Nausea

My swimming is improving (I did write going forwards...) in style if not in endurance or speed. At least my current coach has told me that I'm starting to look like a swimmer! In fairness I do generally feel more in tune with the water and frequently notice that I'm going through a checklist of at least arm entry site and angle, front-quadrant timing, pelvis tilt, ankle position, hip rotation as I'm swimming. Previously I was often thinking about just keeping going.

I'm still struggling with kick drill lengths and finding them exceptionally tiring.

Last week I was re-introduced to tumble turns, starting with a basic tumble away form all walls. It took me  few attempts to realise that being in a tight ball is pretty critical. The rotation made me feel dizzy. After 4 or 5 successful tumbles I moved towards the wall to start to learn the push-off phase. I had to stop though as I felt nauseous. That lasted almost 48 hours. Since I've tested one tumble per swim to try to become accustomed to it. The thought of a tumble, actually half a rotation, every length makes me feel sick. A quick online search revealed that nausea is common for newcomers to tumble turns, so at least not unusual even if unpleasant.

Stroke Rate and Early Catch

Today I was at Askern with @CoachMorg. The initial video showed that my stroke was more relaxed than previously and I had some degree of elbow bend in the catch. However my hand entry was still leading into a dropped elbow and raised hand. We spent a while working on dropping my fingers to gain an early catch and tend to raise my elbow at the same time. Naturally this leads to a reduced reach.

Next we looked at stoke rate. We did the ramp test from my leisurely turnover of 56spm to a tough 70spm. There didn't seem to be an obvious dead-spot glide but it was clear that an increase to 62spm would give a distinct increase in pace  with only marginal increase in effort. Notably, at the highest rate it looked as though I might crack 2:00min/100m if I could sustain it. That would be great.

Anyway, the plan is to work on 100m sets at 62spm and then lengthen the sets until that rate of arm turnover is natural. Then increase the rate a little! It felt far simpler to focus on stroke rate than my previous attempts at CSS lengths,  Morg described that focussing on process of stroke is far simpler and immediate than thinking about an outcome such as pace.

The only problem is that my TempoTrainer seems to have perpetually flat batteries despite replacing them.

Swimming lesson

In my quest for a swimming coach I found Swim121 near Chesterfield. The first problem was in locating it but that was due to my carelessness rather than any error in the company's location map. I was disappointed to find that the pool was only 10m long. As my major issue is fatigue it is hard to induce that in very short lengths. Also the pool lacks any internal markings so you have to keep quite a check on how many strokes you'v done per length to avoid hitting the end.

The teacher gave me some tips about my stroke, in particular that I probably wasn't exhaling sufficiently for the effort I was making. This was also linked to a rushed arm stroke that gives a short window for inspiration. Having said that, I didn't feel I'd settled into my stroke at all in the half hour due to the short pool length.

He also thought that I should adopt a thumb-first entry style to reduce air capture on hand entry which some online 'experts' feel is bad practice nowadays. Here's an example but there are others! This is probably trivia but anything with a risk of injury isn't ideal for a stiff 50 year old.