Flip turns vs. tumble turns (part 84)

More on that later.

This evening I continued my attempts to kill myself in the pool, with a set which, despite being a 'mere' 2400m, left me absolutely annihilated. I'm writing this two hours after the end of the session, and I'm still drained. The set consisted of the following:

• 200m warmup
• 400m kick drills (200m 0-1-2 drill, 100m kick on side, 100m 10-4 drill)
• 400m other drills (100m fists, 100m trickle, 100m sighting, 100m hypoxic swimming)
• 2 x 400m paddles (that's a lot of paddles, kids!)
• 8 x 50m sprints on 1:30 (ow, ow, ow)
• 200m warmdown

The sprints were exquisitely painful. I've never scheduled 8 in a row, and it told by the end. The idea (apart from to smash myself to bits, which is a given), was to compare flip turns and tumble turns by doing sprints alternately, to see if there was a noticeable difference. As it turns out, there was, ish. The times for the flip turn reps were [43s, 41s, 41s, 42s], whereas the times for the tumble turn reps were [40s, 40s, 41s, 43s]. That was despite my feet slipping on the last three tumble turns (odd, I usually mess them up in every single way apart from that). I'm still not sure it justifies the extra energy expenditure, mind. Not to mention the danger of missing a turn completely and looking a complete fool.

I doubt this is over :-(

PS. Those sprints were damn quick. I seem to have lost that point in the turn-based madness, but still...