Okay. So I shadowed a coach. Actually two. For three lanes of triathletes. And it was great.

The pool is amazing. LCM. Really wide lanes. Could probably swim 3 or 4 abreast. Water looked great.

Swimmers were fun. I had three in my lane. Two men and a woman. One of the men had a pretty nice stroke, flat hand entry, and from what I could tell, pretty good pull under the water. Rotation not too bad, but he tended to go to unilateral after swimming a bit. His fast (first) lap for the final (4th) 500 was 1:40.5. After that his laps were in the 1:48-1:50 range.

The other male swimmer was way more fun. He swam the traditional ’60s S-pull, with textbook thumb-first entry. I tried to persuade him to move to the flat hand entry. He left on one lap pulling properly, but went back to his comfort zone pretty quickly. I told him when he was done I’d show him something on the deck that would show him how his S-pull isn’t the most efficient. Basically, I did the exercise in the Swim Smooth book (82-3), where you ask the swimmer to face you on the deck with his arm straight out. He presses his hand straight down on your palm. It is not hard, as the coach, to resist this pushing. This shows the swimmer that the straight-arm pull is inefficient.

Next, you have the swimmer bend their elbow (but still facing you head-on) and repeat. A little harder to resist, but you can resist. Finally, you have the swimmer angle the body as if they were doing the proper rotation in the pool. Much much harder to resist. More importantly, the swimmer (this swimmer specifically, too, which was nice) feels the different muscles involved. The final push really emphasizes the big muscles of the back and chest, while the first uses the shoulders almost exclusively. I could see the realization come to the eyes of this particular swimmer. I’m looking forward to seeing how his stroke develops.

The female swimmer, not too sure. She stopped a lot. She had raced recently and her muscles were still sore. I’m going to have to give her stroke another look.

All in all, it was a blast. I really enjoyed it. I will be doing this again. The other coaches were great. They introduced me to all 8 swimmers and did a main set in honor of me (4 x 500, odds build, evens race pace). They told me sets of 500 is considered long. They hope to get their swimmers up to doing longer sets, including possibly swimming a straight 2000 or even 3000 one night.