now have a love/hate relationship with stroke counting. Doesn't take much to figure out when I love it (15s = smiles) and when I hate it. (NO NUMBER!)

Unknown said...

Apparently I'm in woeful need of stroke repair also. My count is usually 22 +/- 1

Julia said...

I once went to a one day clinic with Steve Tarpinian

Julia said...

Sorry - I hate Beta version of Blogger...as I was saying...I went to a Steve Tarpinian one day clinic several years ago. If I don't remember wrong it was in New Jersey. The first thing we did was do a stroke count, mine was like yours, 22. Then he filmed us, did video analysis of our strokes above and below water. He then pointed out what each person needed to do to improve (everybody had a different issue). After that back in the pool to practice the exercises he thought would be good for us. Mine was on rolling and my kick. Oh, I forgot, he got in the pool to do a few demonstrations. Totally worth my money right there...ANYWAY, at the end of day, five hours later he had us recount our strokes. Mine went to 14 on just the improvements he showed me to do. It was great! I liked it because it only took one intense day to learn where my mistakes were and how to improve them.