Continuing on with our discussions of strokes other than freestyle, we now look at Breaststroke. Breaststroke is the oldest known swimming stroke as evidenced by cave drawings from the Stone Age depicting people doing a variation of the stroke. It’s also the most popular stroke in swimming throughout the world…
Some of you might have seen David Danenhower, a tall coach with black hair, on Wednesday and Friday mornings. He is indeed a new coach with CBD. David comes from down state in the Champaign area. He swam for and was an assistant coach for the Champaign County Aquachiefs (now…
With a team of 5 swimmers, Tim Carlson, Kevin Wilson, Zeus Boiser, Rob Herbst, and Ami Patel, the Blue Dolphins scored 223 points and took 9th place at the Tyr Grand Prix at the University of Chicago last weekend. The team racked up 13 first place age-group finishes and 9…
We’re a bit late on this one, but 34-year-old Gary Hall Jr. announced Saturday, Nov. 15, that he is retiring from swimming to devote himself to his family — he’s married with two small children — and his foundation for diabetes. I hope that with a swimmer readership, Gary Hall Jr. needs no…
Most every one of the new swimmers who joins my Masters team or comes in for lessons tells me, “Fitz, I really just want to learn freestyle. I want to be able to {insert goal here – “swim a mile,” “do a triathlon,” “swim for fitness”}. Freestyle is a spectacular…
On November 10th and 11th, we ran our second pass at the 3 x 300 or 10 x 100 Performance Set. The test get an average 100 pace, 50 stroke counts, and 10 stroke tempo estimates for each swimmer. Out of these results, we can get our Swimming Golf measure…
Many of you have met or swam with Becca Mann, a 10 year old phenom that I’ve been giving lessons to for the last couple of years — really since the Swim Studio opened. She just recently won Cliff Bar’s Kid Athlete of November/December with “Chicago Athlete,” and she’s now…
I was just out at the Illinois Masters Swimming Association website and saw that they’ve begun to post the competions for the end of the year. You can see what’s there at: http://www.ilmsa.com/competition/upcoming. I wanted to draw everyone’s attention to a meet going on December 6-7th down at the University…
This past September, Chicago Blue Dolphins turned five years old. We started as a small group of swimmers at UIC in September, 2003 and we’ve grown to a team of 175+ active members. Thank you all for being part of CBD over the years, bringing in your friends, and helping us build…
I recently came across a section in Houston-based Masters Coach, Emmett Hines’, new version of “Fitness Swimming” that talked about why you get hungry directly after you swim. Emmett says: “It is true that most swimmers tend to hungry after workouts. The same is true in nearly every sport. But the timing of…
