Gary P
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Thus far, I’ve strictly 25’s to train for the 100. I will say, I think there was some residual carry over from the sets of 75’s I did training for the 400/500 that helped me finish a 100 better.
After training only for freestyle events (100 and 400/500 primarily) for the last year, I’ve recently added a couple butterfly sets a week to the mix. I figure the overall conditioning can’t hurt, and I’m already seeing dividends in the power of my UDKs off turns in freestyle. I may try a 50 fly in a meet now and again, but I’m not really expecting to make butterfly a major competitive focus.
The increase in kick intensity was definitely intentional. Late in the training season, as I was looking for ways to get deeper into sets, I worked on a 6-beat kick to go with my “distance” stroke. (My 100 free stroke pattern is to breathe every 4 to the opposite side). I would start with a 2-beat, then go to a 6-beat later as the arms started to fatigue. It got me a little bump in repetitions successfully made so I worked it into my race plan, going to the 6-beat at the 200 mark. If my kick looks a little inconsistent early, it’s partially because I was fighting my natural inclination to go harder there.
Thanks for the insight on the walls. I knew the breakouts got worse, but I didn’t catch the pre-turn issues that probably contributed to that. Also thanks for pointing out the diminishing rotation and shorter stroke late. Things to work on, things to work on!
Thanks for the thoughtful comments, guys. Matt, below are links to two videos of the race, from opposite sides of the pool.
(In this one, I’m the third swimmer from the top, 4th lane (numbered 3 because the first is 0):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgnZ0m7_BTQ(In this one, which gives a broader field of view but less detail, I’m third swimmer from the bottom):
https://youtu.be/_ahmwcHtvLM?t=6250I was only able to do one Long Course practice and only swam one LC 400 free race this season. In fact, this was only my 9th race since coming back to the sport. The 200 free was my best event as a high school swimmer, but I swam the 500 a lot because we had less depth at that distance. I had originally planned to swim the 200 at this event, but for scheduling reasons switched to the 400 and switched my training focus from 200 to 400 back in January.
To be clear, I wasn’t unhappy with my performance; I pretty well swam the race to my plan and hit the time I expected. I agree that ideally the splits would stabilize in the low 38s and I’d have a little more juice on the final 50, but the pacing in this race was much better than the previous attempt at a 400LCM and the one SCY 500 I swam. I’m looking for ideas how to shore up the back half of this event, and break through the training plateau I seem to be stuck at. Any ideas would be appreciated.
FWIW, here are my splits and stroke counts from my 400 free (LC) at USMS Summer Nationals
Splits..Strokes
35.37…..37
37.07…..42
37.94…..46
39.12…..48
39.46…..49
39.84…..50
40.66…..51
39.80…..54
5:09.26Some efficiency degradation is expected. 25% seems too much, although I have no basis to make that judgement other than a hunch.
I had the same “three second inhale as if I just did a breath holding contest” feeling last fall. Not so much anymore. I never did anything at 100 pace other than 25’s this past season, but I did do over 1000 75’s at 400/500 pace. That really helped my back-half 100 form, including turns.
You’re probably going to have to slow it down to get enough “fatigued state” turn work to improve.
I think your concerns about getting sufficient volume of 50’s at 100 pace are well founded. You can try, but I suspect you’ll find it hard to hold even back-half pace for many 50’s.
Turn work doesn’t have to start from mid-pool, and not every set has to be a USRPT conditioning set. You can do your 25’s at race pace for the conditioning, and then do 50’s build-to-turn/decelerate-after-breakout on a sufficient interval to get a satisfactory # of turn repeats. That’s far from the “garbage yardage” set that USRPT aims to avoid.
Marlin,
I mostly did just one USRPT set per workout. In the beginning, it was because I would get leg/calf cramps when trying to exert myself on a second set. I was getting 2-3 exposures a week each to 30 x 25 @ 100 pace and 30 x 50 @ 200 pace. Later, when I’d switched emphasis from the 200 to the 400, it was because the 400 set took pretty much all the time I had. I would offer 40 X 50 a couple times a week and 25 x 75 three times a week. I let the 30 x 25’s offering fall to just once a week until about 4 weeks out, then I brought it back to twice a week. On top of that, I did an occasional high effort long distance swim (800-2100 yards) to work on my pacing for an open water event, along with some occasional all-out, no-breath sprint 25’s with long rest to tune up for the 50.
In retrospect, that turned out to be an overload on the 400 work. At one point, my progression stalled out, then actually regressed a little bit. About 7 weeks before the Championship meet, I swam a 400 Long Course in a local meet, my first exposure to that format since I came back to the sport. My time converted to about 12 seconds slower than I had done in a 500 yard Short Course 15 weeks prior. I knew it while I was swimming it, too, since I could see my splits on the scoreboard at each 100, but I just couldn’t go any faster; my arms felt like mush by the 100 mark. That kind of shook my confidence momentarily, but I managed to get over it and looked for lessons to be learned. First, I recognized that the Long Course format was considerably more demanding that I had remembered, and that, in practicing short course, I had been relying on turns for both rest(arms), and speed. I worked on developing a longer, slower turn-over stroke for the early part of the 400. Simultaneously, I worked on a six beat kick for the back half to hopefully keep the overall speed up as my arms were fatiguing. (Previously, I had only done a six beat for the 50 and 100, where I was breathing no more than every 4th stroke, and hadn’t developed a six beat to use in combination with my every-other-stroke breathing on longer distance events). At the same time, I recognized that I probably wasn’t allowing myself enough recovery. I started tweaking the rest interval variable a bit. Up until that point, I had been strictly adhering to the 20 seconds rest rule for 50’s and 75’s. I allowed myself to go to 23 seconds on both distances until my success rate recovered, then started alternating shorter rest at the same pace with the same rest at a slightly faster pace. I stopped doing 75’s all together than last two weeks, and gradually increased the rest while decreasing the volume of 50s’ and 25s. I ended up going 18 seconds faster in the 400 at Nationals than I had in that earlier meet.
As for other strokes, I didn’t take any up because I was over-focused on the 400 free. I will work in a second stroke in the coming year in hopes of not overloading on freestyle again; probably breaststroke.
I can’t see any real physical benefit to racing that much, but certainly there’s a lot to be gained mentally.
I use a Speedo SD55137. Got it off Amazon, although it’s not currently available there. I did find one on ebay out of England: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Mens-Speedo-Black-LCD-Quartz-sports-vibrating-alarm-watch-SD55136-/281655906580?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item4194001114
I like this over the tempo-timer because you can program different intervals for the swim and recovery cycles. I’ve only had it 3 months, but I’m very pleased so far. It’s much better than trying to use the facility’s pace clock, especially for 25’s. Even though the local pool has high-brightness digital display pace clocks at both ends of the pool, rarely are the two in exact sync. Once oxygen deprivation started kicking in, I was always fumbling with he mental math of adjusting touch time targets and start intervals.
There are a couple limitations, however. First, You can only set the intervals to whole seconds. You have to estimate fractions of seconds. For example, if I’m trying to swim 14.5’s for 25’s, I set it for 15 seconds and expect to touch a bit before the alarm goes off. At best, you can probably estimate quarter-second intervals. Secondly, the vibration generator isn’t terribly strong. If it goes just as you’re touching the wall with a hard driving stroke, it’s hard to feel. I set it up to both beep and vibrate to double my chances of getting the proper notification. Also, at the end of an interval, the alarm beeps and vibrates twice. I tend to hold the touch for a moment, waiting to feel the second vibration and/or hear the second beep. I have developed a pretty good mental idea of how long that wait should be. If it’s too short, I know I touched too late.
There’s also an anomaly in the operation that I had to work around. You can set from 1 to 10 intervals in a cylce. Then you can choose one of three options to do at the end of a cycle; stop, count time up, or repeat. For USPRT, the obvious idea is to set two intervals (swim, rest), and choose repeat. However, at the end of a cycle, the vibration and/or beep continues until you hit a button or until ~ 10 seconds before the end of the next interval. It’s kind of annoying, and it takes away the ability for the “pause at touch, wait to hear/feel the second alarm” method described above because you don’t know how many beeps past the original one you are. Also, this watch has just a regular watch battery so I suspect extended vibration periods would drain it fairly quickly.
I work around this issue by programming the first interval for 1 second, the second interval for the desired target swim time, and the third for the desired rest period minus one second. For example, if I’m doing 75’s at :52 pace, I set the intervals for :01, :52, and :19. Since the the time at the end of the cycle to the next alarm is less than ten seconds,the extended alarm is eliminated. As a mater of fact, since it’s less than two seconds, its just a short blip, then one second later comes the more pronounced double beep/buzz to start.
What’s a typical set of 25’s at 100 pace take, 15-20 minutes plus recovery?
Actually, its probably more like 12-15 typically, with a maximum time of 20 minutes when completing a set of 30.
What’s a typical set of 25’s at 100 pace take, 15-20 minutes plus recovery? Unless your workouts are only an hour, I think there’s ample opportunity to do a set for both 100’s every day along with some work on at least one of the 50’s. 50’s work would include starts and turns.
There’s a pretty big gap between 1:51 and 1:47 or even 1:48. I think it’s OK to chase a “goal” pace, but you need to be careful not to be so aggressive with your goal that you’re not achieving a critical amount of distance before failing the set. How far is the “critical distance?” I don’t have any evidence to back it up, but to me it seems like it’s at least 600m when training for a 200m race.
BTW, what does your coach say? Because if you can do a 100 METERS in less than 50 seconds and are in the low 1:50’s for a 200 meter free, I can’t believe you aren’t working with a professional coach already. That’s out there at the pointy end of the performance curve; a place where improvements come in tiny slivers, not chunks or even bites. Expecting to extend your current 100 speed to the 200 in a few months seems overly optimistic given how much potential you seem to already be tapping. I mean 1:47.9 in the 200 meter (long course) freestyle was the cut for the semi-finals in the last Olympics. If you don’t have a coach, get one now because you’re on the threshold of being a world class athlete.
