MIT Swim Lesson #2

Today we talked about breathing and arm movement. It was really good!

First, breathing. It's fine to breathe on just one side, bilateral breathing isn't necessary. Which is good, because I seem to have given up on it. However, breathing on just one side doesn't mean that you don't rotate your body in both directions! You still have to rotate. In terms of taking a breath, as one arm is back and the other is forward, your body rotates and you turn your neck, and take in water. I think that's pretty much what I do, though I'm pretty sure I slack on the rotation on the non-breathing side. You don't have to take a big, gasping breath, nor do you have to completely empty your lungs breathing out. It's just breathing, like you usually do when exercising, but some of it is under water.

There are four important positions of the arm that give you speed when swimming. First, when your arm goes into the water you don't just plop it there. It dives into the water, like a bird going after a fish. But a bird that goes in at an angle, not straight down. When you are shooting your arm into the water, you move forward. Then, after you have reached as far as possible, you bend your hand and make it into a paddle. Keeping your elbow up you pull it back. Some S shape stuff happens in the pull. At the end of the stroke, you flick your hand up to get that last bit of a pull. It's not really a flick, but that's kind of what it seemed like. Then, in the recovery you lead with your elbow so that you are ready to shoot your arm in again. 

That's a lot of things to practice. I really liked having the teacher talk through exactly what you are supposed to do - I don't think I've had that talk for a long time. Pieces came together and I connected dots and all that good stuff. 

One thing that I realized is that I've been so focused on my right arm not going down, but actually the arm is an extension of my body, so if I focus on getting my body in the right position, the arm will follow. I'm sad that the woman who has been teaching is going on vacation. She's really good. There is this guy who's "coteaching" though he doesn't actually get to say much, but he will teach the last two classes. He seems nice. Hopefully he will teach us some drills.

At the end of class we did sprints racing each other back and forth. In my group of four, I was always last, but not by too much. After class I swam 50 meters again, and it took me a minute and nine seconds, which is 7 seconds faster than last week. But that was after doing a bunch of sprints. 

After swimming I went to Shakespeare in the Park with the Merfolk. We had a nice picnic and this year was MacBeth - it was really good!