Flying like a fish

Woke at 6:30 to a sunny spring morning, back in the old routine today, Louis to ferry to and from school and the dogs to walk. Make a full English, but leave out the toast and eat breakfast and drink coffee in the Garden Room. I'm getting to know my resident birds, the obligatory garden Robin, he was involved in a turf war with two other cock birds yesterday, but saw them off successfully. I also have a mating pair of blackbirds nesting in the hedge, the male sings beautifully every morning, and a nest of starlings under the eaves, their squalk is not so beautiful, but I can hear the chicks shouting for breakfast as I lie in bed still half asleep in the morning. After dropping Louis at school, I take Dolly and Teddy down the old railway line, today is a perfect spring morning, no wind, sunny and around fifteen degrees, sixty in old money. Everywhere is a lush green after all the rain and most of the trees are in blossom, horse chestnuts, with big white candles and the cherry and apple trees ablaze with pink and white flowers. It is one of those days where the world is once again enchanted and so I walk slowly, as I want the moment to last. Down the line the first hawthorn tree has a show of May, only a few of the south facing buds have opened but it's a lovely harbinger of Summer, although heavy rain is forecast for later. After the walk I call at the supermarket for a few odds and ends and then continue to the leisure centre. Suddenly I feel weary, perhaps the downside from the high during my walk, so decide to warm up and see how I feel. The schools are in, so half the pool is used up, but there are only four swimmers in the other half, so a free lane isn't a problem. I don't need to relax or calm myself today as I feel half asleep anyway, so push off into a slow, easy, relaxed freestyle, breathing to either side every three strokes. Soon settle into my thirteen stroke pattern and float along counting the strokes and rolling my body to breath in order to maintain my streamlined profile in the water. Ninety nine percent of freestylers turn their heads to breathe, and this throws their bodies out of alignment and this creates friction and extra resistance. It seems so simple and obvious, to roll the body around its longitudinal access to breath, and it is simple, once the technique is mastered. The real secret is to have the body perfectly balanced in the water, with the feet, legs, trunk, neck and head in a single plane. This means swimming with the head low and water flowing over the back of it. In this position the only way to breath, without enormous effort, is to roll the body to where the air is. It takes a little while to master but delivers huge improvements in stroke efficiency once you do. In my case, reducing my stroke count per length from twenty strokes to thirteen, a thirty five per cent improvement in efficiency. The real pay off though is the way it feels, effortlessly gliding through water, almost like flying, simply by making minor adjustments in balance. After ten lengths front crawl, felt a little more awake and rolled onto my back and did ten lengths easy backstroke and then ten lengths easy breaststroke. I would normally then have done fly, but didn't feel like it today, so repeated the whole sequence again. After sixty lengths I felt much more alert, so did four one hundred meter medleys, at a reasonable pace, but keeping the stroke fluent and smooth, and surprised myself, they were a full ten seconds quicker than last week. I was tempted to do more but decided it was prudent to warm down so swam another four by one hundred medleys, but really slowly.
Tomorrow I had hoped to go to the running club in the evening but Louis wants to see the Aardman animation pirate film, so I shall probably run in the morning instead.