I have slowly begun the training process.  It hasn’t been easy, I was getting used to slacking off.  The last couple of weeks I have mange to get some spin classes and swimming in.

In terms of swimming I am working on my breathing technique by doing superman style drills.  I lay on my stomach floating in the water with my hands out over my head and overlapping.  The whole time my face is in the water I am exhaling with my nose and mouth.  When I need to breath I take a stroke and take a breath.  I do this a length at a time, and it works well.

Last night I tried to incorporate the breathing into my new swim stroke.  It was awkward to say the least.  If I had to sum up the event, I would say that it resembled controlled drowning.  It is really hard to get everything synced up, and there was more than one time where I got a mouth full of water instead of air.  The good news is that I was able to recover and get a good breath on the next stroke.  So it seems that as long as I don’t panic I should be ok even if I get a little water in my mouth when I go for air.

Later on I tried to slow everything down.  Slow my arms, slow my pace, and then things seemed to feel much better.  Look at that, slow down to go faster, it almost makes sense.  At any rate, now that I am getting better at breathing, I don’t have to breath every other stroke, so I can be a bit more efficient.  The next step is to get my stroke straightened out.  Lots of work to do there, but I’m optimistic.

Incidentally, I had the first triathlon of the year a couple of weeks ago.  It went ok, and I’ll dedicate a post to it when I get a little time.