Swimming: Am I too conservative in races?
I'm curious if I'm more or less on-track compared to others, because sometimes I think my swim times are slower than they should be. I wonder if I am - in some races - just not swimming hard enough. How fast do you all go, relative to your 1000 yd time trial times? I feel like when I do my 1000 yd time trial, I'm going all out (like doing a 5K run or whatever), so I don't go that hard in races.
To put myself out there, here are data from me from last year. All times per 100 yds, from 2009 races:
Best 1000 TT of the season: 1:33 (scy, open turns)
Best Oly (1500 m): 1:40 (27.5 min total)
Best Half (1900 m): 1:44 (37 min total)
IM (3800 m): 1:50 (78 min total)
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Comments
So you just deal with being at super high HR coming out of the water during T1 and a few min on the bike? I've always been scared that I'd ruin the rest of my day I guess.
@ William - that's my 1000 yd TT: 1:33/100 yds. My race times: 26/33/70. My best IM is 66, but I've consciously slowed down in that distance the past two years, trying t save gas. 78 sounds like a pacing or a conditioning issue. I walk out of the water until I feel good, then start running. That keeps my HR and first minutes of bike feeling much easier.
P
Yes, and there's the draft, too... It took me a couple years to figure that out, and suddenly I picked a couple of minutes. (I may still be able to do a better job at that)
No, I haven't done any 2k TT in the pool, in large part just to have a single, easy-to-repeat benchmark test to gauge things by. Every so many weeks I've been doing the 1000 TT for the last few years while actively swimming (as it appears is the case in my new EN plan as well).
However, there's an implication in your response, Patrick, that I guess gets at the heart of the matter: "at a similar effort level". I think there's little doubt that I swim with higher perceived effort on the TT than during the race. I guess I've always thought that there was a big issue with getting out of the water having burned too many matches, so I played it kind of conservative (just like not running full tilt at the beginning of a race). I gather from your response and from Al's that my suspicion that maybe I was playing it too conservative is correct.
In the "Swim Clinic 2008" book, you list the following for "Good swimming" cutoffs:
1000 m/y = 17:30-18:00
1500 m ~24:00 min
Half IM 34-35 min
Full IM ~ 70-75 min
Even if we assume the long version (m) for the 1000, my 1000 time converted to meters is easily in the 17:00-17:30 range, and it looks as though you're holding pretty steady on the paces from the 1000 (presumably a TT) vs race times.
I have a Warm-up/season-opening/"C" Olympic distance race on the calendar for May 23 and another swim TT in between now and then. Perhaps this is an opportunity to experiment with swimming closer to that TT pace??
(BTW, this race has two down-then-up river valley crossings on the bike with 7-10 min climbs. Is proper EN-etiquette for an Oly race being taken as a hard training day/benchmark to attack the climbs intelligently or smack them as a training exercise?)