A Short, Fast, Swim- Speed-building
Set
By Alex Kostich
Indeed, many swimmers and triathletes enjoy training
endurance because it feels like a real workout (the "no pain,
no gain" approach). However with consistent endurance training,
it is easy to fall into a pattern of swimming longer distances at
slower paces.
Dawn Heckman is a World Class Workout contributor
as well as a gold and bronze medalist at the 1999 Pan Pacific Games,
a member of the World Championship Open Water team, and holder of
several recent masters world records. She maintains that every now
and then it is necessary to practice speed and keep your body conditioned
to sprint. Dawn's workout is designed to do just that.
Pre-meet Warm-up
A pre-meet warm-up is whatever it is you do to get ready before
a big race. Some swimmers take longer than others and prefer to
do up to an hour of drills and light sets. Others like to get their
body moving with an easy 1,500 meters and call it quits.
Whatever the case may be, take your time and warm
up correctly every time you do the following set. To successfully
complete the workout, you need to be prepared to swim fast.
Main Set
8 x 50 ALL OUT as follows:
4 @ 1:10
2 @ 1:00
2 @ :50
This is only 400 meters of swimming, but the challenge
is to swim each 50 at race pace. The final time for the 400 meters,
when added up, has to equal your goal time in the 400-meter event
(those who don't know what that time would be because they swim
different events or compete in triathlons should still focus on
sprinting, regardless).
"Every single 50 for me had to be at race pace
or faster," Dawn remembers, "or else it didn't count and
I had to do it again! The intervals weren't the challenging part;
it was making yourself swim really fast when you were dead tired."
Cool Down
This can be a few hundred yards of easy swimming to flush the lactic
acid out of your system, or even 2,000 meters of pulling if you
want to inflate your yardage a bit.
The value of the above main set is that it forces
your body to perform under race conditions when you may not feel
your fastest or your best. If you are in mid-season, swimming a
few 50s (let alone eight of them!) at race pace could be really
challenging, yet it's a great way to gauge where you are in your
training.
If your body is really broken down and you fail at
the set, perhaps it's time to pare down the intensity of your training
and focus more on recovery time to swim fast. If you complete the
first half of the set but fail on the last few 50s, then that should
be a clue that you need to work on your endurance.
In midseason, Dawn would do this set three times through
in one workout, for a total of 1,200 meters of fast swimming. As
the season progressed she would do it twice, then only once in the
weeks of her taper. Occasionally, she would do the set butterfly
(she primarily raced freestyle but felt that butterfly was a greater
challenge).
Ultimately, this short set could be the most important
drill you do during your season. While endurance training is the
pillar of any open-water swimmer or triathlete's logbook, sprinting
is the oft-neglected element that separates the fast from the faster.
The more an athlete is accustomed to swimming fast
during midseason training, the more conditioned he will be to rise
to the occasion when the gun goes off on race day.
As endurance-prone workaholics, sometimes we need
to remember to set aside time for fine-tuning ourselves with sprints,
and thanks to Dawn we now have a blueprint to follow.
