learning to fly

Occasionally, I think I am hallucinating when I walk into master's swim and I see new strokes on the menu for swimming: breast stroke? butterfly? why so much paddle work? I'm swimming for triathlon - the stroke of choice for efficiency is the crawl. I have worked my butt off to get good at it - why spend time doing all these other things?

At 5:30 in the morning, everything seems like a hallucination, but it turns out there's good reasons for this stuff.

My tri coach has pointed out that backstroke gets us away from the front curving body posture that the crawl gets us into for hours upon hours. Backstroke will "open up" the chest a bit. Breaststroke is just a nice change, a good power stroke for the pecs. Kicking makes sense, it helps us get more effective at using our legs. I get that. Pulling with paddles is clearly about building strength, that makes sense. Pull buoy is obvious - to keep me from sinking, and allow me to work on my stroke technique.

Butterfly, by contrast, is just freakin' hard. I figure the master's coach puts it on the board just so that we know what Anaerobic Threshold really feels like.

That's only partly true.

The first time the Master's coach put it on the board, I threw myself into it - literally. I vaguely recall learning the Butterfly at the very end of my red cross swim lessons when I was about 6, and I observed several of my co-master swimmers techniques. After a couple seasons of triathlon, I was starting to feel confident about my crawl stroke, and pretty sure I wouldn't drown. I knew that if I had to, I could get myself out of trouble with my freestyle stroke. So I plunged myself into the butterfly set like a frenzied dolphin, whipping my arms around to the front as fast as I could, and kicking like mad with my feet together.

Alas, no amount of power or willingness to drown felt like it was getting me across the pool efficiently. A friend of mine likens it to water boarding. I think he has a good analogy there.

I think I managed 3 of the set of 4x25 meter lengths. I may have even given up halfway through the last 25, and gone back to the crawl. It was exhausting!

I casually mentioned my frustration to my master's coach, who talked me through the mechanics of the stroke, assuring me that it was no big deal.

Later, however, when he watched me flailing down the lane like a drowning cow during another surprise set, he said "one of these days we'll go into the baby pool and do butterfly," which I think was a polite way of saying I totally suck and need a stroke intervention.

This morning I was totally caught off guard. As I was headed for my lane, the master's coach stopped me and said casually "let's get in this lane and we'll practice the butterfly." Oh crap - I wish I had known we were gonna do that before I had gone to lift last night.

After a brief creaky warmup and a short chat on technique, my coach showed me what an efficient butterfly looks like - and it doesn't look so hard when somebody good is doing it. Here's what it looks like when it's done by a pro.

By the way, I did not look like that.

The interesting part of the stroke is that the kick is almost incidental. The tricky part is doing the surface dive - which definitely takes some practice, and a lot of core strength. I can see that it is possible to do it without spending the gut-busting energy that my poor stroke takes. Boy is that going to take some practice to manage.

I did a little bit of pocket research, and I found out that the butterfly can actually be a slightly faster stroke than the crawl. You have to be really good at it to be fast, but when you are, the stroke pulls you through the water faster because you're throwing both arms out to catch water. It turns out that Butterfly stroke uses just about every muscle in your body, and you can bet that's a very useful skill when you're trying to improve your swim. Mostly, you have to get your core into it - in addition to the shoulders and lungs and triceps.

So, after my own experience plus reading this article, I can now answer the question that every triathlete with a sadistic masters coach asks: why learn the butterfly stroke? Because it will work your entire body until you're a quivering mass of jelly, and that's good for you.

Back to my swim torture, I managed 200 meters of passable butterfly integrated into my master's workout this morning, along with a few hundred meters of practice fly, and it was far less taxing than my previous attempts.

As a result of this plus my little lifting session last night, my shoulders and my abs are completely smoked, and I have found my lats. My husband says I am buffer than I was this morning. I've lost 5 pounds without changing my diet, I'm sexier, and also, my net worth has increased since I make more money now, just from doing Butterfly.

See? Butterfly is a useful stroke!

(kidding!)




In other news, I pulled the trigger and signed up for the full Vineman.

eep!