Off to the pool again today with hope in my heart that I might complete my current set:
- 400m f/c warm-up
- 24 x 50m f/c, target 51s, turnaround 75s
- 200m swim down
When I walked out on poolside there were two lanes available, both occupied by swimmers clearly considerably slower than me 🙁 I decided I’d just have to get in and deal with the mess when it happened, but actually the swimmer in the lane I chose vacated it before I’d finished warming up.
I have to admit that I wasn’t feeling entirely up for a good performance today, but I just got my head down and kept going. My intention was to at least improve on yesterday’s first failure at rep 20. I put in quite a mix of 50s and sub-50s reps, probably around 50/50 of each, but by rep nineteen I was really starting to feel tired and it just became a matter of hanging in there. The last two were very tough, but on the second length of the final rep I really pushed hard to get back in time and actually managed a 47s 50m, which seems pretty good at that point.
So, another completed set and time to make it more difficult again. As I’ve previously posted I think it might be time to start dropping the target by half a second after each completed set in order to maintain a balance between making the set harder and making it so hard that insufficient swimming takes place to stimulate an improvement, so my target time for the next session will be 50.5s.
Looking through my records for last year it appears that I have never completed a set with a target time faster than 51s so even if it is half a second, this next one will be a big step forward. More so because at that time I was doing open turns because I couldn’t stay on the pace doing tumble turns. Since then I have gone back to the drawing board and will now be doing tumble turns every time, so there should be more improvement to come.
USRPT distance this year: 84,950m
Total distance this year: 87,500m