Unexpected gain in today's leisure swim

Did a swim at Tampines SAFRA with Weicheng today to push him for a bit of recovery physio from his broken toe injury.

On swimming alongside with him, then I started to appreciate how much I have improved in my swim from the point when I first started doing triathlons.

I used to struggle quite a fair bit to keep up with his speed, and had to use more strokes to complete a lap.
When I moved on to OD, my speed was about the same as his, but it will have to be a sustained effort to keep up.

Only after moving to 70.3, then my swim really improved tremendously as I learnt more through lots of read up, and actively honed my technique on top of my endurance.

It was now with relative ease that I'm able to glide past Weicheng today without much effort, and he could tell the huge advancement I made in my swim technique over the last 2 years.

I had tried to practice breathing on my left-hand side during the front crawl in many of my solo swim sessions in the past, but usually gave up after 2 laps of drinking chlorinated water.
Since today was supposed to be a leisure swim with him, there was no stress to hit any specific timing or mileage, so I spent more time learning how to operating on the left side since this will slow me down and I can swim next to WC rather than going too fast alone.

First 2 laps were horrible as usual, drank a bit of pool water.
With some fine adjustments, the improved slightly in the 3rd lap.
4th lap was getting better.
5th lap, I was able to overtake WC
6th lap, I was getting more comfortable with left side.

It was really an unexpected gain today to be able to properly swim on the left hand side.
I'll need to incorporate this into my future solo swims to properly develop my technique and allow for balanced muscle development on both sides.

This will probably lead to another small gain in my technique in time to come.
I have unexpectedly benefited from today's swim when my only objective was just helping my friend.
Good karma.
Happy!