Forgot to take my session plan, so I just swam 2.7km front crawl and did turn practice. My turns are definitely improving. Breathing on the stroke before the turn is becoming more rare and I’m becoming more comfortable with turning off whichever arm I need to use, and also coming off the wall fairly straight as a general rule. I think what I need to be working on now is more control of my arms in the turn — they can get a bit wild sometimes, and better breathing control during the actual body rotation. I’m probably exhaling too much which leaves me gasping for air by the time I’ve surfaced and managed three strokes.
I’m also attempting to get a more pronounced early vertical forearm. I can feel a significant difference when I get that right as there’s far more pressure on the forearm during the pull, but it’s also quite tiring as I’m probably transferring the load of the pull to muscles that aren’t quite so used to it. I am wondering if a side benefit of “EVF” is that it stabilises the arm making it less likely to drift excessively under the body during the pull (especially on breathing). That’s a problem I seem to see very often with my age group swimmers.
Total distance for the month: 25,400m
Total distance for this year: 57,600m
Not as much as I wanted for this month, but we’ll see how it goes next month.