Recovery Swim and Spinning

Decent swim. Still working on reducing my stroke count. Getting a little nervous about the fact that I can't swim much more than a couple hundred yards with the new stroke right now. Gotta stick with it. The rewards will be worth it but I have this irrational desire to revert to the old stroke and crank out a couple hours. The problem with this is that I'll be confusing my muscle memory. So I feel like I'm in the middle right now. Committed to getting a better stroke, which is good, but eyeing the race in November hoping that I can get my endurance up with the new stroke. I'm sure it'll work out. Every now and then in the pool I get glimpses of how effortless a nice stroke is. One of my big problems is a lack of core strength. Been doing some kickboard. Need to do more situps, crunches, planks, legups, etc.

As for form, I'm working on not crossing over the center line. The S form is a lot more natural now. I'm starting to try to keep my elbow high. I remember when I went from a straight arm to a bent arm with my old stroke... I used bigger back muscles and found a huge speed improvement. Hoping to find the same sort of thing with the new stroke. The base difference is that in the old stroke I was doing high cadence low force. Now I'm doing low cadence high(er) force. The reality is that there's a lot of overhead in each stroke so the overall efficiency and power output of the new stroke is better. But it uses a different set of muscles in a new way. Those muscles need to get trained. Hurry you little muscles. Hurry!

My legs were still dead from yesterday's TT. Thankfully, Keith put together a recovery workout with a little bit of everything but nothing too intense. He's lookin' out for me and I really appreciate it. I just couldn't get anything going today. I tried for twenty minutes to get my heart rate up but it just wouldn't budge. My legs felt heavy and dead. So I resigned to a recovery ride at about 25 minutes. I hate doing it because the spinning classes are so good at high VO2 workouts. But my legs just didn't have it in them.