20k of swimming
I want to get my swimming back to where it was a few years ago. Recently,I have been in the habit of going back to sleep when the alarm goes off and so this week I gave myself the clear purposes of doing a swim every morning. I’d also read some blogs which helped:
- Paulo Sousa: Practice makes perfect (and a few days before, one of his tweets: “Technique goes a long way in swimming, but it’s nothing without fitness. Working on your fitness works on technique. The opposite is not true”)
- Joel Filliol’s blog: The Top 20 Rules for Faster Triathlon Swimming
Paulo’s tweet and Joel’s blog really rang a bell for me. In particular:
- Swim more often
- Do longer main sets
- Use paddles with awareness of engaging lats (which ties in with what I was doing before my first Lanzarote Ironman)
- Do many short repetitions for stroke quality
- Repetition is your friend
So, on Sunday I did 30x100m (first 1k-ish without paddles, the rest with) with 10s rest at the end of each 100m. I then did the same every day over the rest of the week but this time with paddles on all the time. The number of intervals also increased on the days when I had more time. A few times I did 150m when I should have done 100m. A couple of times I stopped to talk to someone in the lane but in general I was very “honest” about the 10s-ish rest. All of the sessions were recorded automatically on my watch without me pressing any buttons. This morning I added a few more laps to get to exactly 20,000m (roughly 12.4 miles).
Average pace per 100m:
- Sunday: 1:48
- Monday: 1:48
- Tuesday: 1:43
- Wednesday: 1:44
- Thursday: 1:44
- Friday: 1:44
The aim in terms of pace was (i) to be consistent so that I would not slow down significantly at the end (ii) but at a level that meant that it was my arms that ached rather than my lungs. I think I achieved that.
Tomorrow I will give swimming a rest but the plan for next week is similar but a bit different. Work will stop me swimming on a couple of days and so it won’t be as frequent. Also, I plan to include some groups of 3x in the hundreds where I will go a bit faster but have a 30s rest at the end of the third interval.