Its been a while since I gave an update on Jia’s Rome Challenge, it was a very busy summer.
Summer 2018
Things went a little off the rails in the beginning of the summer. I took a two week break from swimming after the Irish open and afterwards I insisted Jia take something similar off. Jia went back training afterwards, but with no galas coming up and with my training for the Europeans taking up so much time the intensity wasn’t there. This isn’t a big problem, Jia was mostly just redoing old sessions. Towards the end of the summer we started back by doing a few sessions that focused on technique. We made big breakthroughs on her backstroke and butterfly, as well as on her tumble turns, streamlines, pull-outs and dives.
As training continues its looking more and more like Jia is naturally a short axis swimmer, which means she is naturally better at butterfly and breaststroke. I suspected this was the case when she raced 100m IM, but despite changes to her backstroke and frontcrawl the improvements in those aren’t as big as the other two. We will still work on them and race them, but we are going to focus a bit more on breaststroke, fly and IM. She also really enjoys fly and IM.
Changes
As I’ve said elsewhere on this site, as masters swimmers we have to work around things that didn’t affect us as junior swimmers. Things such as work, family, public pool sessions, and study. I mention the last one because Jia has recently been accepted on a research masters. While this is good news for us, it means that we almost certainly won’t be making it to Rome for the European Masters Games. Which is probably for the best, my last two summers of training were pretty intense and it will be good to have a summer off to do something else like triathlons. We will probably have to think up of a new name for this blog. There is a big competition we are looking at in 2020, but until we are more certain we will keep quiet about it. Training and competing will definitely continue, partly because it’s a great relief and distraction, and partly because we are a sporting family that has to do something.
New Season
The new season has started, but neither of us have been ready to race in the two competitions that have been held up in Dublin. So, our first gala of the new season will be the Mallow Masters on the first of December. Jia will be swimming the 50m fly, 50m Breaststroke and the 100m IM, it will be interesting to compare times to last year. More importantly, it will be fun to be back on deck and to meet friends from other clubs.
pullkickswim.com 