teetering on the brink of the DL/IR

Shoulder discomfort has kept me from really whole-hogging a swim for a while. I'm not amused.

I think I'm in a weird sort of holding pattern. I'm obviously injured, but it isn't getting worse, so I'm just trying to hold the line. For Christ's sake.

OK swims

Wednesday and Thursday both turned out OK. I am not so quick to get back in the swing of things since the butterfly lady's been laid up, but I appear to have kept the conditioning and didn't have any trouble. But nothing to write home about, either.

Harder than it looks

Lengthen that stroke... no problem, right? Ha, well.

At least Monday was a swimming day, but I'm not so sure about how easy it will be to fix whatever is broken with my stroke :)

oh brother

So here I am, swimming my arms (OK, really just the shoulder) off, going slow. Trying to figure out why I'm soooo slow, but also pretty fit, I checked out U.S. Masters Swimming, which has some coaching articles (I'm a little too shy to just go up and ask the lifeguards what the hell I'm doing wrong).

Anyway, one of the articles said if you're taking more than 20 strokes per 25-yard length, you're pretty much broken. The same source pointed out that if you're being efficient and you're about my size, you should take 12 strokes (or so) to get down the pool. Uh, I take way more.

Now I have a much more interesting goal, to cut down the number of strokes I take!

Monday swim

Just another day in the pool - 2,250 yards or so (but I still! can't count without losing track once in a while, so it was probably a bit longer) with a speedy ending. All's well in shouldersville, but my pool-water allergy has been a mess. I've had trouble since Friday, when I had to wait until a few hours after swimming to take a Claritin. By that time I was already congested, and it seems that this is like how migraine sufferers report their ailment - if you take a pill early you're fine, if not you're screwed. With luck, I'll be back in good shape congestion-wise next time I swim, and I won't forget to take the damn pill on time.

Another good swim

Thursday went well. I've settled for the time being on a fairly hard 2,250 - 500 warmup and 1,750 afterward, with the last 450 somewhat speedy and the final 200 a sprint. As I say, I'm not sure that an outside viewer would call what I'm doing sprinting, but that's sure how it feels.

My shoulder still makes strange sounds if I move it around (like shrugging) and it warns me every now and again (when I was fixing the molding around the door and had my arm elevated for a while), but it doesn't complain when I swim, so now that just leaves the allergy-to-pool-water problem, which may be unsolvable.

Whatever. Swimming works, which makes me happy :)