Swimming needs a lot of work

Monday started the week strong. Strength training for an hour, good. A short run for some pace training, good. And, swimming in the evening, not good.

I was swimming 100 meter repeats. The last 25 meters are way harder than they ought to be. I have pretty good cardio fitness and there is no way that my heart rate should be 160 beats/minute. I starting doing diagnostics.

First I swam 100 meters as easy as I could, bilateral breathing (breathing to both sides every third stroke). After 100 meters my heart rate was 160 beats/min. Ugh.

Next I swam 100 meters easy with a pull buoy, bilateral breathing. After 100 meters my heart rate was 120 beats.min. OK. Obviously the driving heart rate is related to my kicking. This is no surprise but I’m not that inefficient. I am not kicking that hard.

Aha! What if kicking is raising my heart rate to the point that I need to forgo bilateral breathing and simply breath every second stroke, always to one side or the other.

So I swam 100 meters as easy as I could, breathing every second stroke to my left going one direction and every second stroke to my right going the other direction. After 100 meters my heart rate was only about 140 beats/minute. That’s good. But, I was much slower and that’s bad.

I am sure that I was slower because my stroke mechanic goes all to hell. When I breathe to my right I tend to badly over-roll. When I breathe to my left I tend to sink. Nice eh?

This then appears to be the challenge for me. Smooth out my stroke on both the left and right so that I can maintain a reasonable speed at a reasonable heart rate by breathing every second stroke over 1500 meters or 3800 meters. Every now and then execute one three stroke rep in order to sight ahead.