Swimming - Part 2

So, after Augusta, I decided I was going to swim more and do harder workouts. Swimming is the easiest of the 3 sports for me to talk myself out of a hard workout. I may go to the pool thinking about maybe doing 6 x 400 HBA, or 20 x 100 on a hard interval and once I get in the water, it just sounds better to do the Master's workout of the day as it was easier, or to throw on some paddles because I LOVE to swim with paddles. I had 1.5 months before Clearwater 70.3 and I needed to be with the main pack out of the water if I wanted a chance to finish well. I committed myself for the following month to at least be in the water 4 days a week swimming. I was doing some really challenging bike / run workouts so adding in yardage in the pool was a challenge. I did successfully add in harder workouts in the water, but my yardage stayed about the same as it had been before. I was only hitting around 20,000 yards because I was only swimming 4ish days a week, but was feeling better in the water because of the threshold workouts. I went into Clearwater and had a decent swim but nothing spectacular. I came out of the water with some strong cyclists, but had an average T1 and was left in the dust. At least at Augusta I was able to pace off of Chris Legh when he passed me early in the bike to help catch some of the other guys. At Clearwater, Legh and a few others beat me out of T1 so I had no one to pace off of and the few guys that I was catching were slightly weaker cyclists than me, so we were not making up ground on the main pack. I ended up in no man's land and had a pretty average race. After Clearwater, I took it easy for a few weeks, then hit it hard in December. I got my yardage up to over 20,000 yards a week and continued to build from there. I swam over 100,000 yards for January and February, and then March was really close to 100,000 and that included 2 taper weeks for 2 separate races. I have felt a large improvement in my swimming as of late, and I was only 1:05 behind Kahn and O'Donnell at San Juan 70.3. I feel like the only reason I wasn't in the pack was because of the guy in front of me stopping about 1200 into the swim thus opening a small gap from us to the end of the front pack. This is the closest I've been to the leaders in a big race like that and has given me some confidence about my swimming. There are a few small changes I've made in my swimming that have enabled me to do this. 1. Swimming main sets of at least 2400 yards, preferably longer. For distance swimmers I've read it needs to be 3k or more. 2. Lots of drills, and emphasis on 1 arm swimming with the opposite arm at your side. 3. Swimming w/ a pull buoy between your ankles. 4. Cutting back on the # of yards I swim w/ paddles. These three things have helped A TON. I rely a lot on my kick, even when I pull w/ paddles and a buoy, I still unconsciously kick. When I put the buoy between my ankles, it doesn't allow me to kick at all and makes me focus on rotating my body. It also makes me think about keeping balance without using my kick to stabalize myself. I feel like this has given me a better feel for the water. Also, since I'm actually swimming more and not pulling w/ paddles, this also has allowed me to "feel" the water better. The 1 arm drill is incredibly hard when you don't have good body balance in the water. This has been a great drill for me and allowed me to focus on my body rotation and position in the water. The #1 step was swimming longer main sets. On most days, I would swim 4 - 5k but do this by swimming 1.5k warmup, and then 2 sets of around 1,500, whether they were swim, kick, pull, drill, etc. So my usual swim set was only about a mile in length and then 2,500 on super long days. Once the new year came around, I have tried to do a longer main set even on the easier days, but just swimming slower than usual. If on a harder day I'm holding 1:05 pace per 100, the easier days I'm going over 1:10 pace. And I try to include a lot of backstroke on the recovery swim days just to mix it up and not get burnt out on freestyle. Harder days I'll either have fast intervals and have a goal of just finishing the main set, or focus more on pace and take :10 - :20 rest between intervals while trying to hold the pace. And on the harder days, I'll incorporate a long cool down just to help loosen up and get in a few extra yards. I am still working on my swimming as it is something that I will always be working on, but I swam 21,000 yards last week and that was with a recovery day and a skipped swim workout so I'm pretty pleased with where I have progressed to from just November of last year. Tony