1.5 Mile Open Water - New PR Swim!

Met my mom (who is basically a mermaid she's such a good swimmer) and we drove up to Lake Goodwin for a little open water swimming practice. After checking out a few swimming options on the lake (a friends dock, a community swimming area and park, and Wenberg State Park's swimming area) we settled on a lovely and jet-ski free roped off swimming area at Wenberg.

Here's the view of the swimming area from up above in the picnic area. This was after our swim, when it got crowded, so you can imagine how nice it was earlier, when we had the water practically to ourselves.

Lake Goodwin is gorgeous, with beautiful clean water with a sand and river-rock bottom. The Wenberg swimming area was great too, with a buoy line separating the shallow wading area from the deeper swimming area. If you look at the sat pic of our route you can see the swim lines and the deeper-water area. My mom swam laps on the shallower, warmer inside line (about 75 yards from one end to the other), and I ran a loop of the perimeter (200 meters, give or take).

There was nary a duck in sight (I say "no thanks," to swimmer's itch) but I did see several dragonflies and butterflies, so nature was definitely playing nice. When we first arrived, at around 11, there were several families and quite a few kids hanging out on the log-booms and off the buoy lines of the swimming area, but everyone was really cool and well behaved and the deeper water section of the swimming area was basically deserted. An hour later, when I wrapped up, quite a few more people had entered the deeper water area and I had to avoid more random legs and arms, but it still wasn't unpleasantly crowded.

I did 12 laps total, for a swim of about 1.58 miles according to mapmyrun.com. My mom went about 3/4 miles before calling it a day.

All in all, maybe the most pleasant open water swim I've yet done. The water was so clean and calm, and the loop was simple enough that I felt like I could focus on my form within the open water context. I did catch myself falling into back-quadrant swimming and windmilling a few times, but in general I think I did a pretty good job of catching-up, pulling with a high elbow, and executing a full-body rotation. I found that when I thought of my stroke as a way to propel my body into a skate position instead of a push back against the water I achieved a nice balance of fluid propulsion without shoulder and arm weariness.

I also worked on keeping eyes (and head) up so that my gaze was right around my extended hand. This really helped when it came time to breathe and sight and (especially) sight-breathe. The last thing I focused on was keeping my extended arm extended until the recovering arm got to the catch-up position on a breathing cycle. It's always been harder for me to keep balance while breathing, and my extended arm tends to drop too early because of this. The drop means that cycle turns into a windmill stroke instead of a high-elbow anchoring/pull stroke. I'm still working on it, but it's way easier in a wetsuit (isn't everything?).