Ignoring the Plan's Swim Workouts
Let me get the prerequisites out of the way, I'm 10 weeks out from IM KS 70.3 and in an HIM plan rather than the outseason plan. Also, I should get it out of the way and say that I have been swimming, in fact I just competed in the state Master's swim meet last weekend. That kind leads to my point however, I am ignoring the coaches' / plan swim workouts in favor of swimming with masters and adhering to the workouts of my swim coaches. I'm still swimming at the prescribed volume and frequency, just not the actual sets laid out in the plan.
My question to all of you is what is the cost/benefit of not following the actual structure of the swim workouts in the plan? My only access to indoor pools is through masters, and it is not humanly survivable for me to swim in open water quite yet (in Iowa). My plan is to continue to swim with masters and supplement with longer race-targeted open water swims when it becomes possible to do so. Honestly, the HIM swim does not bother/intimidate me that much at all, after Kansas I am switching to my IMWI plan in which I am planning putting a much greater focus on my distance swimming.
I guess I could have simply worded this as an informal poll, has anyone completely ignored the swim workouts in favor of masters and met either unprecedented success or certain doom?
Comments
A lot of folks around here do the same, myself included. I do all my swim workouts with a masters team.
There are swim workouts in the plans?
I find the master's workouts mimic the swim plans "close enough." When I trained for FL, I would substitute some extra freestyle for fly or IM sets, although I would do different strokes each workout to break things up. One thing that worked for me was to do the 1,000 yd time trial once a month. IOW, from time to time, a continuous, longer swim helped me build up that part of the engine. It was an important component for me--that and the RR swims.
@Chris--yup, there are workouts in the plans. Handy when you need them.
For what it's worth, I had on my former competitive swimmer swim cap on when writing the workouts, so they are very real-swimmer, masters-esque. But swimmer masters with other people is worth 2-3" per hundred faster, extra work. Good gig if you can get it.
I hope I didn't come off as dismissive of the plan's swim workouts in terms of their quality or structure. The (outside) city pools haven't opened up here yet so I have not had the opportunity to swim on my own outside of master’s practice, but if I did then I would immediately defer to the plan's workouts. The plan's swim workouts do appear to be very masters-esque as you've said, which is partly why I have not worried about it much, especially for the HIM.
200-500 repeats are more than enough to get you ready for an IM. Just don't do what most triathletes do, which is swim 1.5-2k continuous very slowly. Better to rack up 3k as 200-500 repeats at a much faster pace. That's how "real" swimmers train. I was a miler my whole life and can count on two hands the number of sets I did with repeats longer than about 600yds.
It's all technique. No worries.
However- I'm now in a place where I have no access to any masters groups. I'm very thankful for the swim workouts in the EN plan and I'll be following them very closely this year (starting in April- that's when I get back in the pool). So I'll let ya know what the delta is after IMoo this year!
If you follow me on Facebook, you know that my first swim in almost two years was last Friday. I warmed up about 200m and then did a 1k TT in a long course pool. It pretty much sucked, especially as I had done a 3hr climbing ride a few hours before and I was fighting foot cramps the whole time.
I've just kinda come up with the idea of having Stoopid Coach Dick Trick Contests every week or so. I do something whack, ask people to place bets and award a price. See my Facebook later today for my next stoopid trick, coming this weekend.
But back to the swim, I want to see what happen to a 1k TT time when all I do is sprint swim workouts. I'm going to do this session about 8-10x and then do another TT:
WU: 300m
MS: 10 x 100 pull on 2:00, as 50 Hard, 50 Easy. Goal is to go fast enough to reach muscle failure in the last 10m of each 50, not very hard to do with my current fitness.
CD: 100 easy
Dryland: pushups, pullups, core, pick up a few weights and put them down again, etc.
Basically experimenting with the High Intensity Training (HIT) stuff that came out in the NYT(?) recently, which said that 10 x 1' all out efforts, a couple times per week, had as much benefit as nearly 10hrs of endurance training. In my case, the 50's above take me about 38", which means I'm racking up 500m at 1:16/100m pace. If I were to do them as typical swimmer sets of 100s, I'd "maybe" swim 1:30 pace right now. I should be able to get them down to 33-34"/50m in 4-6wks, so sub 1:10 pace.
By the way, we started with 12 50's, now doing 20+ 75's. I do this once/week, then get a longer steady swim and a technique focused swim in.
Disclaimer- I suck so there's lots of room for improvement.
OK Coach Dick, I'm In. Because my IM swim times have not improved over the past five years like my bike and run, I'm willing to try some HIT. Once a week. But because I'm an OF, and need more time to loosen up, I'll be doing about 3 x 300 swim, 6 x 50 drill, and 2 x 100 kick as my warm up. And because I don't do a 54' swim (more like 70'), I'll do yards, not meters on 2 minutes. But I'll do the ten weeks, and see what spits out in Lake Couer d'Alene June 27th. Besides, I LOVE the pull buoy, any excuse to use it approved by Coaching Staff.
Maybe you should make this an official challenge?
Al, cool, but that's not really the same, not a very good control, as you've got ~1500yd/m of swimming as warmup before you do that set. That qualifies as old skool, so 2009 training, vs my 2010 space age experiment
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My thinking is:
I absolutely know this will build a faster 1k TT, but I'm not sure that the the very limited volume (<1500m per sesson) will translate to a faster IM swim split. I guess a better experiment, for our purposes, would have been to do a 3800m TT as my first swim in 2yrs (that would have SUCKED), do my little 8 session experiment and repeat. Maybe after I take my next 2yr break...<img src="http://members.endurancenation.us/DesktopModules/ActiveForums/themes/_default/emoticons/cool.gif" alt="" />
At this point in my tri career (not knowing when it might end!), I guess I shouldn't be experimenting too much. So I'll take advantage of my remaining OS weeks to add in a little high end speed work to my swimming. Once a week, 5x100 as described should wake me up in the pool as as prep to handling the longer stuff come April/May.
BTW, if I tried to do any intense intervals with only a 5 min warm-up, I'd probably throw a rod or something. I need 20-30 minutes to loosen up the juices nowadays.