Critique My Swim

My thoughts from watching the videos:
1- Hand alignment: I need to prevent my hand/arm from going so wide, especially when I breath. The best way to accomplish this for me is to focus on the position of my elbow -- for some reason I have an easier time judging my elbow's position than my hand position. Another way I will work to achieve proper hand position is to focus on pulling straight back and getting my hand lower in the water. (Watching the video again, my hand on my non-breathing side crosses over a tad and could be a bit wider.)
2- My hand is pointed nearly perpendicular to my direction of travel toward the end of my stroke. I think this issue is related to my wide elbows, and I think focusing on pulling down and straight back may help my hand position.

Here are two great photos (circled in red) of what I'm going for, courtesy of the Swim Smooth blog:



Two other things I will keep in mind are (a) flexing my wrist to initiate my pull and (b) keeping my elbows pointed toward respective forward corners of the pool during my catch and pull. Both these should help my high-elbow catch/pull.

In other news, I'm running up to 4 times per week now. I've run 30 minutes as 3 min. running/15 sec. rest, I've run 25 minutes straight, and I've run 20+ minutes with 3 minutes at <7:00/mile. So, the run is coming along. The heel is better, but not perfect. Still, it's getting better every week, so things are heading in the right direction. In fact, I'm heading out for my second run of the day today to see how 40 minutes in a day feels.

Cycling is hit and miss. I had an awesome ride one day (a trainer ride with intervals at 220 W while my HR is in the low 130s), and then the next day my power to HR ratio was crap again (250 bpm wasn't even getting 240 W). Hopefully more consistency and volume will help. I did have a killer 2.5 hr trainer ride culminating with a painful 5 minutes at 285 W.

Two final notes:
(1) Ozzy is now 32+ lbs and gaining 1.5 lbs a week. How big will he get?!?


(2) This week's song of the week:

(Marc Bolan called -- he wants his riff back.)