How to explain swim improvement?
I did a swim test last week and posted my fastest 1,000m time ever. My time was 16:50 which was 10 seconds faster than my previous best (17:00) last Fall in my prep for IM-AZ. What makes this significant is that it was literally my first time in a pool in 10 weeks! And for the the 10 weeks before that I had just been doing periodic swimming - nothing structured, nothing hard - just some recovery swims and a little drill work here and there. Since I have been swimming, training for IMs and doing periodic swim tests for the past several years, how do you explain any improvement after such a layoff? My only thought is that all the FTP bike workouts I did during the OS carried over into my time trial in the pool. Does this make sense? Anyone else experienced such a phenomenon?
Comments
I would attribute this to the fact that you probably have well established technique. It's hard to "forget" that stuff once you have it. As for the fitness losses/gains in the pool over 10 weeks, it's hard to say. It's hard to separate that from the fitness gains on the bike and run, especially if it's something like a 10 sec difference. Lots of other variables could account for that too (ex. how fresh and well rested you were during your test, how hard you pushed, etc.) Fitness in the pool is mostly limited by stuff like upper body strength and endurance, so I'm guessing swim-specific fitness isn't an issue here.
Anson, thanks for the feedback. Yea it's not even so much that I improved my time (10 secs. is relatively minor). But I assumed after close to 5 months of little to no swimming I would be a good bit slower than my previous tests. I really didn't even feel like I was pushing that hard and therefore was shocked when I looked at my watch when I was done!