Swimming the Wrong Way?

At the outset of this venture I’d decided to go for two targets; qualification for the AG triathlon World Champs and doing well at the Masters Swimming European Champs.  Well, after only days, I’m now reviewing these objectives. The good news of me getting a roll down spot for the Triathlon AG Euro Champs has changed things quite a bit. One thing is that I’ve had to plan things for the year a bit more than I had done. This has opened my eyes to a little bit of reality. The fact is that focusing on triathlon and swimming this year is not going to work.

Although I’ve always been a reasonable swimmer for just about all my life, my speciality, or my best stroke is and always has been breastroke. I was reasonably good when younger, even becoming Welsh Area Age Group Champion when I was sixteen. In my last Masters age group, just left, I managed to break all the 50m, 100m & 200m breastroke Welsh records and even got a bronze medal in the 200m at the Masters World Champs in Australia in 2008. Now it’s pretty obvious that being good at 50m breastroke won’t necessarily help me in the 1500m swim part of a standard distance triathlon. However I did think I could manage to focus on both. This is not going to work. Since last summer I’ve really been training with long distance frontcrawl in mind. Whilst my performance in this has improved slightly I have had the feeling that my breastroke is going the other way. This was proved to me last weekend at the first Masters swim gala of the year, the Shrewsbury Masters, where I managed to achieve and all time PW for the 100m breastroke (Personal Worst, if you need to know). I was so far away from what I should be doing it was depressing. OK – I did do the fastest 100m IM and 100m frontcrawl I’ve done for about four years which shows my general swimming fitness is ok but I’m too far off the pace in frontcrawl to ever challenge for a top position or get near age group records. So that is my dilemma, if I focus on breastroke for sure my frontcrawl, and therefore my triathlon is going to suffer.

Going back to the schedule and long term planning it all became a bit easier for me to decide what to do. Firstly, I realised that the planned Cardiff Masters team trip to the Barcelona Masters event clashes with one of the qualifying events for the London World Tri Champs that I’ve already entered. Then I saw that the British Masters swim champs in Plymouth this year in June is the same weekend as the Turkey Euro Tri Champs. Then to finish it off I realised that the European Swim Championships in Eindhoven in September start on the same day as my daughters first day at school. So if I do go for sure I’ll be going alone! 

So triathlon it is. I’m not going to stop swim training, or rather breastroke training. You never know, it might all come good.  However my focus now has to be on distance frontcrawl. But it’s not going to change too much. I’m still never going to kick in frontcrawl. Why would you?