Off the Deck

Of the many endless debates in swim circles, one of the more popular lead-off questions is: “How should weights fit into my schedule?”

There are many possible swim-weights combos. By now I think I’ve tried them all, partly due to schedule shifts, but also because I like to experiment. One pattern always seems to work best for me though — swim and lift on the same day. The swim has to come first, followed by at least three hours before lifting weights. Here’s why:

1) Swimming well is my primary training goal. Therefore, I apply the most time and energy in the pool. If I lift then swim, I am tired in the water and don’t get the most out of practice. If I swim then lift, absolutely, I’m not as “fresh” for weights. But my attitude is that following up a “good” swim with a “pretty good” weights session on the same day is excellent endurance training.

2) As I fossilize, I need the most recovery time I can get. Practice and weights can be equally hard on my body. When I swim one day then lift weights the next and repeat, I am tired, tired, tired all of the time and all of my workouts — water or land — suffer. Swimming and lifting on the same day however, gives me a hard-lighter-hard (then rest day) pattern. Weights are always a hard workout, but the swim-only days don’t have to be distance or endurance. Instead, they can fit the “lighter” theme with a focus on recovery, stroke, speed, technique, etc.

3) By resting between swimming and weights, I am reducing my risk for injury. I know many swimmers who can lift right after pratice. That just doesn’t work for me. Not only am I too tired to do a decent weight routine, I can’t hold my form as well, a condition which we all know opens the door to injury.

4) I need a lot of warm up. I am not naturally Gumby-like flexible. As an asthmatic, I need to ease my body into “work” phases. And, I am a distance swimmer for a really good reason — I can’t go from 0 to 100 at the drop of a hat. All factors combined, my body requires way more warm up time than average. Swimming (followed by stretching) helps loosen up my body for weights later in the day. Weights than swimming just makes me tighter.

Of course, my pattern suits my particular physical condition and needs best. Schedules such as weights-then-swim immediately, swim-weights-swim-weights etc. per day, and others will serve sprinters, swimmers who have limited training time, etc. better. That’s the beauty of experimentation. Keep trying until you discover what works for you.

Until next time,
Rebecca, swim evangelist

Assuming your main goal is to swim fast (and that’s primarily why you’re lifting weights).

I’m sure that many of you, like me, have a hoard of latex swim caps from various meets and open water races. A practical and affordable item, it’s easy to see why organizers always slip one into event loot bags.

Despite accumulating enough latex meet caps to wear a different one every day for a month, I have to confess that it’s always fun and exciting to receive another one when signing in — seeing a new logo designed just for the event I’m about to participate in never fails to psyche me up.

Absolutely, I could wear them at practice. Except that I prefer latex — a tad warmer and they last longer. I could stop taking them home from meets and races, but I like keeping each one as a memento. And, trading is only cool when someone offers their team cap in exchange for yours.

So, I ask you: “What do you do with your latex event caps?” I’d love to have a creative, yet practical application for them. For example, I know that some swimmers make a quilt from old event t-shirts.

The reader who sends the best response wins a brand new Finis Tempo Trainer, in a very nice water-y blue color. Deadline is Nov. 30. Please be sure to include a contact email address with your submission.

Ready? On you mark, get set, go! Have fun and send in your entries!

Until next time,
Rebecca, swim evangelist

Ah, short course season. There are several reasons you have to peel me off the deck of an outdoor 50m pool and shove me indoors to 25y training at the end of every summer. One of them is “all those turns.”

To be fair, there are factors beyond “fewer turns” that make me better at long course. But I know sluggish turns is one aspect I really need to work on to improve my short course swims.

Turns have been my achilles heel since the day I graduated from 25s to 50s as an age grouper. Over the years I’ve taken any opportunity that’s come along (on-deck coaching, clinics, the good nature of fellow swimmers who excel at turns) to figure out what’s slowing me down on the walls. I watch the experts’ technique revealed by underwater cam views during big meets on TV, such as Worlds, the Trials, and the Olympic Games.

It’s been really frustrating then, to be able to comprehend what I have to do, even visualize what I need to do, but then still suffer from some sort of brain-body disconnect at walls. I can just feel myself slowing down as I approach the wall and “pace-disrupted” off of it.

Thanks to “coach” Brett, a fellow teammate (a sprinter who really knows how to work the walls) who has devoted countless after-practice hours to one-on-one work on my turns, the mechanics of the “flip” part of my turn have greatly improved. I’m planting my feet better (deeper than my hips, and wide enough to apply full strength to push off). I’m also thinking “dive into the turn” as I head into every wall which is a big, aggressive step up from my former “drift in” approach.

Heather (or “Lady COMSA” as she is known in our local swim circle) watched my turns as she counted for me during the 1500 at LC Nats this past August. Her assesment? The actual turn isn’t that bad now; it’s time to focus on streamlining.

Here’s my current plan of attack:
–My goal this month is to do at least one dolfin kick off every wall. I hope to build to two the following month, and ultimately get to three. The beginning of the short course season is a great time to try this out — I can take advantage of the slower “get back into shape” practice intervals to get used to exerting more energy off the walls and hold good technique for each repeat.

–I am going to attack every wall every repeat every practice. Yep, I definitely used to be lazy on the walls, but no more!

–I have added yoga and pilates to the weekly training mix to improve flexibility.

–After practice I’ll throw in a few “push of bottom” streamline drills in the deep end.

–Continue to get expert help as well as experiment. For exmaple, I know I’ve seen swimmers dolfin kick off walls on their sides, but it took me forever to realize that it’s easier to kick on my side than my stomach off walls. But hey, now I know…

Until next time,
Rebecca, swim evangelist

There’s a lot about the swimmer lifestyle that non-swimmers just don’t get. If you start swimming as a child, this “distinct from the general population” feeling begins early. That’s because anyone who doesn’t know you that well finds you a bit odd. After all, not many kids curtail most other activities so they can swim before and after school, on weekends, all summer long, and do daily dry land training. Or shave off all their body hair once or twice a year.

Luckily for me, my scholastic team was very successful (our boys’ and girls’ varisty teams usually won every dual meet, often were sectional champs and sent many swimmers onto the state and national level), so by the time I hit high school, while people stared, nobody actually said anything about my dripping into homeroom each morning and inhaling a packed breakfast before the bell rang fifteen minutes later.

Obviously, we were seen as freaks by our peers, but being winning freaks saved us from being picked on. But that same success also put swimmers in the spotlight during high school. To this day, I still feel silly when recalling mandatory fall pep-rally attendence. As a captain, I was required to wear my varisty sweatsuit and stand on hay bales on the back of a truck to “receive a cheer for the team” by our football cheerleaders. (As a girl, being “cheered to” by other girls was beyond surreal and awkward-icky. Especially since swimming is so not a cheerleading sport. Competing in suits eliminates the “we need to sexy this sport up with cheerleaders in skimpy outfits” need, I believe.)

While school may be long over for me, the swimmer lifestyle persists. I still swim year round, often going to bed early to hit a.m. practice. I walk around a lot with wet hair, and during summer I have weird cap and google tan lines on my face. I even shave down once a year for LC Nats.

The mystique is still there too. When picking up some produce recently, I could see the cashier was a little disapproving of my wet hair. I think she was starting to put it together with my swim t-shirt though when I said, “I swim competitively.” She then burst out with “I LOVE swimmers!” A little peculair I thought — when did swimmers become such a popular “type” in the public eye? This was in July, pre-Beijing, mind you.

True, every Olympic year is followed by a little spike of interest in swimming. Just as in high school, while the majority of people still may not “get” why we swim, success brings respect — and American swimmers traditionally have done well at the Olympics. Certainly, in the past some kids out there watch some one like Rowdy Gaines, Matt Biondi, Janet Evans or Summer Sanders and decided right then and there that they too, would be swimmers. And many of them follow through on that dream.

But for the most part, swimming fades from public view for another four years, until the next Olympics. Except perhaps, maybe this time. Michael Phelps’ quest for eight golds captured world-wide attention. Let’s hope that inspiring more kids to swim is the least of the repercussions of Phelps’ awesome accomplishment — let’s hope that this means more pools open year-round to all ages and at affordable fees, that scholastic teams for boys and girls and college men and women are no longer cut, and that swim-geeks like me will see more coverage of swimming during non-Olympic years.

Until next time,
Rebecca, swim evangelist