Silly me, I thought I was there to fix my breathing. Turns out, what I thought was my problem wasn't really my problem and what I really have difficulty with I didn't even know I was doing wrong!
So there you go. That's why you need a swim coach.
She's great. Although I think she was a bit thrown off because we seemed to be having some sort of weird communication problem. Mostly because I was trying to absorb and think of questions as she was trying to come up with ways to help me. I believe she was prepared for far worse than I turned out to be. I know it's her job to offer positive encouragement, but I also think she genuinely thinks I'm better than I'm giving myself credit for. My troubles are the ability to keep everything together and I think it was tricky for her to decide what small adjustments would be the most helpful.
Not that everything looks perfect. Just everything looks decent. I'm relaxed--which I didn't think would be the case because I feel tense. More importantly, after about 10 minutes of breathing instruction it turned out that my arm placement was preventing me from getting my head to the side properly. Problem solved.
Of course, that opened up a new can of worms because my real issue is arm placement. Kelly has mocked me for lacking a "glide" in the water. Well, it's related. By not keeping my lead arm in front long enough, it's causing all sorts of other technique situations. In short, my habit is to operate my arms sort of independently like a clock.
My practice for tonight is going to be keeping that front arm in front until my back arm has a chance to takeover. No moving the front arm until its "replacement" arrives!
All that said, I had a few very beautiful stretches of swimming towards the end...before I got tired after an hour. What I need to work on, too, is keeping my form good even if that means stopping to regroup. She'd rather I swim half a lap well than a whole lap drifting in and out of proper technique.
But my confidence got an instant boost! It's nice to know I'm not completely out of my depth here. Pardon the pun.
So there you go. That's why you need a swim coach.
She's great. Although I think she was a bit thrown off because we seemed to be having some sort of weird communication problem. Mostly because I was trying to absorb and think of questions as she was trying to come up with ways to help me. I believe she was prepared for far worse than I turned out to be. I know it's her job to offer positive encouragement, but I also think she genuinely thinks I'm better than I'm giving myself credit for. My troubles are the ability to keep everything together and I think it was tricky for her to decide what small adjustments would be the most helpful.
Not that everything looks perfect. Just everything looks decent. I'm relaxed--which I didn't think would be the case because I feel tense. More importantly, after about 10 minutes of breathing instruction it turned out that my arm placement was preventing me from getting my head to the side properly. Problem solved.
Of course, that opened up a new can of worms because my real issue is arm placement. Kelly has mocked me for lacking a "glide" in the water. Well, it's related. By not keeping my lead arm in front long enough, it's causing all sorts of other technique situations. In short, my habit is to operate my arms sort of independently like a clock.
My practice for tonight is going to be keeping that front arm in front until my back arm has a chance to takeover. No moving the front arm until its "replacement" arrives!
All that said, I had a few very beautiful stretches of swimming towards the end...before I got tired after an hour. What I need to work on, too, is keeping my form good even if that means stopping to regroup. She'd rather I swim half a lap well than a whole lap drifting in and out of proper technique.
But my confidence got an instant boost! It's nice to know I'm not completely out of my depth here. Pardon the pun.