I did this swim workout 2 weeks ago, and I thought it might be worth sharing. The general idea (especially the main set) is from Gale Bernhardt’s Training Plans for Multisport Athletes. The idea is a time trial test to determine race pace and other paces that are needed for tempo-type work etc.
- Warm-up for 300m
- Do 300m of power work with hand paddles
- Do 3 intervals of 300m. Try to finish each of these with completion times that are within 15 seconds of each other. Effort should be hard, but not so hard that you’re blown up in the third set and the times are inconsistent. Rest 30s to 1 min between intervals
- Do 3 sprint intervals of 50m. Rest 30s to 1 min between intervals
- Cool-down for 150m
Total distance: 1800m
If you average the time of your main set 300m intervals and divide by 3, you get a benchmark time for 100m. Slower than this for aerobic work, faster for speed work…
Looking at the stats from my test 2 weeks ago, it seems my Garmin 910XT and I don’t agree on interval lengths. If I look at the average 100m pace for Intervals 3, 4, 5 (the main set), rather than the total times of the intervals, we see I’m not quite consistent enough; the times vary by almost a minute, when the paces should vary by about 5 seconds or less (5 seconds=15 seconds/3).
Oh well, I’ll be doing this time trial several times during the 27 week training plan, which starts soon enough…