Swimming, 20th January 2017

Posted on January 21, 2017 by james

Unlike yesterday, a quiet session in the pool again for my third Swimfit session. In the end I did:

5 x one length front crawl, one length backstroke, easy pace
One minute rest
6 x one length breaststroke, medium pace, 20 seconds rest
Four lengths quick front crawl
15 seconds rest
Four lengths front crawl kick
15 seconds rest
Four lengths front crawl pull
15 seconds rest
Four lengths front crawl
15 seconds rest
4 x 1 length front crawl sprint, 30 seconds rest
Four lengths front crawl, easy pace

After that I swam 500m front crawl practising turns at the deep end and a final easy-paced 100m front crawl.

I’ve not swum backstroke for a while and found it very hard physically. My breaststroke seems to be improving though. I’m thinking more about keeping my heels together from the end of the kick through the recovery phase so that my lower legs are as far as possible behind my body and not generating any more drag than necessary. My feeling is that my arm pull is a bit variable though. I shall be trying to work on that.

Total distance this month: 27,700m
Total distance this year: 27,700m

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Mark 1 Potato Cannon

Posted on January 20, 2017 by james

Search youtube for potato cannon and you’ll find loads of examples. My son was keen to try building one so we came up with a plan to build this one from bits of pipe we had lying about. It didn’t really need much. The “combustion chamber” is a 100mm waste water rodding fitting. One end is completely closed off with a blanking plate and the other with a reducer down to 2″. The entire thing is mounted on a wooden carriage. That’s pretty much it:

We put a couple of bolts through the blanking plate on the end and wired each one to the wires of the spark generator from a barbeque lighter. The button for the spark generator was just glued to the blanking plate using Araldite. I also wired the blanking plate in place as unlike the reducer which was a solvent-weld fitting, it was just a push fit piece:

On the inside a couple of bare copper wires are fixed on the bolts and bent so they produce a nice fat spark when the button is pressed. They’re just visible at the bottom of the rodding eye here:

To fire the cannon, a potato is rammed down the barrel to the end. A quick burst of hairspray is squirted into the chamber through the rodding eye and the cover is screwed on. Push the spark generator button and away you go. Or the potato does, at least.

The first test firing wasn’t entirely successful. The potato did shoot out, but the rodding eye cover also blew off. There was clearly also a lot of stress on the barrel.

We shortened the barrel by about 30cm and fitted a retaining chain to the cover to keep it in place.

The second test was far more successful. The potato cleared some well-grown sycamore trees about 60m away and was still travelling upwards when we lost sight of it.

Next we should make a video of it in operation.

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The Beer Shack is born

Posted on January 20, 2017 by james

I’ve been brewing my own beer for years, but doing a ninety-minute rolling boil of five gallons of wort in the kitchen has never made me the most popular person in the house so when the thermostat on the boiler died I decided to have a rethink of how I did everything. I came up with a plan to move everything to an insulated shed in the garden which would solve the issues with steaming up the kitchen (not to mention the occasional sticky floor) and allow me to organise all my kit in one place rather than storing it all over the house. My son christened the shed “The Beer Shack”.

The following pictures show the start of the project, before the EPDM roof went on and waiting to fill the walls with insulation before lining the inside.

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Swimming, 19th January 2017

Posted on January 20, 2017 by james

Very busy in the pool today making it very difficult to swim lengths, but I managed 4 x 500m front crawl and then another 10 x 50m practising turns at the deep end. Control of breathing is starting to get a little better.

Total distance this month: 26,100m
Total distance this year: 26,100m

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First results from the micrometeorite collector

Posted on January 19, 2017 by james

A couple of years ago I posted about making a micrometeorite collector that used a neodymium magnet to capture magnetic material in flow of rainwater from our house roof.

Months later we removed the magnet from the collector and collected and dried all the material we found. Here’s what we ended up with:

Obviously we can’t know that the material genuinely originates from meteors, but it’s interesting nonetheless. I think the best explanation for a terrestrial origin would be that it was carried up to the roof by birds that perch on the ridge.

We collected more material a second time.

I worked out at one point what the estimated weight of meteorite material should be in a given area based on estimated figures for the entire amount falling on the Earth in one year. I should weigh what we have collected and see how it compares. I’ll post about that another time.

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Swimming, 18th January 2017

Posted on January 18, 2017 by james

A shorter session today and I got some “toys” out too:

10 lengths front crawl
One minute rest
4 x 1 length front crawl kick, 20 seconds rest
4 x 1 length front crawl pull, 20 seconds rest
4 x 1 length front crawl, fast pace, 15 seconds rest
2 x 2 lengths front crawl, fast pace, 15 seconds rest
4 x 1 length front crawl fast, rest until recovered
10 lengths front crawl swim down

(These are not my session plans, btw. They’re what I have swum based on the ASA “Swimfit” sessions. Sadly it looks as though they’re discontinuing that programme.)

The kick set was pathetic compared with what we’d normally expect the club swimmers to manage, but my thighs were really burning by the end of it. I was pleased to give them a rest for the pull set afterwards.

I also fitted in another 500m doing front crawl turn practice at the deep end. Still working on the foot placement, though it was getting better.

Another thing I’m going to have to think in the turns about is timing of breathing. I have only ever learned to breathe to my left when swimming front crawl and if I arrive at the “T” on the “wrong arm” then taking the last breath before the turn becomes tricky. I accept that in fact I need to develop the capacity to swim longer on a single breath, but at the moment exhaling during the turn leaves me gasping for air by the time I surface (and I so hate being anywhere near the flags when I take my first breath). I should learn to breathe to my right which would help, but as I get better at the turn I hope I will be able to control my breathing so I’m more comfortable coming out of the turn regardless.

Total distance this month: 23,600m
Total distance this year: 23,600m

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Swimming, 17th January 2017

Posted on January 18, 2017 by james

A very simple swim today: 4 x 500m front crawl, followed by another 500m practising front crawl turns at the deep end of the pool. I can’t do them at the shallow end yet because I don’t have very good control of the angle I come off the wall and often end up hitting the floor on the way out. Getting good foot placement on the wall is key, I think.

The pool was very busy. Obviously those New Year resolutions haven’t worn off yet 🙂

Total distance this month: 22,000m
Total distance this year: 22,000m

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Swimming, 16th January 2017

Posted on January 18, 2017 by james

So far this month I’ve just been swimming front crawl each weekday, generally up to 2.5km each session if time allows. Thus far I’ve clocked up 18,100m so far this year. From this week however I’ve decided to alternate between shorter distance training/skills work and longer distances.

So, today’s swim:

3 x 3 lengths front crawl, one length breaststroke, easy pace.
One minute rest
6 x 1 length front crawl, medium pace, 20 seconds rest.
3 x 1 length front crawl fast, 1 length front crawl easy
Rest until fully recovered
3 x 1 length front crawl sprint, rest 15 seconds, 1 length front crawl medium pace, rest 15 seconds
2 x 1 length breaststroke fast, 1 length breaststroke slow
One minute rest
Six lengths front crawl swim down

I also did some practice on front crawl turns, bringing the total distance for the session to 1,400m.

Total distance this month: 19,500m
Total distance this year: 19,500m

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Becoming a swimming coach

Posted on January 17, 2017 by james

Last September I got myself on one of the last “Level 1” Coach courses before the ASA stopped them running to revamp all the swimming coach courses. The course was partially online (most of the Health and Safety and Safeguarding bits) and the remainder took place at the Plymouth Life Centre, about 90 minutes drive from home.

As someone who never trained as a club swimmer and without access to a head coach (the club where my children swim was without a head coach at the time) I found it quite hard going. Although there were no significant prerequisites for the course there was a fair degree of assumed knowledge that there’s probably no reason to expect someone who hasn’t been involved in competitive swimming to have.

Most difficult of all was the requirement to actually write a session plan and then deliver it to a group of actual age-group swimmers. The course documentation clearly stated that as a Level 1 Coach you’d not be expected to be write session plans and the course itself had nothing on the syllabus that included teaching us to write session plans, but we were nonetheless expected to be able to produce one that was coherent enough to use. That was a stressful evening 🙁

In addition, whilst the course did cover how to behave and communicate with swimmers once you’re poolside, there wasn’t any chance to shadow someone else doing it or to have a go and get feedback before actually reaching the point of being assessed. Perhaps if you’re part of a large club with more senior coaches who have the opportunity to keep themselves up-to-date and who do mentor the more junior coaches that’s something you can work through, but coming from a club that at the time had only two Level 1 coaches keeping the whole show going I didn’t feel at all confident that I was doing things right (and sometimes that I really even knew what I was doing).

In the end however I passed and received my shiny certificate to prove it. Since then I’ve been coaching at the club three times a week. Sometimes it’s like herding cats, but it’s also incredibly rewarding to see people improving their swimming and then taking them to competitions and watching them do well. So much so in fact that I applied to get on one of the first “Swimming Coach” courses (the replacement for the previous Level 2 Coach qualification), which I start next week.

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Learning to swim

Posted on January 17, 2017 by james

Well, sort of…

I was taught to swim at primary school, but mostly in a “learn to survive if you fall in the canal” kind of way. If you could stay afloat and propel yourself around the pool that was pretty much good enough. Anything resembling a recognisable stroke had to be self-taught. I very much enjoyed swimming nonetheless. I just didn’t take it any further.

As I was spending a lot of time hanging around sports centres whilst my children trained with one of the local swimming clubs, I decided to get back in the pool myself and make better use of the time. That was back in April 2015. For the rest of that year I spent a couple of hours a week swimming whilst they were training, getting a little fitter, but not actually improving my swimming very much.

In January 2016 I set myself a target of learning all four strokes properly and learning to turn properly, as well as setting a distance target of 250km (or 10,000 lengths if you prefer) for the year which I felt was attainable, but far from easy. Initially I started swimming more regularly to further improve my fitness and then in April 2016 I decided I’d attempt to swim every weekday. Some private lessons followed where I picked up the basics of each stroke and one of the childrens’ coaches has helped me improve my front crawl further, working through a catalogue of faults that needed fixing 😀

By early August my swimming had improved sufficiently that I reached my target of 250km, so I revised it to 400km, which meant I was going to have to do some serious work on being able to swim further in less time (more of that later). Over the next couple of months I worked on building the distance I could swim eventually reaching 2km (80 lengths) of front crawl without stopping. Much to my surprise that meant I reached my 400km target on November 30th. Another revision was called for and this time I went for another 50km. That was really pushing things and as Christmas loomed I was starting to feel very tired towards the end of the week, but by 23rd December I’d hit 447.5km leaving me just 2.5km which I completed in a single session between Christmas and New Year.

So, where am I now?

I’m relatively happy with my front crawl. I do need to work on my front crawl turns though. If I can get those sorted then I think it should be possible to do both 1,500m in less than 30 minutes and 50m in less than 30 seconds.

Breaststroke I find quite difficult and often suffer from pain in my knees when I swim more than a few lengths, I believe due to the sideways stress on the joint when returning my legs to the streamlined position at the end of the kick.

Backstroke I have not swum very much, but the flags are now generally left in at the pool where I swim, so I’ll be working on that more from now on.

And butterfly. Hah 🙂 It’s tough. Really tough. I’m getting there, but it’s going to be a while before I can swim 100m IM 😀

Now I just need to set myself a plan for 2017…

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