I got to the workout by 5:30am!

Throughout the workout I worked hard to focus on not over-rotating, keeping my hand relaxed and keeping my head in line with my spine. Unfortunately, I found that my stroke count was way up.

After watching me as I was completing a kick set, the coach commented that he needs to work with me on building a more compact kick. He said that I am bending my legs. I was actually concentrating during the set to kick from my hips, as I had received the same feedback on Sunday both verbally and visually. It's somewhat baffling to me that I still have the kick so wrong. I thought that I had pretty much removed my kick from my whole stroke swimming. I think what I probably have done is that I kick fewer times but I still kick totally incorrectly. I am guessing that my kick is actually creating drag and slowing me down.

So, I think that I am seeing that I need to spend a LOT of time practicing how to do things properly. At the moment it seems apparent that I am doing pretty much everything wrong.

I even have soreness between my shoulder blades right now. I don't know if that's from the way I slept last night or if it's a reaction to how I'm working on rebuilding my stroke.

I think that I will focus on drilling seven days a week this month. I'll plan to continue to go to the masters workouts on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But, I'll swim in the open lane and just do drills; I won't do the actual workout. I think that I may need to spend time doing vertical kicking in the deep end as well; I need to do something to (literally) straighten out my kick. It will probably be better for me to see about doing two 30 minutes workouts each day. I'll have to see if I can organize my schedule and myself to accomplish that. I'll probably still do the one hour at masters, though.

This is definitely a good news / bad news situation. The good news is that there is so much I can improve in my technique. I can only imagine how much better and faster I will be. The bad news is that I've got to figure out how to get my body to make those improvements. I am already working so hard mentally to put the pieces in place. I think that maybe I'm really seeing what Tom meant when he said it's going to take time.