Swim - Red Mist Pace translation to Race Day

Dawn Cass

Hello all - I posted on Mike's thread as well however will start new to get more thoughts.

I have been doing Red Mist drills for months now and see the benefit.  When I plug in my paces for the sets, i can achieve paces that I have not been able to do in the past....excellent.

I now wonder how I translate that to race day.  If I just "swim" without the tempo trainer, I am going slower than what I can do when I am doing the Red Mist sets.  If I plug my tempo trainer to beep once every stroke...I have tried several options on timing, I still don't repeat what I can do on Red Mist.

Question is...what do people do on race day.  Do you use a tempo trainer to keep you in beat?  Are you seeing times similar if not faster to what you have doing in the Red Mist sets?  

Or...do you simply just SWIM....keep as good of form as you can and see what comes out at the finish line.

Appreciate thoughts!

Mike Roberts

Hey Dawn, I do not use a TT on race day. Your TT is great for identifying and muscle memorizing a good stroke rate for you (i.e., if you think 60 spm is your number, try holding that over 300, 400, 500s - you'll likely find that our SPM rate tends to fade over distance). So I like using the TT on stroke rate mode (i.e., 65 beeps per minute) on longer endurance sets. Red Mist, on the other hand, is great for bumping up your threshold and developing those multiple gears Rich talks about. If you do Red Mist for 6-8 straight weeks, that's 2 months of teaching your body how to swim progressively harder and faster for one hour (descending) with different gears close to threshold, a perfect tool for a one-hour IM swim. IMO. By race day, you will have all the gears to go out hard, settle into threashold+ pace, surge (change gears) if needed, and maintain/increase effort late in the swim. If you do that 6-8 weeks of work, will you have the physical ability to swim 2.4 mi at your RM pace? Absolutely. Executing that pace on race day, to me, is not some calculated pacing or timing plan. Don't overthink it. Just swim. Find your right start location, aggressively go through that first 10-15 minutes, settle in as if it's the middle of one of those hard one-hour workouts, then finish like it's the last couple 400's of a RM workout. Final bit of advice: do a couple of race rehearsals without the TT to see where you really stand. If you're 1:05, you'll truly know where to seed yourself, and then do so confidently on race day. When I did my final RR, I knew that I truly belonged up front. Then the swim felt just like a RM workout, and I came out within 30 seconds of my RR time.

Just my $.02.

Dawn Cass

Hello Mike - thanks a lot for the comments. All make sense...and my feeling was not to use the TT on race day however I know some do so felt to ask the question. My first (and only) IM effort was 1:15 on race day. Since then I have put more time into the swim...however not 100% of what you have talked about. At this point...will just see what happens and look to see if the work has paid off. If so...will be elated...if not, will put it behind me and just try to re-focus, and look forward to the bike. ;-)

Tom Glynn

I don't think TTs are legal race day. I happen to like the Red Mist sets a lot too. I've been doing them this year for the first time and I think they are really making a difference, I usually do them as prescribed in the Swim Smooth workouts, but once in a while I'll switch it up with the Tempo Trainer. Normally I set the timer for the length of the pool. As Mike noted above, I notice that my cadence starts to fall as I get tired, so after the first couple thousand yards I'll switch the TT over to stroke mode and use the wall clock as a timer for a couple sets of 400's and then switch back to mode 1 with time per length again. It really helps me bust through the mental part as I can feel myself slowing down.

Dawn Cass

Thanks Tom, good points as well.

Here's something of interest...a couple days I was trying to set the TT to beep each stroke, looking for the most efficient. Came home to find my paces were all very low.

Today, I just went by feel, no TT....and my times were fantastic. I did so x number of sets so not a real RR however it goes to show that the TT in training is fab...and on the day, going on form and feel is perhaps the best.

Tom Glynn

Dawn, for your efficiency test, why not do a sort of step test, so raising your cadence by a couple of strokes every 100 yards and then coming home to figure out the fastest speed and the corresponding cadence? I've done that a couple of times and it seems that my cadence in general could go a little faster, but it's quite a bit more aerobic, so it takes practice.