31 July 2024
After a Wednesday morning watching beach volleyball at probably the coolest sports venue I have ever been to ...
... I took the metro out to the 19th arrondissement to a gorgeous 33-meter pool, the Piscine Pailleron, which sits in a quiet neighborhood and is very close to the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, a great green space in Paris.
With the air temperature approacing 35°C, I fully expected the place to be crowded, which it was. I was pleasantly surprised to find, though, that the 4 lanes reserved for actual length swimming were not too busy. I shared the rapide lane with 3-5 other people during the hour I was there, the majority of whom were pretty competent. What made for a little bit of extra fun, a little bit of open water style training, was not the normal sighting practice I get passing people (though that existed), but the fact that the two lanes next to us were setup for recreational swim. In a normal pool, that would be unremarkable, but the deep end here was more than 3 meters, so they allowed jumping/diving/cannonballing/etc. in the deep end of those lanes. That made for a little bit ... and sometimes a lot of ... wave action. I took this all in stride, reframing this a practice for my Windermere Chillswim in the event the wind whips up the lake.
At one point on a break in my swim, a very nice man first complimented me on my style and speed and then asked me the question I quite often get when approached by people at a pool, "What can I do to make my stroke better?"
For the number of times I've been asked this question, I really should be better prepared. I usually stumble first and make a recommendation that he checks out Total Immersion when he goes home, gets any book by Terry Laughlin (like this one) and/or checks out the YouTube channel of Shinji Takeuchi. I stand by those ideas, but they are hard for someone to remember while standing in a pool.
I really need to think deeply about three recommendations that I can explain easily to someone, that they can remember, and that are not so complex that the person won't be able to implement them the next time they swim. I recognize this list will need to evolve as I try sharing these with people in the future, but here's my first pass at my top three recommendations.
Form is function in swimming - I cannot speak to any other sport, but swimming well is a highly, highly technical effort. I think about my form every time I swim, every stroke I take. Yeah, I zone out sometimes, but I am pretty good about keeping my primary focus on form and next on power & effort. My first recommendation to anyone looking to improve their swimming speed is for them to recognize improving their swimming grace, their form, their fluidity will drive far quicker gains than focusing on their effort, their power, their stroke rate. So, I will encourage people to first become aware of what good form is and to try to apply improve their own form.
One kick, one arm - One of the downsides of newer swimmers watching Olympians and elite athletes racing is the dominance of the six-beat kick at so many distances. I have no doubt that this the right thing for elite swimmers to do, but I think newer swimmers need to first build the connection between their kick and their pull. There's no better way to do this than with the classic two beat kick. I see many lap swimmers kicking kind of randomly, with no synchronicity between their arms and their legs. My stroke guru, Anne Wilson of Camelback Coaching, who I still see for technique lessons whenever I can, taught me to think about the snap of the kick as the ignition to the kinetic chain - snap the kick, rotate the core, stretch out the arm, repeat.
Breathe bilaterally - This is another one that goes against the grain: what works for producing world-class freestyle times is typically to breathe to one side only. But, I see so much imbalance in the typical lap swimmers that I think they'd benefit from using an every three strokes breathing pattern. The main benefit I believe this will provide is that it will also help them to action my sneaky fourth tip - don't swim flat, but rotate around your core - because the act of breathing on each side naturally introduces a rotation around the core.
I didn't have these for tips for the nice gentleman (Mike, if I recall) that day in Paris, but I'll try them out when asked in the future.
This is now pool #692 on my #1001Pools quest.
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