Had a break yesterday because I was so tired. Today I spent the entire session working on front crawl head position (particularly during breathing), body rotation and stroke length, doing 20 x 100m followed by 10 x 50m. The latter two are quite tiring to work on, but experimenting with my head position was quite interesting. My legs naturally sink (I can’t float on the surface), but pushing my head down into the water (similar to Sun Yang, of all people) lifts my hips and ankles closer to the surface and massively improves my streamline to the point where I can actually feel the water flow changing across my skin. In turn this makes life much easier and I’m also less inclined to lift my head to breathe to the right. It’s consistent with some suggestions I’ve read that swimming at a very slight downwards angle (four or five degrees from the horizontal, say) may actually be beneficial.
I’m going to have to experiment with this more.
Total distance for the month: 17,800m
Total distance for this year: 433,000m
Distance compared to annual target: 39,000m ahead