Lucy Charles wrote:
jond81 wrote:
Loved watching the coverage of the race at Kona via the live cast which feature you a lot as you were up front most of the way and with the super gutsy finish reclaiming 2nd place at the end I think you earned even more fans. Your Youtube stuff is always entertaining as well. You guys seem to genuinely enjoy what you're doing, or at least do a good job portraying it that way.
With your swim background do you think you put less time into swim training throughout the year than your competitors? Is it always your intent to go off upfront by yourself so no one is drafting off you and you can get the mental edge of starting off the bike with some time between you and the next athlete? That's assuming if you went a bit slower on the swim maybe you'd have more later on if needed. I don't think many people can choose to just be in the front, at least not without burning too many candles, so I just didn't know what your thoughts were on that ability. In the video you guys were vague in regards to this years plan about keep doing what works and change up some other things, is there anything in particular you are looking to improve that you can share?
I get asked this question a lot. I genuinely find it more difficult to swim slowly because I sit lower in the water and therefore end up putting in equal effort resisting more drag. So equal effort for a much slower pace. It might appear that I’m working really hard to break away from the pack but I’m actually in cruise control, I’m aware it’s a very long day!. I experimented with swimming slower at 70.3 words last year with the intention of some of the faster pack swimmers to latch on, however they couldn’t and it felt like I was purposely slowing down for no real gain.
This is really interesting and explains in part why bad swimmers swim doubly bad (like me). If you're faster your position is better so you win in both ways. Of course you must be able to swim faster, and slow AOS's like me are often not able because we get out of breath. Seems a locked door.
However, lately I changed my swimming in that:
-I swim more (instead of 3k a week average 6k average with weeks of 10k);
-I increased stroke frequency. I saw a video of a coach who said 90 % of AOS swimmers have a too low frequency.
Surprisingly I am able to do this and do not get out of breath. Probably because the breath frequency increases too. So the frequency increase together with the buoyancy effect Lucy mentions, I could maybe get out of my stagnation I'm in since years. As a matter of fact I improved my PB on 400m with pullbuoy the day before yesterday with 10s, which is a lot.
(PS I'm also working on this 2/3 breathing on which a thread here is running, but I do not know if that is something for me: it seems to be more strenuous than normal breathing every 2 strokes for me)