My vague plan for today was to change my set around and attempt:
20 x 50m front crawl no slower than 55s on a 75s interval
some sort of recovery
16 x 25m front crawl aiming for somewhere around 20s, on a 45s interval
I had no idea if 20s would be achievable, so the second set was a bit of an experiment.
Generally the first set went pretty well, though it didn’t help when someone decided they were going to join my lane and swim much slower than the pace the rest of us were doing. I let him have a 15s head start at one point and still caught up with him at the end of the length. Eventually he caught on to the fact that he really shouldn’t be there, but it took a fair while. In the end I managed to get all the way through the set without a failure, though I had to skip a couple of tumble turns to avoid this swimmer.
I took a couple of minutes without swimming to recover and then had a gentle pootle up and down the pool to give myself a total of around five to six minutes break before starting on the 25s. I messed a few up at the start as I didn’t realise that the pace clocks at either end of the pool are not synchronised. Once I’d worked out what times I needed to leave the wall on each clock I was sorted, but I lost track of how many 25s I actually swam. All but one were faster than 21s, so I’ll take that as a marker for now. I did have to skip two reps. Next time I swim I’ll count the reps more carefully and see if I can’t get a longer rest between the sets which will hopefully help.