With a bit more structure to my training plan this winter, I have dedicated one workout every four weeks to fitness testing. This serves as a way to benchmark my training and be sure that I am making improvements as the weeks go by. My swim training has been plagued a bit by the temporary closure of the pool close to my home, forcing a 30 minute commute if I want to get a swim workout in. I’ve been able to tag swim workouts along with my job as a freelance writer that brings me down to the “big city” of Sturgeon Bay, but I haven’t jumped in the pool as frequently as I would have liked over the past four weeks.
Still, big improvements were made in just these past few weeks and I have a few hunches as to why. As a brief overview, the fitness test that I am following consists of a doing three 300-yard sets as fast as I can while keeping the times relatively close. Doing the first one 30 seconds faster than the last two doesn’t give me a whole lot of good information. Between each 300 is 30 seconds rest, giving you enough time to catch your breath, but not enough to fully recover before the next interval.
My first test gave me an average of about 4:06/300yards with a threshold pace of 1:22/100yards. Since then, my swim workouts have consisted almost exclusively of long, slow base work and drills/speed skills. Perhaps once a week I’ll do a main set that includes some threshold work, but I’m working primarily in that endurance/skill zone that is recommended by Joe Friel’s coaching book that has been my guide in these first months. So far, the results have been encouraging.
#1: 3:49
#2: 3:53
#3: 3:56
Average: ~3:53
Threshold pace=3:53/3= 1:18 per 100y
I cut my average 300y pace by 16 seconds and brought my threshold down four seconds over the course of four weeks. Four second may not seem like too much, but thinking of an Olympic distance race, that would be about one minute off of my swim time, which could easily be the difference between the podium and a finishers medal.
Given my limited access to a pool in the past few weeks, I can justify my improvements two ways. The first is my never-before-seen dedication to the weight room. Weight training three times a week with a big emphasis on not just the upper body, but swim specific muscles such as the deltoids, triceps and lats, has left me with noticeably stronger muscles in the pool (not in the mirror yet, but hey, it’s still early). This is further evidenced by my favorite question in training: What slows you down, your muscles or your breathing? Since I first jumped in the pool, the answer to that question has always been my muscles. The aerobic engine that I built with cycling and running far outstretched the ability of my swimming muscles that have a few years of mediocre high school tennis playing under their belt. But since my frequency in the weight room increased, I’ve found that my breathing in the pool gets more labored than my muscles. My stronger muscles are lasting long enough to allow my aerobic capacity to be reached when before, I would breath easy while my upper body muscles failed.
The second explanation I have is my work on drills and speed skills. I’m a self-taught swimmer and I took that to an extreme by studying correct the correct swim stroke and being aware of how my body moved in the water while swimming instead of just zonking out for a 1000y warm up. The greatest change that I made has been engaging the triceps to pull through the stroke in order to take advantage of my entire range of motion rather than cutting my strokes short and losing that tail end force. I’ve also been more cognizant of what Joe Friel call’s “pushing the buoy”. In this case, the buoy is your lung and he explains the feeling as almost like swimming downhill. This ensures a more streamlined position in the water where your legs are not being dragged below your torso. This is easily noticed if you lift your head while swimming and look straight ahead. You will feel your legs drop and the resistance increase.
It’s one thing to do easy 25’s with a pull buoy and concentrate on each part of your stroke stopping every lap to readjust. It’s another thing to employ the skills in your regular swim stroke. By forcing myself to be conscious of these adjustments I’m trying to make, I believe I have done a good job at bringing these skills to fruition in my stroke, thus improving my efficiency in the water and in turn, my speed.
Another test is in the books and results are promising. I will now start to incorporate some very high-intensity sets to try to improve my top-end speed (hopefully to break that 1:00/100y goal that I have.)
