Hi everyone!
I’ve been a reader for many years in this forum but never posted anything. I’m here today to share my story on how I improved my swimming, from 2:20 to 1:40/100 mts in 11 months.
During this time I’ve read a lot of topics here saying that when you start swimming late in your life it’s really hard to improve and that it will take some years to have a decent time in the water. This scared me a lot (I’m very competitive) so I decided that I would do everything I could to accelerate this progress.
I’ve started on triathlon o may last year. Doing an Ironman was always a dream but I could never train for triathlons because the last 9 years of my life I’ve been working on a offshore oil ship. During this time I’ve had some good results running (including a 100 km ultra training most of the time on a treadmill), but I had to stop because of injuries.
During the pandemic I gained a lot of weight (35 kgs) and my health was very poor (high BP, pre-diabetic) so I decided that I needed to go back to running. I tried running again but had little sucess, my weight and the injuries made my knee hurt really bad, I couldnt run for more than 5 minutes in one session. So I decided to start biking and loose weight so I could run more.
I lost weight, I was biking so I decided to swim and start triathlon. I live in a very small city in Brazil and luckily the only pool in the region is 5 minutes away from my house.
The first sessions were terrible, I couldnt breath properly or move myself fast (this is a video 3 months after I started: https://youtube.com/shorts/wf80ZIEbW7A?feature=share, sorry for the video orientation). So I hired a coach, the only one available on my city.
She helped me, but not very much. So after two months I decided I was better of without her. At that time I was swimming at 2:05/100 mts on my average ppce.
During this time I started to watch youtube videos on how to swim properly and faster. This helped A LOT! During every session I tried to focus on one specific technique that I watched on the day before.
One thing that helped me a lot was learning how to do the catch properly and how to position my elbow underwater. After this I was swiming at 1:55/100 mts and I was seeing improvements every session, but after some weeks I wasnt progressing anymore.
At this time my wife started to swim with me and I told her to watch the youtube videos that helped me.
She did and after sometime she wanted to buy an online course for a guy that she was watching the videos. I didnt think that it would help much, but since I wasnt progressing, I told her to go ahead and we would do the lessons together.
The course did help a lot, I could drop my pace to 1:50. The thing that helped the most was to understand on how to properly set up the catch and position myself in the water.
My wife also did have good results so we sent our swimming videos for this coach to analise and help on what we should focus on the next months. This helped a lot. My shoulder was creating a lot of drag in the water, and so was my head and hands. Fixing this already made me drop some seconds (if you are curious, heres the video: https://youtu.be/2U1o9rs-VYY )
Some weeks after this analisys I raced a sprint triathlon and while my swim time didnt improve much (it was under rough sea), I could exit the water right after the FOP and could place 2nd on my age group even after a droped chain on the bike.
I continued to work and shave some seconda every week on the pool and did another analisys ( https://youtu.be/zo4PXumAqYE ) . This time I’m trying to focus again on my hand and how my arm moves during the catch.
After this second analisys I did another sprint tri and this time I could swim with an average pace of 1:42 on open water and placed 1st in my age group (10th overall).
Somethings that helped me during this time:
-I always had something to focus on my technique, even if it was something really small
-What you do underwater is what it will make you faster. For many years my wife had been swimming in a club with a coach watching her on the pool. He never entered the water to check what she was doing or what she could improve. As soon as we started working on these points (the catch, the hand position, head position), we both could see big improvements
-My wife and I always help each other during the sessions, looking on what we were doing right or wrong
-Online coaching worked very well for us
I swim 3 times a week 2,5km - 3,5 km each session
I’m far from being a good swimmer, but I know that some people have a lot of problems progressing in the sport, so I hope this can help in some way