Flashes of Panic

I spent this morning soaking in Blodgett Pool—actually, creeping back and forth across it, doing drills in a freestyle clinic put on by Cambridge Masters Swimming. My brother put me on to the clinic last month at the meet, and eventually just signed me up for it as a Christmas gift. (I wonder if my 100m thrashing might have prompted that.)

I’ve got a packet of material from the clinic that I should really go through, but this was probably the first time since I learned to swim that anyone has sent me back and forth across the pool with the sole purpose of seeing how I do it, and telling me how to do it better. We focused on body position and pull. I hold my head a whisker too high, which tips my feet down; that’s pretty easy to fix. Harder is my pull, though some of the body position drills (rolling from my hips) will help.

They had underwater and on-deck video cameras to tape us and show us our form, which is a very striking way of demonstrating what we’re doing. Seeing my left arm pulling wide to the outside without much angle to the elbow on the underwater camera is much more vivid than any demonstration: I don’t need much prompting to see what’s going wrong.

After about two hours in the water (much of it spent getting quite cold,) I did feel like I was faster—or, at least, like I could swim the same speed with less effort. It’s also clear to me that I will need to get in the pool on Monday and nail these things down before I forget them.

Given that I’m not swimming New Englands this year, I’ve spent some time over the last few days plotting what I will do instead. I’m hoping to do the hour swim sometime before classes start again, which means soon; I just need to make an appointment with my lap counter and screw my courage to the sticking point, or something like that. It looks like there’s a meet in southern New Hampshire sometime in February which may be interesting; they’ve got mostly short stuff on the schedule, but also a 1650y, “time permitting.” However, there are more meets in Maine than anywhere else in New England this winter, which is pretty pathetic when you consider where all the swimmers are actually located.

So I’m thinking seriously about making my goal meet the Colonies Zone SCY meet in April. It’s the weekend after the Boston Marathon, but it’s also going to require some travel: it’s being hosted by Patriot Masters at George Mason.

Now Playing: Angels Of The Silences from Recovering The Satellites by Counting Crows