As Christmas obligations get evermore it's nice to get out for a run to clear our minds. I used running many years ago for this, then it became a hobby, a sport and then something more professional. But it's nice to get out and run free of times, distances, and heart rates and chill out.
Also this time of year, I'm not brave enough to open water swim, but getting a swim in once or twice a week is also nice just to feel the water. It's a good time to meditate on how you move through the water, rather than the drills and distances.
One of the things I have been keeping an eye on is the amount of glide that I have, quite a lot, I was thinking about how the Garmin Swim watch shows quite a fluctuation in lap times. That said it has only been recently that I started to make sure that all laps were under a set time. But I soon realised that its is very hard to judge. Then last week I was looking at Swimsmooth.com and they have a very interesting page about, rhythm and stroke rate.
There is a new product by Finis the Tempo trainer Pro, It is the perfect little aid that beeps to you laps or stroke rate to see where my swim dead spots are and also to set my stroke rate and lap times. I used Amazon to buy it at 47 euros delivered. I thought it is worth a try. I noticed right away that my lap times are bang on, I can touch the wall every 30seconds, beep, beep. Meaning the Garmin Swim metrics are a little inaccurate.
So on with hunting out the dead spots, now this take a few sessions to get the correct beeps per cycle of your arms. Mine is about 50 strokes with both arms per min.
What now, well over Christmas I will be playing with increasing my rate to very gradually and timing it over a 100m. I will have to be careful not to increase my strokes per lap as that will decrease my efficiency. So its a fine balance to find the 'sweet spot' as Swimsmooth call it. But it's a nice little project for my winter swims to fine tune getting my swim better without the 'junk miles' as they say in running.
Merry Christmas.
Cas
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