[sclim]

One further day of specific Head and Neck Axis alignment focus added to prior other focus. (Also simultaneously continuing to drill 100m sets of 50 fist and 50 full-normal hand swim). The head and neck alignment thing is coming more naturally, though still far from automatic -- there is still a lot of loss of attention and then head dropping.

How is it affecting the rest of the stroke? Hard to say. It felt as though I was more clumsy and my SPL seemed harder to maintain, then when I fatigued actually failed to meet my prior target of 24, which I was pleased recently to meet during the full stroke portion of my 50fist/50 full swim sets with TT set at 1.25 seconds. A few months ago I was barely hitting 24 spl consistently with TT set at 1.30 seconds, and only swimming 25 metres at a time! So the failure to sustain the 24 spl was disappointing until at the end of the session just before I turned my TT off, I noticed that it was actually set at 1.20 seconds -- I reduced the interval at the end of yesterday's swim for a 100m SPL trial which didn't go too well because I was fatigued, but forgot to return the time to 1.25 seconds. So I was barely able to sustain the prior SPL but did it for most of the session at a slightly faster tempo, while carrying out a novel (for me) head and neck position. So that's encouraging after all.