Swimming With a Friend > Swimming Alone

Maybe it's an attitude problem, but I ALWAYS perform better when I'm working out with a friend. This, again, proved to be true today when I was up at the Wilson Aquatic Center with co-worker and master home-renovator Patrick. To set the scene, the pool was magnificently uncrowded. A few of  the familiar faces were there, but we were lucky enough to have only two others in the lane with the two of us (that's 4 for your math whizzes). Enough of that though... let's take a look at the stats.

Interval Workout - 3300m
500m - warm-up
300m - 5:11 (1:44/100m)
300m - 5:19 (1:46/100m)
300m - 5:18 (1:46/100m)
300m - 5:12 (1:44/100m)
300m - 5:19 (1:46/100m) 
300m - 5:04 (1:41/100m) (RECORD!!)
300m - 5:17 (1:46/100m)
300m - 5:04 (1:41/100m)
100m - 1:24 (1:24/100m) (RECORD!!)
300m - cool-down

WoooooooooooOOOOT!! Another great day for improvement! As the stats indicate, I did indeed set two new swimming records, which I'm pretty damn happy about.

The main one is the 100m record, brought down 3 seconds from my last record. This record is purely a side-effect of my larger goal of a purely vain accomplishment. It really has no bearing on the rest of my training, but it feels great to watch the bar rise higher. To keep things in perspective, I like to remember the crazy-ass 100m time a friend of mine posted waaay back in highschool in his swimming glory - sub 0:50:00.  

Daaaaaaamn.

I've still yet to find anyone in the triathlete world that could touch that time.

In the time between I swam 5:19 to 5:04, a guy I met named Brennan was cool enough to offer to throw a few pointers my way. He saw me sucking air between sets and wondered if I was training for something. I shared the story of my swimming debacle at the Nation's Tri last summer, as well as my desire to improve on those times dramatically.

He noticed that I've got more twist than a corkscrew.

Wait, you mean I'm not supposed to do all of that gyrating??

No.

He basically noticed that I was yanking my head way out of the water to breath at an inefficient angle, thus causing a change reaction in the rest of my form. I would then over-rotate my body and ruin my streamline even more. His solution was to have me tilt my head up so that the water-line was about where my hair-line was. Eyes are forward, more water is hitting chest and when I turn to breath, it's almost at a forward angle.

It felt pretty good, too. I felt more aerodynamic in the water and my head was DEFINITELY moving a lot less than it had in the past.

Very cool!