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A new target today:

• 400m f/c warm-up
• 24 x 50m f/c, target 54s, turnaround 75s
• 200m swim down

One second faster than the set I completed on Thursday last week. I wasn’t feeling great when I got to the pool and wasn’t really mentally in the right place, but actually the set went pretty well. I had no failures and most of my reps were 51 seconds or 52 seconds, with a couple of excursions into 53 seconds when I messed up the turn. Rep 23 felt very tough, but I was so determined to complete the set that I gave it everything on the way back on rep 24, finishing in less than 49 seconds. I was quite pleased with that.

Target time 53 seconds next, then. That might be tough. I will need to make all of my turns I think. No slipping on the wall or turning a bit too early.

USRPT distance this year: 76,200m
Total distance this year: 78,750m

So, back to the stopwatch today, working on the following set:

• 400m f/c warm-up
• 24 x 50m f/c, target 55s, turnaround 75s
• 200m swim down

I felt quite tired during the warm-up so I wasn’t sure how it would go, but my first rep was 48s, after which I settled into a fairly steady rhythm of 51s, dropping into the 52s later in the set. I did have a couple of 53s when I had poor turns and didn’t get a good push off the wall, but they were the worst two. Overall I was very pleased with it. I’m not sure I can manage another set tomorrow however. I might do a 100m pace set instead — perhaps 24 x 25m f/c, target 25s, turnaround 40s or something like that. I’ve got no idea where to start, so that doesn’t seem too bad a point to work from.

USRPT distance this year: 74,400m
Total distance this year: 76,250m

I don’t usually swim on Wednesdays, but having missed Monday I decided I’d go the pool, especially as I must have slept awkwardly and had woken up with a pounding headache thanks to the muscles in my back and neck being very stiff.

I didn’t really know what to expect, but as it happens the swimming came very comfortably and though I was tiring at the end I managed to complete my entire set without a failure.

Perhaps it’s now time to explain in more detail what I’ve actually been doing for the last three months…

Last year I spent most of my time swimming USRPT sets and had managed to get to the point of swimming a complete set of 50m reps with a target time of 50s and a turnaround time of 75s. But that was doing an open turn between lengths, and it was becoming fairly obvious to me that I was going to struggle to get much faster unless I could tumble turn instead. Trying to swim sets with tumble turns was just killing me however. I could manage perhaps half a dozen reps and then I was completely exhausted. I might manage the odd one or two more, but putting more together in a run just wasn’t happening.

I had a fair while off in late November and early December last year thanks to quite a bad cold, so when I started again on 10th December I decided I’d give myself a short while just to get back into the swing of things and then I’d adopt a USRPT-style approach to getting my tumble turns in, starting from quite a long way out, time-wise.

So, my first set was twenty-four 50s, tumble turn every time, target time 100 secs, turnaround on 120 secs. Even that wasn’t easy initially and I had some fails that first time. I persisted however, and every time I could do the full set of twenty-four reps I dropped the target time and turnaround time by five seconds, but I had to keep the tumble turns going. Slowly the time has dropped, though it has been quite tough recently. Today I completed twenty-four 50s with a target time of 55s and a turnaround time of 75s for the first time. Not quite as fast as I was four months ago with open turns, but hardly far off either.

To progress now I think I need to change the game plan. I’m going to return to “proper” USRPT, use my stopwatch and start trying to drop the target time one second each time I can complete the set, reducing the turnaround time to twenty seconds once it reaches twenty-five. I’m looking forward to seeing how it works out.

USRPT distance this year: 72,600m
Total distance this year: 74,450m

Unlike the last couple of weeks when it has been quite busy, I arrived at the pool today to find no-one lane-swimming and it remained that way for most of my session. I have to admit that I wasn’t really feeling too keen to swim – my daughter has a cold and I think she may have passed it on to me, and for some reason I felt quite tired, too. I didn’t swim yesterday however because work got in the way and I don’t want to get into the habit of skipping two days in a row.

So, same set as last Friday, with a goal to make at least twenty-two reps before my first failure. In the end, twenty-two was exactly what I made, though the last one was a bit of a fight. From there, finishing the set without an additional failure wasn’t exactly a struggle 🙂

USRPT distance this year: 70,800m
Total distance this year: 72,650m

I arrived at the pool slightly early today to find it already empty. Normally there’s a school session, but apparently the last one hadn’t turned up so I started ten minutes early with the pool to myself. I did have to share it with a few people, including one parent who repeatedly dragged her baby across my lane whilst encouraging it to kick, but what can you do?

I felt slow today, but by the clock I was doing ok and in the end had my first and only failure on rep twenty-two, a couple more than yesterday and back to where I was on 7th March. Afterwards I did a bit of tumble turn practice in the shallow end. I struggle to avoid hitting the bottom on turns at the shallow end, but I’m getting there slowly.

USRPT distance this year: 69,050m
Total distance this year: 70,900m