I’ve been struck by a fair bit of confirmation bias recently as it relates to some new thoughts I’ve had on swim mechanics for open water swimming.  Coincidentally or not, improvements in my own swimming recently have come at a time where I spent more time than usual on the pool deck in January and February between Dynamo Masters workouts and the AIMP Spring Tucson Camp.  I enjoy these deck moments because it forces me to think about how to best communicate specifics in stroke technique across a variety of skill levels and learning types.

In trying to put together the traditional consultant 3-bullet point summary for good freestyle open water technique, I boiled the nuances of the dynamic movements in freestyle to the below concepts:

1. Balance the Line: Achieved primarily through head position but complimented by #2 below.  The purpose of balancing the line is to minimize frontal drag by keeping the hips hidden behind the shoulders and head which MUST cut through the water.

2. Load the Lats: Established by the delta in shoulder rotation (more) versus hip rotation (less), this creates the coiling/uncoiling dynamic that allows the swimmer to apply force in the propulsive phase of the pull.

3. High Elbows / Paint the Bottom: Acts as the final component to a lat-driven (as opposed to leg-driven) propulsive framework.  Maintaining a high elbow position assisted by pointing the finger tips down allows us to transfer force.

Be sure these components consist of a fair amount of moving parts, but the concepts will point you in the right direction.  In layman’s terms, Point #1 allows efficiency (minimize drag) while points #2 & #3 focus on the creation and transfer of force, respectively.  If anything, an athlete should master point #1 first and foremost, even if #2 & #3 are a close second.  Assuming the mastery of point #1, I wanted to go into more detail about the “Load the Lats” (LTL) concept.

The concept relates to creating tension in a prime mover – the lats – so that there’s stored energy in stretching out the muscle and associated soft tissue.  At the highest level, the coiling of muscle and tendons creates the load.  The shoulder rotation allows the lead hand on entry to extend forward and anchor or “catch” the water at a far point in front of the swimmer.   Coupled with a slight rotation of the hips in the same direction as the shoulders and the lead hand anchors/ “catches” out in front, we create the tension in the lats (stored energy) that we can uncoil (transfer energy -> apply force) as the hip drives downward and we maintain a high elbow position.  That high elbow is facilitated by “painting the bottom” of the pool with your finger tips.  I tell athletes to pretend their hand is a brush and the fingertips are the bristles.  You want to paint the bottom of the pool with your finger tips.  In order to do this, the swimmer must maintain the integrity of the elbow position.  When you see an athlete whose fingers/hands are crossing their bodies (fingers pointed towards the side of the pool), you can be certain the athlete has dropped their elbows.  Without that high elbow, we can’t transfer the stored energy we’ve created in loading the lats.

What does it look like? I took the liberty of taking some screen shots of Grant Hackett who dominated the 1500m freestyle for the better part of a decade to help illustrate the concepts:

Shoulder vs. Hip Angles

High Elbow / Paint the Bottom

Repeat, Wash, Rinse

LTL requires good range of motion in the shoulders to enable the proper rotation.  Without the shoulder flexibility, the athlete cannot set up the delta between the shoulder and hip angles to create the coiling effect (the load!).  So many triathletes come to the sport from “ball sports” and don’t have this shoulder flexibility naturally.  They often compensate with hip rotation and in doing so, “snake” through the water.  I recently read an interview with uber-coach Darren Smith where he talks about maniaclly working on shoulder flexibility with all his non-swim background professionals who seek out his services.  This was a nice piece confirmation bias to corroborate the LTL concept.

What about execution?  In terms of drill work to reinforce these concepts, the best drill I’ve used is Freestyle swimming with a two-beat butterfly kick . The dolphin kick keeps the hips from over-rotating, and the two-beat rhythm allows the athlete to appropriately rotate the shoulders and establish a nice anchor out front.  Inavraibly the question of kick arises?  How much?  What tempo?  The short, easy answer is that above all things, the kick force needs to be applied downwards (not to the side). The somewhat longer answer is that the kick for the swim leg of a triathlon should (a) not interfere with arm-driven swim mechanics – LTL  and (b) act as a complimentary propulsive force to the LTL mechanics.  How that looks from swimmer to swimmer depends on various interrelated conditions (e.g., ankle flexibility, stroke rate, race tactics, etc.).

Happy swimming!

Happy Hunger Games!

I think I’m on top of enough things to come back to writing for a bit, or at least until #3 breaks into the starting lineup soon enough. This one is way overdue, too, and mostly because I’ve been, well, afraid of how to capture my feelings towards Suzanne Collins‘ The Hunger Games Trilogy (HGT). I was first introduced to the series by beloved Mongoose and extremely well-read athlete, Haley Chura, while we were in Hawaii last year. Actually, Elizabeth, Haley and I were having lunch the Monday after the race when the topic of the book came up. Haley explained the premise and a lot of the political overtones in the book and spoke pretty passionately about the story and characters as a whole. I remember being dismissive. I gave her a hard time saying something along the lines that this was another Twilight or Harry Potter light-weight, brain candy book series. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, really. Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With series is just that, but I had given it a pass because it tackled more “sophisticated” notions of societal ills. Translation -> let the Tweens read The Hunger Games, us adults will read the Girl With books. Yep, snobery only a kid raised in private schools can aspire to.

At some point in February I had just finished War Room (which I’ll address in another WIR), when I was browsing through the family collection of books on Kindle maddeningly searching for something to help me get to sleep. As I scrolled the list of options, I came across all three HG books and I think the cover art caught me. The font, the graphic, the layout, all seemed “sophisticated” – clean and contemporary, the Bauhaus feel that I always seem to fall for.  The look of the book at least didn’t scream gratuitous money-grabbing sensationalist tween love/sex story. And so I took a flyer, downloaded it and began reading. Three hours later, at 1’30 in the morning, I put the book down, having devoured half of its contents as well as half of the available time I had to sleep that night. The post-apoocalyptic first-person narrative had caught me squarely in its metaphorical crosshairs. And I didn’t really know why. But it did. 5 days and many late nights later, I had finished all three books. I couldn’t stop reading. And I still didn’t know why. Worse yet, when I was done, all I wanted to do was talk about it with other people. I wanted relive it in shared experience with somebody else. I was still mesmerized by the story and the characters.  And as a confession, I still am, enough that I re-read the first book prior to Friday’s movie opening.

A couple of weeks ago Haley asked me why I hadn’t written a HG WIR for the blog. I was honest with her and told her I was scared. Yeah. Simply scared. Something about those books had so moved me that I didn’t want to write something that didn’t at least partially convey why I was steamrolled by the story. Katniss, Cinna, Haymitch, Peeta, Prim and Rue all had such an impression that I didn’t want to dishonor that effect by writing something banal or trite. Crazy? This tween series had uppercut me in a silly, messy way.

And I still couldn’t put my finger on why it had. It wasn’t until I was having a conversation with my father recently that I finally had the “a-ha” moment about the books and my fascination with them as I tried to convince him to read the series himself.  While we were discussing the books I told him that the series brought me back to my own formative teen years – that 6th-7th-8th grade period – where my English classes were fraught with literature steeped in very similar themes as the HGT. Those English classes were taught by some great teachers at an all-boys school in the late 80s. If you want to get the attention of a 13 year-old boy, you have to get stories that will act as a 2×4 for that wandering pubescent male consciousness.  Competition, violence, oppression, unrequited love – those things usually do the trick, or at least they did for me. Following suit, the stories weaving those traits grabbed me with two hands and shook me into a tranced state of true genuine attention, an early teen attention that only works prior to a post-adaloscent puberty where your attention goes squarely in one singular direction.

And what were those works that captured me? William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies; Richard Connell’s incomparable short story “The Most Dangerous Game“; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (the novel that led me to be an English major several years later); The Orwellian classic, 1984; and Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. All had elements of a post-apocalyptic world where the communal social conscience degenerates into something that is a bastardization of some of the worst traits of current society. Further strengthening the power of the those works at the time was the real wold model for them – the Cold War anti-hero Soviet Union.  Being a middle-schooler at the tail end of the Reagan administration we lived through media stories that personified many of the themes we were reading about in class. Everything – fiction and reality – seemed to be real. That yin-yang of news narrative/fiction narrative had stuck with me then, and apparently, had layed dormant inside for the last 20+ years. All I needed was the story of Katniss and a post-apocalyptic rebellion to wake it up again. And I’m so thankful it did.

As I type out these words I can’t help but smile thinking about being in my 8th grade English class, talking about literature in a way that wasn’t tainted by preconceived notions of “life” or at least “adult” (sophisticated??? hah!) life. Those discussions actually resonated with me, all these years later. And I can thank the HGT for awakening that dialogue again, turning those subsconcious whispers into a full-fledged “adult” conversation between the father of three I am today and that young adult in-waiting establishing an identity of himself under the fluorescent halos of a Memphis University School English classroom. I’m a sucker for nostalgia but I feel like it also makes me appreciative of what I have had and what I have now.

I won’t ruin this update by talking specifics about plot development or deconstruct character motives. I will say my favorite of the three books was the last one, and I appreciate Suzanne Collins’ ability to deliver a superior finale to the tales. As for the movie, well, like The Lord of the Flies cellophane versions (both films) or On the Beach, the HG film was more take it or leave it than anything else. For me, it didn’t capture what I wanted it to in its execution – the complexity of the relationships Katniss has in context of her predicament. But Christopher Nolan can’t write every screenplay nor direct everything, I guess. And our imagination is always more illustrative and fertile than somebody else’s. So that will have to do here, as it should.

The family in this shot above, complete with L as apparition in the background, dancing to something while her brother snoozes on mom and #3 tucked nicely into E’s bahiga.  These are the moments you thank your blessings and take a snapshot in hopes that many years down the road, you remember how special this time was for the purity of the moment itself and in context of your babies as they age.

On to what I’ve read, which is actually quite a lot since I last posted on the topic.  I’m likely going to end up shelving a lot of the articles I saved the last 5 weeks and stick to the more current content in that media.  So books will dominate this edition and speaking of those, well, see below:

Running with the Buffaloes – Most folks who follow running these days are more familiar with Kara Goucher, the wife of Adam Goucher, who was a prolific cross country runner for the CU Buffs back in the late 90s.  One of my good friends, Greg Krause, from back in Colorado is married to a runner (Lindsay) who ran for the women’s squad during Goucher’s tenure at CU, so I had a tangential tie into this book prior to picking it up.  Author Chris Lear follows Goucher, his teammates and famed CU coach, Mark Wetmore, through a full season, capturing the emotional highs and tragic lows in this “season in the life” narrative.  Interestingly enough, I knew of Wetmore only through Lindsay and had heard some small stories about him.  What I didn’t know until I started this one is that Wetmore is a Lydiard guy.  And as such his approach resonates intensely with me and immediately endeared me to his approach.  If you are into sport, and a bit interested in running, this one’s a good one to pick up.  If you’re not a bit interested in running, move along.

SEAL Target Geronimo: My family shares a Kindle Library (am I allowed to write that?).  We all operate under the same account and therefore download to the same Kindle Archive.  My Dad and his wife foot the bill and we all get a nice cross-section of topics from across our different personalities.  It’s pretty neat and opens up the content drastically.  For whatever reason that my father and I have never really discussed, my Dad is into the SEALs.  Fortunately, so am I.  And as a result, I plowed through this book on the operation to go get UBL in Pakistan and at the same time reading my 4th SEAL book in the last two years.  Overkill?  Probably.  Interesting?  Always.  Author Chuck Pfarrer takes you through SEAL Team 6 training, provides background on Al Qaeda origins and weaves it into an ongoing narrative around discovering Bin Laden’s hiding compound in a small, peaceful town in Pakistan.  Pfarrer does an admirable job breaking down the complexities of weaving all of this content coherently.  While his sources have come into question by the military and government I imagine there has to be an element of truth to it if he is able to illicit a response from these bodies.

iOS Apps for the Triathlete – This one is hot, hot, hot off the presses.  Ray Maker of DCRainmaker fame just published his list of 7 iOS apps he uses the most.  There’s some well-known ones in there – MapMyRide, Wahoo Fitness, Pele – but there’s also some hidden gems in there, too.  If you have an iOS device and are a triathlete, this one is worth the 5 minutes.  And by the way, if your significant other has an iOS device, you can use the Find My iPhone app in lieu of Maker’s suggestion for the Garmin Tracker app.  My wife and I just started using this approach on my long rides which are usually done solo, mid-week.  She can pull it up on her iPhone and see where in rural Georgia I’m pedaling.  Then again, she can also see whether or not I’m squeezing in a mid-day movie, too.  Tradeoffs.  Always tradeoffs.

The self-portrait above is of L and me on our first pilgrimage to the Magic Kingdom.  It’s a “Pantheon” shot – an all-timer that captures the bliss of a father-daughter moment on a beautiful day in a special place.  And for the title of this one, well, The Boss starts us up with one of his better commercial successes in recent years.

The Dude & I at the Botanical Gardens

Happy 2012 folks!  The photo this week is of “The Dude” & I at the Botanical Gardens here in Atlanta.  Fantastic exhibit they have up for the holidays that makes me proud of my hometown.  As for this week’s WIR, I have a nice blend of some of my favorite things – technology, human behavior and sport.

The New, New Thing for 2012 – I grew up as a technophile admiring Marc Andreessen since his web browser was my browser of choice.  That was back when you actually had to pay for a browser in the early days of the Internet.  I was on dial-up and AOL, even using Telnet to chat with my college roomie when he lived in Japan for a semester.  When I lived in Silicon Valley my condo was a mile away from Netscape HQ.   But I digress.  In this interview, Andreesson talks about his predictions for 2012 in technology.  Obviously his opinions are influenced (and meant to influence) towards the companies and verticals in which he has financial interests at stake, but there are still opinions of a gentleman who’s more right than wrong.

The Thinker – I got this one from a regular contributor to this column – The Prof – who knows my soft spot for Michael Lewis.  In this one, Lewis dives deeper into a unconscious, tangential influence in his bestseller, MoneyBall, discovering that the analytical methods of DePodesta can be traced to a couple of cognitive behaviorialists, one of which has been crowned by the King of Sweden with some Nobel thingy.  In this short Lewis excerpt, the author delves deeper into the author of Thinking – Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman and the colleague who influenced Kahneman most, Amos Tversky. As usual Lewis paints a lucid and human portrait of the Kahneman, doing his best to honor Kahneman’s complex ideas without making them trite.  After reading the article, I think I know what my next read will be on the old Kindle.

Surprise, Surprise – One of the blogs I follow regularly is The Science of Sport.  These blokes from South Africa do a great job in their coverage of endurance sports and they have a soft spot for rugby (not that I’m a rugby fan but I like how they like ‘ball’ sports).  In this post they go through several suprise performances of 2011.  What I found most compelling in this post wasn’t even a performance from 2011.  It was the Sammy Wanjiru clip from the 2010 Chicago Marathon.  If you’ve never seen this before, spend the time to watch it.  If you can’t be inspired by it, then we need to check your adrenal reserves because this is compelling sport – beautiful in it’s tactical brilliance and determination.  The world lost this great talent in 2011 in a sad domestic violence case.  His memory lives on in his performances.  Most importantly, those performances inspired a transcendent year in marathoning globally.  And that is a positive legacy from which we can bid adieu to 2011 and welcome in 2012.

See you next year!

The Dude Rides

A little late with this one from last week, so we kick off the new week with a quick WIR.  A shot of “The Dude” above figuring out the balance bike while being encouraged by big sis.  It’s so much fun to see the “light bulb moment” with a child.  It’s even more fun when that child is yours and that moment comes at the behest of an older sibling.  Awesome stuff.

On to the content!  We have another schmorgasborg of items today, but all with some deep personal meeting this week.

A Rose by Any Other Name – As they do this time of year, the various contributors to Sports Illustrated take to their Internet property, SI.com, and make a case for their Sportsperson of the Year.  The winner has since been announced, but I centered in on Lee Jenkins nomination, Derrick Rose.  Rose was the point guard his one and only year at the University of Memphis for the 2008 National Finalist team.  I happened to be attendance at his “light bulb moment” against the University of Tennessee, a game featuring number one versus number two.  Rose kept his team in the game, and finally became the assertive offensive presence the Tigers needed from him to compete against anybody.  Though the Tigers lost, they established the chemistry that would take them to within a nanosecond of being the 2008 national champions.  This article corroborates many of the stories I had heard about him while he was in Memphis for the short season.

Old School Apple – From the Apple fanboy department, this iPad2 case conjures up memories of playing Oregon Trail during class in grade school.  It’s probably a bit much for a mobile device, but I love the classic clean lines and bauhaus styling of the original Mac.  Ultimately, it’s a piece of nostalgia which is always nice.  If you get one, Tweet at me so I can see what it looks like applied in a real world setting.

My Ten Minutes – Since I’ve become more heavily involved in the sport of back in 2002, the one industry news source that is my “go-to” for all things triathlon has been Slowtwitch.  I’m not contributor to their forums, choosing to “lurk” and not get involved in a lot of the destructive things that too frequently define online forums.  Despite my passive relationship with the site, I do consider myself part of the Slowtwitch community.  I had the fortune of meeting editor-in-chief, Herbert Krabel, on the plane out to Kona this year.  At our layover at LAX, Haley Chura and I broke bread with him and got to learn a little more about him – his family, his profession and his interests.  We ran into him several times during race week, often taking a minute or two to catch up.  By the end of the trip my respect for Slowtwitch had grown even further because their was now a personal tie or a face behind the content.  When Herbert reached out to do a quick interview as part of his “Random Age Grouper” column, I was quick to jump on it.  For all of the above reasons, it was a genuine honor to do.  I’ve Tweeted it, Facebook’ed it, emailed it a hundred times over, but it’s because of the regard for Herbert and his site and both their personal meanings to me.  So why not blog it?

L on Pineapple Hill

The picture above is #1 at the top of Pineapple Hill at Kapulua in Maui.  The family had a wonderful time out on the island – beach time, pool time, gym time at The Invite, all quality time.  As for the WIR post this week, a nice smorgasbord of genuine “stuff”.  Enjoy!

And Now for Something Completely Different – This one from my primary news source, The Economist, details how California’s state legislators are actually getting work done through compromise and some sane, sound decisions that have the best interest of the state in mind.  Imagine that?  A state with one of the higher GDPs in the entire world (yes, as a state alone) but saddled with immense debt(sound familiar?)  is actually trying to figure out constructive ways to address their debt burden.  You know when California is leading our own federal government in political sanity, the United States is in bad shape.  Ugh.

Doing it the Apple Way – Yep, still infatuated with Apple these days and the legacy of Steve Jobs.  This is a quickie from the WSJ from one of Apple’s long-time PMs.  Simple tenents here which are applicable to life, business and sport: Focus, Simplicity, Courage, Best.

Speaking of Simple – I follow Seth Godin’s blog through other sources on Twitter.  His stuff is usually a nice short thought on business and/or life.  Not earth-shattering.  Just pleasant reminders of some important things that are usually subconscious or that we, as humans and professionals, lose sight of along the way.  I like this one along the lines of all of the above, especially in relation to relationships and in training.  Relationships and training go north, south one day at a time.  Keep TOBG (The One Big Goal) in mind as you go through each interaction or each workout.

A little pictorial post for posterity this week as we spend the holidays in Maui. E and I have never been here before so to see it through our own eyes and that of our children is a special treat. To do so with my father with the familial glue of Memphis Tiger basketball is like the preverbal cherry for the soul. Dad has been taking me to Tiger games for the better part of 33 years now. To continue that tradition and experience L & W’a first Tiger games, well, priceless doesn’t do the value justice.

E and I taking in some alone time at the Invite

W & L doing some beach time

Did you say dessert?

L trucking down the Cook Pine corridor on Pineapple Hill

Thank you to my family, my friends, the blessings of health, the beauty in these relationships and in our environment.

The Three Best Gifts Ever

Birthday edition of What I’ve Read this week.  The caption above says it all.  I’m a happy husband and father.  Not much else to really want outside of that.  Now, on to the material!

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World – If you know me, follow me on Twitter and/or read this blog you know that I’m a Lewis fanboy.  I picked this one up after a good friend of mine had forwarded Lewis’ Vanity Fair article that turned out to be a version of the Germany chapter in this book.  The timeliness of this work is spot on, with Berlusconi in the rearview mirror and the upheaval in Greece a daily occurance, impending financial doom and gloom hovers like a starved scepter of economic chaos.  As Lewis relates, this work is a companion piece to his Big Short (another great read) that went into detail on the issues involved in the subprime debt fiasco of ’08-’09.  He picks up where the cascading effects of that crisis have infected the global financial system, this time effecting the governments who held much of the debt that served as the “other side” of the subprime bet.  As usual Lewis does a great job telling a narrative in the soverign debt crisis enveloping the globe.  The prelude of this one  is enough to make you shudder and start hoarding gold.  And no, you don’t have to read the Big Short to get immediately into Boomerang.  For a great, timely and quick read, pick this one up.

Steve Jobs – Anything I could find on the Penn State tragedy and this book both literally consumed me last week, and in the process, accounted for a significant amount of emotional overhead.  Walter Isaacson does a neat job tying in the diametrical forces that shaped the Apple founder’s complex, full but short life.  Jobs talks about his passion for his work lying at the intersection of the humanities and technology, something that resonates all too clearly for me.  At this intersection is where I found my passion as a consultant back in my prior career and where I do today as a coach.  That’s not trying to compare me to Steve Jobs at an “outcome” (accomplishment) level but more of an acknowledgment of what is the “sun in my belly” in my own career.  For me, Jobs is the Einstein of my own short life, a monolithic figure whose influence permeates all of modern culture in art and technology.

Find My iPhone – In the general oblivion that often is my general state of consciousness, I left my iPhone at CostCo last week.  I knew I had lost it, but I had no idea where.  I actually even had turned around and gone back to the store to see if somebody had turned it in.  At that time, nobody had, so I left utterly confused (per usual) and hoping to activate the location services function on one of my iOS/Mac devices at home.  Once home, I did a quick Google search on losing your iPhone and found this app.  I downloaded it to my iPad, launched it with my Apple ID and voila!  There, pinging in the middle of the CostCo warehouse on a Google Map was my iPhone.  Not only is this app great for these moments, but as I had related the story to my wife later that day, the functionality is ideal for tracking me for my mid-day riding, heaven forbid something unpleasant ever happened.

A little shot from Hawaii to get this edition of What I’ve Read out the door…

The Pele App – So not something I’ve read, but a little gem of an app for your iOS devices if you want to follow several athletes competing in a WTC 70.3 or Ironman.  The app allows you to plug in the names (or bib numbers) of multiple athletes in multiple races and follow them.  Using the direct feed from IronmanLive.com, the software is only as good as the feed, so be warned.  WTC is (in)famous for their bad bandwidth on race day, so frustration with the app will likely correspond with the data feed.  Remember, Pele is just a slick, useful presentation layer for WTC’s timing data.  As a result, the adage aptly applies here: garbage in (the data), garbage out (the app).  For a small investment ($2-4), though, I would recommend this nifty little tool.

Bossypants – Tina Fey‘s autobiography is an easy read, even if you’re not a super-fan of the witty, hysterical comedic writer and actress.  What you see on 30 Rock seems to be what you get in real life with her, and this autobiography seems to confirm it.  It’s not all fluff in here.  She does address serious topics – women in comedy, balancing a thriving professional life with motherhood – but she does it with a sense of self that is disarming.  She takes herself seriously at times, but not enough to come off as pedantic, always sure to insert an appropriate amount of humor.  I’m a big Tina fan, so this was right in my wheelhouse.

Yeah for the iOS Consumer – Not a must-read, as the soundbytes and headlines will take care of the “heavy-lifting” for you, but if you’re an owner of an iTouch, iPhone or iPad, you got some good news from Adobe today.  The Silicon Valley stalwart professes to switching direction in the investment of their web visual software standard – Flash – and complying with HTML 5 as a visual web standard.  One has to wonder if Steve Jobs’ death was the event that really precipitated the concession, as the egos of two powerful tech companies put the consumer right in the crosshairs the last several years.  For you regular users of such sites as TrainingPeaks, Hulu, ESPN3 among others, this is welcome news.