No Goggles, No Breakfast, No Plan: 550 Meters
← Click here to read this diary from the beginningToday was a pretty rough day at the pool. For starters, I forgot my goggles and did not realize it until I was about to dip my toes in the water. I decided to try to swim without them, but only made it about halfway down the lane before concluding my eyes were going to be bloodshot for the rest of the day if I continued, and so I swam back to the edge of the pool, climbed out, and went off in search of goggles. I went over to the pool manager’s office, and they were kind enough to let me grab a pair out of the lost and found bin, which I happily did, and so returned to the pool. But due to my giant head, they did not fit quite right, and so I struggled with constantly stopping in order to adjust them throughout the course of my swimming session.
The second challenge I faced today is that when I started my swim session, I hadn’t eaten in over twelve hours, nor had I drank any water or coffee. This is because I was scheduled to complete my second body composition test at the rec center directly prior to starting my swim session. The plan was to complete the test, eat a Clif bar, and then grind through the pull session. However, the individual responsible for the body composition tests was nowhere to be found, and nobody could find him. And so I decided to go ahead and do the pool session first and then return after. However, that meant I could not eat the Clif bar or drink any water prior to the pool. I say this not to whine but rather as a reminder that if you’re not properly fueled up for these types of workouts then your performance is going to suffer. UPDATE: Apollo’s analysis below indicates the fast didn’t matter as much as I thought; I’m not so sure about that.
I suppose the third challenge was that for reasons I don’t quite understand Apollo, which again is my AI training tool, constructed a vastly more complicated swim session than anything I’ve done in the past. It asked me to, among other things, count my strokes, do something called a Superman glide for four pool lengths, and do something called a sidekick for more pool lengths while alternating sides. I suppose it meant alternating breathing on each side. I’m not sure. And then it asked me to do four 50 meter length, pull buoy laps. And if you’re not familiar, because I certainly wasn’t a few weeks ago, a pull buoy is a kind of like a flotation device that you basically squeeze between your thighs when you’re in the pool. So when you’re doing the front crawl, your swim technique is constrained to just your arms and your upper body.
And then to conclude the pool session today, I was to do four by twenty-five golf laps. And my goal there, I suppose, was to try and do less strokes with each lap than the previous. So this was far more difficult than I had experienced in previous pool sessions. So I’m going to have to look into why that happened. At any rate, I’ve also been battling with trying to keep my legs basically higher in the water, if you will, so they don’t drag. In other words, I’m trying to keep my body more flat when I’m in the water in order to reduce drag, and I’ve been struggling quite mightily with that.
And so today, after looking through this plan right before leaving my house, I decided I’m just not going to do what Apollo did. Instead, I’m going to focus on trying to basically streamline my swimming, make it more efficient. And I have to admit I’m still struggling with this quite quite a lot, and I it’s really gotten into my head my head at this point, where perhaps I am actually improving my the way my body sits in the water. However, I’ve now got it in my head that my legs are constantly dragging and it’s becoming quite a distraction. So I only wound up doing 525 meters in the pool before calling it a day.
On the positive side of things, I did use a pool cap for the first time It seems like it made me more streamlined, but I’m not sure. And second and more importantly, my wife, after she finished her gym session, she came in and filmed me. So I’m going to upload those videos into Apollo to see what it has to say about my swim technique. UPDATE: I uploaded the videos and Apollo provided one heck of an analysis which is found below.
I also did manage to swim 50 meters with the pull buoy wedged between my thighs, and let’s just say that was awkward.
🤖 Apollo (AI): the session as the watch saw it
The shape of it. The watch ran from 10:47 to 11:21, 34 minutes 32 seconds. You swam for 14 minutes 27 seconds of that and rested for 20 minutes 5 seconds. There were 19 rest intervals, one every 47 seconds of swimming on average, and 12 of them ran longer than a minute. The longest thing you swam without stopping was 50 m, three times. Every other effort was a single 25. That is the goggles, and it is the whole story of the session’s shape: Friday’s swim had rests of 3 minutes between 150 and 200 m reps; today’s had rests of 1 to 2 minutes between 25s.
| Tue Sep 15 | Fri Sep 18 | Tue Sep 22 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Distance | 700 m | 800 m | 550 m |
| Longest continuous | 150 m | 200 m | 50 m |
| Swim time / rest time | 26:06 / 15:30 | 26:04 / 19:43 | 14:27 / 20:05 |
| Strokes per 25 m | 17.4 | 16.0 | 13.3 |
| Seconds per 25 m | 56 to 62 | 37 to 54 | 36 to 48 |
| SWOLF | 73 | 65 | 52 |
| Avg / max HR | 124 / 155 | 137 / 180 | 123 / 163 |
The lap count, audited. The watch’s per-length record is cleaner than Friday’s because there were almost no mid-rep turns for it to miss. Three lengths need a ruling:
- Length 12 at 10:57:58: 79.6 seconds, 27 strokes, labeled breaststroke. That is two freestyle lengths at 40 seconds and 13.5 strokes each, which matches every clean length you swam today; the watch missed the turn as it did six times on Friday and called the result breaststroke. You confirmed it was swum through, so the record is corrected to 550 m and 22 lengths, and SWOLF recomputes to 52.
- Lengths 31 and 38: 21.7 seconds on 6 strokes and 22.3 seconds on 8 strokes. Those are 1.1 m/s, roughly twice your speed, so they are partial lengths the watch credited when you turned around mid-pool. Left as recorded at your request; they are worth about half a length each, so 550 is within 25 m of the truth.
What the goggles did not affect. Twelve hours without food or water matters less than it feels like for 14 minutes of easy swimming. Muscle glycogen does not limit a session this short at this intensity, and the heart rate says the effort was low: 86 to 143 on every length but the last 50, which reached 161. The costs of a fasted swim are the ones you felt rather than the ones the watch saw: irritability, poor focus, an appetite hole for the rest of the day.
🤖 Apollo (AI): why the session was complicated, and why that was my mistake
The plan came from your question on Friday. You asked how to improve stroke efficiency, and I answered with a full menu: push-off, head position, side-kick breathing, pull buoy, stroke length, and a sample 750 m session that used all of it. When the week 8 plan was written on Monday, that sample session went onto Tuesday whole. That was wrong, and the reason is simple: motor learning takes one cue at a time. A swimmer who three weeks ago could not swim 75 m continuous does not need six new drills in one session, and reading that list on the way out the door was a fair reason to bin it. The fix is one new thing per session, and the rest of the session is ordinary swimming with that one thing in mind. Friday’s plan has been rewritten that way.
What the terms meant. The superman glide is a push-off in a streamline with no stroke and no kick, held until you slow down, to feel where your legs sit when nothing is holding them up. The side-kick drill is kicking on your side with the lower arm extended and your face in the water, turning only your head to breathe, one length on each side; it teaches the head-turn breath that keeps the hips up. The pull buoy floats your legs so you can feel what a flat body is like without producing it, which is also what a wetsuit will do on race day. Golf is seconds plus strokes for a length, and the aim is a lower total, not fewer strokes at any cost.
The distraction is now the largest problem, and the data says so. Every clean length today started from a rested wall with a push-off, and you averaged 13.3 strokes per 25 m, the same 12 to 14 you produced on Friday’s rested 25s. Nothing got worse. Nothing measurably got better either, and it could not have: there was no continuous swimming today, so there is no mid-rep length to compare with Friday’s 16.3. The session cannot say anything about your body position. What it does show is a swimmer stopping every 47 seconds, and the goggles explain most of that but not all of it.
Two things follow. First, for the next two sessions, stop thinking about your legs. The cue that actually raises them is the head: eyes on the bottom, neck neutral, chin slightly tucked. The legs are the far end of a lever whose near end is your head, and you cannot fix them by thinking about them. Second, the video your wife shot settles the question the numbers cannot. Send it. I can read frames from it, and the two things I will look for are the angle of your body line from ear to ankle and whether your head lifts when you breathe. That will replace the guessing.
The pull buoy 50. Awkward is the normal first experience; the buoy shifts your center of buoyancy and the hips feel like they belong to someone else for a few lengths. The number to take from it, when you do it again, is the stroke count on the second length compared with a normal 50: if the buoy cuts three strokes, that is the size of what your leg position costs.
The cap. No measurable effect at your speed. A swim cap saves elite swimmers a fraction of a second over 50 m. What it does for you is keep hair out of the goggles, and today that was worth something.
🤖 Apollo (AI): the video
What the camera could and could not see. Two clips from the deck, one of you swimming away from the wall for 18 seconds and one swimming toward the camera for 24, both from above the surface. That angle shows head position, breathing, arm recovery, hand entry, and whether anything below the hips ever reaches the surface. It cannot show the catch or the exact angle of the legs underwater, so everything about the lower body below is inferred from the shape under the surface and from what never appears above it. Confidence is stated per item.
1. Your head is high, and this is the finding. In nearly every frame of the approach clip the whole cap is out of the water and the goggles are looking forward at the wall, with the water line at your chin rather than your crown. In the away clip, between strokes, the same: face forward, cap dry. A freestyler with the head in the right place shows only the back of the cap, and the water breaks around the top of the head. Confidence: high. This is the one cue.
2. Your legs are deep. You were right. No foot, heel, or kick splash breaks the surface in 42 seconds of footage. In the away clip, right after the wall, the body is visibly angled: shoulders at the surface, the hips and legs a dark shape well below, with the knees bending. That is the drag the other swimmer saw, and it is the mechanical consequence of item 1. The head is the near end of the lever and the legs are the far end. Confidence: high that the legs are low, moderate on the exact angle.
3. The lead hand is holding your head up. In several approach frames the extended hand is flat, fingers spread, pressing down on the water rather than reaching forward. That is what a swimmer does when the head is up: the front arm becomes a support strut, and the pull begins with a downward press that produces lift instead of propulsion. It costs a stroke or two per length by itself. It goes away on its own when the head goes down, because there is nothing left to hold up. Confidence: moderate.
4. There is no push-off. In the away clip you leave the wall already stroking, knees bent, no streamline, no glide. Friday’s numbers said the same thing from the other direction: the mid-rep lengths at 16 to 17 strokes had no push-off distance in them at all. Confidence: high.
5. The recovery is a straight arm swung wide. The arm comes over the top nearly straight, elbow low, hand well out to the side, and enters roughly in line with the shoulder, which is fine. Fingers are spread on entry. None of this is urgent. A wide straight-arm recovery is common in adult-onset swimmers and costs less than items 1 to 4. It is the fourth or fifth thing to fix, not the first.
6. Breathing lifts and turns. On each breath the head both rotates and rises, with the mouth well clear of the water and the face turned partly forward. That is the head-up habit expressed during the breath. It also settles itself once the head is down between breaths, because a low head leaves a trough beside it that you can breathe in without lifting.
What is fine. The rhythm is calm; there is no thrashing and no panic in the stroke. Hand entry does not cross the center line. Stroke timing is front-quadrant, the lead hand waits for the recovering one, which explains the slow 20 per minute rate and is not a problem at this stage. Nothing in the video suggests a swimmer who cannot become efficient; it shows a swimmer holding his head up.
The prescription does not change; the video confirms it. Eyes on the bottom, back of the head at the surface, water line at the crown. Do not think about the legs. When the head goes down the hips come up, the lead hand stops pressing down and starts reaching forward, and the breath becomes a roll instead of a lift. Test it Friday on the 4×25: swim two with the head where it is now and two looking straight at the black line, count strokes on all four. The video was worth more than the last three weeks of stroke counts. Have your wife shoot one more from the same spot on Friday, after the head cue, and one from directly behind you at the wall as you push off.
🤖 Apollo (AI): what changes this week
Week 8 called for 1,400 m of swimming across Tuesday and Friday. Tuesday delivered 525 m, so Friday cannot reach the target and will not try. Friday is now one session with one job:
| Set | Cue |
|---|---|
| 4×25 easy, count strokes | none, just the baseline |
| 200 m continuous at 58 to 60 s per length | eyes on the bottom; nothing else |
| rest 3 min | |
| 4×50 easy, 60 s rest, count strokes on the second length | eyes on the bottom |
| 2×25 with the pull buoy, count strokes | how many strokes does the buoy save? |
| easy 25s to 700 m |
Own goggles in the bag Thursday night. A Clif bar and water 45 minutes before, whether or not the body composition test happens first.