Anyone who knows me will probably know I am a fan of the mighty Joss Whedon and most of his works (the earlier stuff, anyway. Not even looked at Avengers and so forth yet). It occurred to me half-way through a 2hr, 4km+ set at USWIM Masters tonight that if the zombie apocalypse ever breaks out in Venice (or the less glamorous but still beautiful Lake District), then hey, I am totally your girl for the job. That made me laugh for a whole 400m!
It was a tough set, one of the toughest I've been through, and yet...I survived. And not only survived, but got boosted up a lane; probably due to the late arrival of a batch of newbies, rather than any superior speed on my behalf, though. I was in place five of seven, but when your lane-leader is a 15yo Channel aspirant (who is both awesome and gracious), that's a position worth being proud of. In fact, after these extra coaching sessions I was even - sometimes - able to keep up with Neil, which would have been totally out of reach last year. If there are any Janathon visitors who like running stats and graphs you should definitely check out his blog. I'm quite partial to his training minutes pie charts, myself. I may even make one at the end of Janathon! My thanks to Neil for keeping me in touch with the sets (new coach needs to write bigger on the boards) and for the odd sneaky draft ;-)
So yes, I think there has been an improvement. It's by no means solid yet - as usual, I could feel my form slipping badly when sprinting or getting tired. That's probably quite normal, but the gift I have from Dave's analysis is that when I feel something going wrong, I have a checklist of things to be mindful about. Are my elbows high? Is my hand entry correct? Is my left arm crossing inwards? Is my rotation equal on both sides? Now that I know what the right thing is, I can try to bring myself back to it far more than I could before. Re-analysis is scheduled for early March, which should be interesting!
Yoga tomorrow. Aaaaaah.
