I am thinking about swimming a 1500m in an upcoming meet and am wondering what sort of sets I can swim to see what pace I can hold for that distance. Tonight we had a 12x100 set on 1:50 and I expanded it to 15x100 and came in on 1:35 on average. A coach I was talking to recently said that what one could do with 15s rest in a set like that you could likely do in a race at a meet. I am not quite so sure, 15s seems like a lot of rest. On the other hand the set wasn't that hard to complete and I had plenty left at the end. I was just concentrating on technique and getting 5m off every wall. If I actually held 1:35 that would be 23:45, which would be two minutes faster than the last time I swam it, two years ago, and I would feel really good about that, I was actually just aiming to go under 24:30, which would be a minute off my PB, which I did three years ago. It would also beat my secret nemesis' time... :D Which is the only reason for swimming such an insanely long race!
Any other suggested interval sets to gauge likely meet time? The thing that really gets me is having to swim without the pace clock and having to do 60 lengths before finding out if I hit my goal pace or not! Every 1 sec variance per 50m translates to 30s over 1500, which is both exciting and scary!
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The thing that really gets me is having to swim without the pace clock and having to do 60 lengths before finding out if I hit my goal pace or not!
I'm no expert on distance swimming, but I think what I did would help you. The one time I swam the 1500M I told my coach what pace I wanted to keep and asked him to give me hand signals if I was on pace or not.
Prior to that swim I hadn't swam anything over a 200 before. Like you I had no idea what kind of time I could do. So I just picked a time based on what an EZ 100 time during repeat 100's would be, essentially a comfortable pace that I could hold for that distance. I came up with a 1:20 pace and a goal to break 20 minutes. So during the race I didn't really focus on what lap I was on, but rather focused whether or not I got the on pace signal from my coach. I finished with a 19:41.
I hope this helps.
The thing that really gets me is having to swim without the pace clock and having to do 60 lengths before finding out if I hit my goal pace or not!
I'm no expert on distance swimming, but I think what I did would help you. The one time I swam the 1500M I told my coach what pace I wanted to keep and asked him to give me hand signals if I was on pace or not.
Prior to that swim I hadn't swam anything over a 200 before. Like you I had no idea what kind of time I could do. So I just picked a time based on what an EZ 100 time during repeat 100's would be, essentially a comfortable pace that I could hold for that distance. I came up with a 1:20 pace and a goal to break 20 minutes. So during the race I didn't really focus on what lap I was on, but rather focused whether or not I got the on pace signal from my coach. I finished with a 19:41.
I hope this helps.
