Pheidippides’s BodyBlog

Swam 2500 yards today.  Started with moderate 500 yard warmup, followed by 500 yard time trial.  I was shooting for a pace that I thought was about the fastest pace I could sustain in a race for 1.5 K (1650 yards) right now.  I managed 8:12.  That translates to a per 100 yard pace of 1:38.4/100 yards.  For the race in June I will have to sustain a pace of about 1:31/100 yards, so I have a significant, but seemingly not insurmountable, amount of progress to make.

I noticed that my "time trial" time of 8:12 was not that much faster than the "warmup" time for my first 500 yard segment, which was about 8:35.  During that first 500 yards I was concentrating on staying relaxed and maintaining form.  The relatively unimpressive improvement in pace suggests that as I push to go faster my form deteriorates, negating the benefit of moving my limbs faster.  Obviously, I have to work on stroke technique.

For the third 500 yards I went easy, and then for the fourth set of 500  yards I swam 50 yards on the minute, trying different paces.  My fastest pace was just under 40 seconds.  I seem to really struggle when I try to go fast, and the weaknesses in form seem to put a ceiling on my time.

Finished with an easy final 500 yard set.

Overall, an O.K. swim workout.  It had been about a week since my last one, which is way too long if I want to improve.  8:12 for 500 yards gives me a bench mark.  I need to improve it to 7:40/500 yards in order to be able to achieve my 1.5K goal time of 25 minutes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.