I did it again! This may seem like I'm exaggerating or maybe perceiving things in a skewed fashion, but I swam better today than I did yesterday. I'm really astonished at how much progress I've made.

I did tremendously better at swimming in a less turbulent fashion on the elbow and forearm drills. I am pressing my buoy and balancing tremendously better, too. Breathing was much smoother. There is still a small tendency to lift my head a times, though. I absolutely minimized my kick. It was basically a lazy little flick with each stroke.

I just have to start out by saying "Wow!" I improved at least as much (if not more) between yesterday's practice and today's as I did between Sunday's lesson and yesterday's practice.

The workout went a lot better than I thought it was going to. I guess my brain had a chance to process some things since yesterday.

I did about 100 yards each of the swing/switch drills, going from just the elbow above the water, upper arm above the water, finger tips dragging in the water to ear hops.

I think that my kick was much closer to my normal (version of a) two-beat kick with the finger tip and ear hop drills. With the first two, I found that I was basically fluttering lightly continuously.

Today we moved into learning a relaxed recovery. My drills for this week will have me swimming continuously for one length, incorporating breathing with the drill. I don't need to worry about my kick, though.

This lesson was hard for me; there is a lot I need to coordinate. My kick is an absolute mess right now. I will see if during the week I can calm it down some as I get more natural at doing the rest of the drill.

So, just for my own  sake of remembering what I'm supposed to do this week.

Focus on:

Heading to today's practice I was looking forward to playing in the water more. But, this practice was harder than yesterday's. I think my legs were tired from kicking yesterday.

I had to concentrate a lot harder today. I think that after I rotated to breathe I tended to be over-rotated as I went back into skate. On the other hand I think that when I went from Superman glide into skate I did a much better job of hitting the correct skate position without having to twiddle around.

Yesterday's workout was basically boring and frustrating. So, going into today's workout I wasn't sure how I was going to make it through the workout and accomplish anything productive. I thought about how I could approach the workout as I was walking to the fitness center.

I'm not really remembering what I'm supposed to do besides the superman float into a skate. I need to do a better job of keeping track of my assignment at this Sunday's lesson.

Any time I started to practice a full stroke I immediately also started to over-rotate and bend my knee on the kick.

There was approximately 3/4" of snow on the ground this morning. It was also extremely cold. So, I decided to walk to the fitness center for the workout.

I did a lot of superman glide into a skate. I did a couple lengths (17.5 yards) of a catchup and I did finish the workout with a couple of lengths of essentially full stroke swimming. I spent around 30 minutes for the entire workout.

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.

All I can really say is, "Wow!" I'm so glad that I scheduled the coaching. There were so many things that I wasn't doing right and which I had misinterpreted. I've got so much room for improvement and am extremely excited about how making those improvements will translate into better and faster swimming.

I just scheduled my next lesson for 8am Sunday, December 8.

I think that this week I will only do swim workouts. I'll skip the strength training so that I can get three days of practice (and two masters swims) in before the next lesson.