Camp Eton and Lemons-into-Lemonade

What kind of month has April been? Full of challenges for my own swimming, but before I get to that, I’ll describe the month’s high point–Camp Eton.

Two weeks ago, I visited the UK to guest-coach at an event called Camp Eton. English Channel luminary Nick Adams hosts this camp for English Channel aspirants annually (always on Easter weekend) at Eton College, the historic boys secondary school at which Nick teaches math and coaches the swimming team. Nick and I had talked for years about my joining the festivities. In February I made up my mind: If I’m ever going to attend Camp Eton, it must be this year. I made my flight reservation, fingers crossed that my health would cooperate.

Nick was drawn into Channel swimming early, completing the crossing for the first time at age 15. The next year, he set a still-standing mark for the youngest to do a 2-way. Swimming to France (which has been done fewer times than Everest has been climbed) has become almost routine for Nick; he does it most years. He also organizes and guides Eton boys in relay crossings.

At the camp, there are morning and afternoon pool sessions each day, wrapped around seminars on essential topics such as:
• Feeding and Hydration;
• Pilots, Tides and Courses (the optimal route can change hourly, influenced by shipping traffic, wind, and tides);
• Hypothermia and all things medical (expertly delivered by Nick’s wife Sakura, a Channel vet and MD); and
• The Care and Feeding of one’s Support Crew.

Pool sessions were devoted mainly to sets of interval repeats, mostly 200 meters or less. This was valuable experience for camp attendees because most have a lot of experience with long training swims in open water, but far less interval training in the pool.

I participated in a portion of both morning practices, swimming 3000 meters on Saturday and 5700 meters on Sunday. The group did 100 x 100 (I’d done this in a 25y pool on March 26 and described in the post A Birthday Swim to Remember) on Sunday morning. They began at 6am sharp. Because my biological clock was still on NY time (1 am), I opted to sleep in and wake without an alarm. I arrived in time to swim 57 x 100m on an interval of 2:10.

I was hugely pleased with this repeat series because
• This set happily coincided with my best swimming day of the entire month. Unlike nearly every other practice I did during April (details below), I felt great for the full 2.5 hours I swam.
• I paced it beautifully. My first 100m repeat was 1:58–swimming super-relaxed to ease into the groove of a long set. My times improved incrementally-but-steadily with almost no sense of increased effort, peaking at 1:43 on my final 100. I’m fairly certain no one else in the pool came close to swimming his or her final 100m 15 seconds faster than the first.
• I remained highly efficient throughout: I averaged 16-to-17 SPL per 25m until the final 10 x 100 when I shifted into a higher gear–17-to-18 SPL–to close out the set at a brisk pace, while maintaining a relaxed state.
• I shared a lane with a couple of participants who’d swum the Channel in the last year or two, and consistently outswam them by a fair bit, while swimming with far more ease. This prompted me to ponder: “Could I still swim the Channel, despite my health challenges?” While this was a semi-serious thought at best, the optimism that brought it to mind gave me pleasure.

A pool full of Channel swimmers—transformed in 2 Hours
The best part of the weekend was when TI Master Coach Tracey Baumann and I got to teach TI techniques. As we walked on deck at 7am Saturday, I had to metaphorically avert my eyes, cringing a bit at the widespread inefficiency among the 27 swimmers packed into six lanes. When I immediately noticed, and pointed out, the lone swimmer whose stroke was pleasurable to watch, Tracey proudly replied “That’s my swimmer, Kevin Mullarkey.” Kevin took lessons in her Swim Studio in Wraysbury (30 meters from the Thames and just a 10 min drive from Eton) and swims regularly in her weekly TI group practice. Kevin was also the sole camper who is not a member of the famed Serpentine Swim Club, a hotbed of English Channel interest.

Tracey and I taught technique for a total of two hours over the weekend—30 minutes at the end of the afternoon pool session on Saturday and another 90 minutes on Sunday afternoon. We also recorded surface and underwater video of each swimmer for analysis in the classroom.

With 27 swimmers, and only two of us, Tracey and I coached from the pool deck, and did not prescribe a single TI drill, nor do any hands-on correction as is common at TI workshops and lessons. Rather we coached entirely with carefully choreographed sequences of TI Focal Points and short whole-stroke repeats.

During our brief Saturday afternoon session, we worked on achieving a weightless, aligned head and the Mail Slot entry. The group looked strikingly better already. In the change room afterward, a couple swimmers commented, “I wish we’d done that at the beginning of the day.”

On Sunday afternoon, we reviewed Saturday’s skills for 30 minutes, then worked on the recovery, with Rag Doll and Draw a Line focal points, and finally worked on sneaky and seamless breathing. The profound transformation of movement quality in every lane, and by every level of swimmer, thrilled us both. The swimmers were pretty pleased too. We’re quite confident that every swimmer has a much better chance of avoiding injury during the long months of training to come and a greater probability of making it to France, due to being significantly more efficient now.

How I’ve swum this month: Embracing the challenge
Except for that blissful set of 57 x 100 at Eton, and a single Masters practice in New Paltz the following Saturday, April has been a challenging month. After the highly encouraging set of 100 x 100 on March 26—-which left me feeling incredibly energized–a week later I began to feel deep fatigue even while swimming quite easily.

The symptoms have remained consistent: Even at my most relaxed paces, I felt breathless after even short distances. I also felt a generalized burning sensation in my muscles. That sensation has historically signaled the presence of lactic acid in my muscles. I wondered how I could be in an anaerobic state—despite swimming as easily as possible, and for less than 2 minutes in many cases.

I swam a 1000-yard race on April 7 and—though I’d rested (no swimming) for three days prior to the meet–I felt breathless by 500 yards. My 1000-yard time of 16:19 was a slower pace per 100 than the 1650 (65% longer) I’d swum just three weeks earlier, during which I felt fantastic and completely pain-free throughout. How could I have lost so much in just three weeks, I asked myself?

It got no better from there. Each of the next three weeks, I recorded a new ‘lifetime slowest’ 100 yards (a swim paced to complete multiple repeats, not an all-out effort) seemingly every week. However, I responded to each in the same way.

1. I embraced the principle stated in the title of Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron’s book Start Where You Are. I took ownership of the time I’d just done
2. Rather than feel disappointment over the time, I treated it as simply a piece of information, then tried to understand how I’d arrived at it: What were my stroke count and tempo (with the former info I could easily calculate the latter)? What sensations did I experience? How were my turns?
3. I then began to work on finding more efficient ways to swim that time. Could I make that time feel better by streamlining more consciously; slipping my arm in with less water disturbance; applying pressure in the catch with more patience and sensitivity; improving my turns; exhaling more fully?
4. Sure enough, not only did I steadily feel better while swimming that time, but it began to improve. I could quantify this by swimming slightly faster over the same distance, or maintaining the same pace over a longer distance.

Two days ago at Masters, my first 100 of the evening was 1:53—two years ago, I’d have found it impossible to swim 100 yards that slowly. But my final 100 of the practice, a bit over an hour later, was 1:35—a time I’d seen only once previously this month.

Last night, on a set of 3 x 500 descending, I felt the familiar anaerobic sensation, while swimming the first in 8:40. Then I felt slightly better while swimming the second in 8:33, and—dialing up my stroke count but making each stroke lighter—swam the third in 8:21, well beyond my expectations as I began the set.

At any speed, it’s immensely satisfying to make lemonade from lemons which, come to think of it, we also did with the English Channel aspirants at Camp Eton, two weeks ago.

The efforts I applied last night to bring my 100y and 500y times down the last two nights were directly inspired by what we teach in TI 1.0 Effortless Endurance Freestyle Self-Coaching Course.