Fri swim tt now -> infinity
Thoughts on substituting an hour-long swim, with the main feature of a 2000m tt (and whatever else as 300 - 500m long sets at between T and T+3 to round out to an hour), for my otherwise prescribed Friday swims going forward?
I'm coming to this with a few goals:
-mental skills development - working on practicing skills to get the the grey matter to deal with some level of discomfort (pool version)
-a tangible carrot, to try to cut 1s per 100 off my T Pace every 2 weeks
-a recognition that i'm doing long / endurance elsewhere, with a 90 min swim on Mondays anyhow.
-a guess (?) that there probably isn't that much more tss accrued in this vs EN-written Friday sessions.
-race specificity
Thoughts?
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Comments
I experimented with this a bit in my swimming workup for IMSG, and did several HIM RR's, and I believe a couple (or at least 1x IM RR). Whether I was doing 1900m or 3800m, I just always settled into the same pace of about 1:28-29/100m. The only difference was that I just swam twice as long at that pace when I did my IM length swim. The net is that I don't think there's much TT'ish-ness about a 1hr swim. I think we're all just going to settle into a pace and swim until the counter tells us to stop.
However, when I did intervals, from 100's to 400 or 500's, I would range from 1:23-27 pace. IOW, you definitely swim about the same amount of volume but at a considerably faster pace. My experience says this is more valuable, from a "make me faster" perspective, than continuous swims. I say this as a former distance swimmer / miler, where my longest intervals were at the most 600-800yds long, but I stacked up a lot of volume.
So I still say you're better off doing the sets as written until ~6wks out, then it's valuable to get in those long continuous swims, to build up endurance, especially if you're swimming in a 50m pool.
I think long continuous swims are good for a "yay, me, I did it, I'm mentally tough" thing, if you define tough as being to able to stare at a black line and count correctly for an hour and change. But you'll always accumulate more distance at a faster average pace if you break it into smaller intervals and just swim faster. Again, this is how real swimmers swim, you get faster by swimming faster and doing a LOT of faster swimming to create the volume that creates endurance.
...that said...long continuous swims, especially in a 50m pool, are very good for building shoulder and neck endurance, I guess. Whatever you get from just swimming for a long time without stopping. But it won't necessarily make you any faster, which is why I said you only need to do these swims in about the last 6wks or so, as I've added them to the '15 rewrite of the plans.
Besides, "gaining" 1s per 100 over 2k is hard to target..did you earn it all in the first 400? Last 400, etc. I like the descending intervals better.