Baby steps.

A few small milestones:

-tonight the masters coach a) told me I had a great fly, and b) gave me a simple way to improve it: apparently it's not necessary for me to haul my entire chest out of the water when I breathe! I hadn't even realized I was going that, but the next lap of it that I did sure as hell felt instantly easier.

-I've dropped my stroke count on 25 yards from 20/21 a few months ago to 16/17.

-we did a breathing set at the end of practice tonight, and I didn't even feel out of breath when I finished the underwater 25. Then we were to do a 50 free on 3 breaths, and I did the first 25 without any, and only took 2 on the back end.

-oh, and I still don't have any abs, but I haven't given up hope that they'll eventually show up... and in the mean time, I am kind of frickin' stoked about my arms.

Next goals:

-get strong enough to do 50 fly without feeling like I'm going to collapse

-drop stroke count even more

-drop my intervals

-tighten up my turns

-do a timed mile, straight through. I have been avoiding this, because I'm vaguely nervous that being able to swim for two hours with breaks won't translate into being able to swim for half an hour without stopping, but I really ought to try it just to set a baseline and see where I'm at.