I’ve been swimming more then usual over the last eight weeks in order to prepare for the 1500m swim leg in the Lifetime Olympic distance triathlon in July. The problem — as always — seems to boil down to some kind of swim endurance and/or comfort level that I need to develop. I wanted to pass along some things I’ve been told which appear to be helping and which may help others.
First, swim endurance has been an personal issue for some time. I can easily swim short distances with comfort and efficiency, but as I attempt extend the distance of any given swim effort I experience a kind of gradually rising panic. I had been attempting to extend distance in swim efforts by doing sets of pyramids. Pyramids are a cyclic interval type exercise; in my case I was swimming 50m, 100m, 150m, 200m, 150m, 100m, 50m for 800m total per effort. A set would typically consist of two or three of these yielding 1600 or 2400 meters of total swimming. While pyramids seemed to be going ok, I really hated them. I swam them with difficultly and was constantly tempted to shorten sets or length. Mentally, it wasn’t resulting in much progress.
Fortunately, an alternate path was suggested to me and it has produced some tangible results. The suggestion was to swim a measured distance with planned breaks, then over time squeezing the length of the breaks down to make the distance more contiguous. In my case I was swimming 1500m as 30×50m with 30 second breaks between efforts. Each 50 is a comfortable distance, and the 30 second breaks allowed me to defer the lap counting to my watch. The watch keeps me honest, and the 50m laps have gotten easier. Executing this plan has provided some structure to the time I’ve been swimming which makes it easier to continue to work on.
Second, I have recently participated in a swim clinic sponsored by the Twin Cities Multisports Club. (TCMC) TCMC is a sister club to the Minnesota Tri Club (MNTC) which I have been part of for a couple of years now. In the clinic we were videotaped swimming from the side and from the front. I saw two obvious things in the one viewing of my swimming at the end of the clinic. First, my legs are still generally to deep. Second, I only get fully on my side when recovering my left arm. I have been focusing on these two things in recent pool efforts and something interesting happened.
I have mentioned before that I know that I was able to execute a 12 count for 25m before, but I had not been able to produce one recently. Most of the winter I was in the 14-15 range with occasional 13 counts, but on Thursday I produced two 10 counts. When the first one happened, I was so shocked that I had to stop at the wall. I was sure that I had miscounted, but then it happened again and was reinforced by some 11 counts as well. I should mention that I do not believe these stroke counts are maintainable over the course of a race, but it’s encouraging to know that it is indeed possible. Additionally, it opens the door to some nice potential swim golf scores.
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Big helper for me last year was some weekly group swims in a lake. We’d just make for landmarks on the other side of the lake. Really gives you a good feeling of being out there and just going. While it’s not good practice laps, I think 3 of those group swims worked better for me and made me more comfy for my olympic distance last year than any amount of pool time.
And it’s way more fun than boring pool miles. Tastes worse than chlorine though
Props to you for being the first (other then myself) to use the OpenID functionality.
I still need a bunch of open water swimming practice.. Particularly considering that I have other, deeper set mental issues with lake swimming. *sigh*
mental issues? My mental issues revolve around trying to think about all the ducks pooping in the lake and all the people peeing in their wetsuits in water that then goes into my mouth.
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