Reply To: Ever appropriate to have them go through a whole event during practice?
I should have talked with Prof. Rushall about this when he was here in March –
The research that backs USRPT talks about building “race pace motor units” – the fitness required to swim events at the training pace, etc. The area that appears to be missing from the research (Cameron or Doc. help me out if I have missed something) is – you are fit enough to swim the event at goal pace – you have the neuroplastic adaptations – but the athlete may not understand what to do with all of the existing potential…. so you can “pray for a result” or you can design learning opportunities for your swimmers.
We have found that Dive 75s are often a great way for swimmers to learn to swim 100s – a one-off dive 75 going for the goal split at 75 (SC or LC) nail the split (which is fast enough to put the swimmer at goal time pace for the 100) – then convince the athlete that all that matters is hitting the 75 split in a meet …. which will require that the swimmer takes what often looks like a major racing risk…. if they have done the required USRPT work – they will be out fast enough and they will be able to finish… If they haven’t done the required work – they will probably die on the last 25M – the message back isn’t that they went out too fast – they still have some work to clean-up the end of the race.. All of this assumes goal splits that make sense for the athlete…
