percentage of hard swimming?

I agree with this, and to me there's no way you could do that 10x100 set on 1:35/1:20 with the hard ones anywhere close to race pace. It's just not enough rest. At least I should say I couldn't. Anyway, my idea of a set where you're going close to race pace requires more like a 1:1 swim to rest ratio. From that stand point, yeah swimming a 100 close to my race time in practice would be impossible that many times. By number two I would blow chow. I was refering to level of effort. And even with a great deal of effort during this set I was about 10 seconds off race pace for a 100. I guess a better question is what is considered hard swimming or quality yards?

I agree with Ande....there are definitely different levels of "Hard" all the way up to Race Pace....I usually save Race Pace days for Fridays so I have the weekend to recover....once I get back to the level of doing 2 a days then the follow up day to a Race Pace day would be a lot of long rest/easy sets concentrating a lot on the warm up and a lot of drills.

I swim 4 times a week,2500 yd or less each time. I swim a one day 50 pace,one day 100 pace,one day 200 pace and one day combo.My basic is a 1:3 ratio,so on 50 pace day it is 25 all out,75 recovery.I do the 25s timed and am repeating 100's on the 2-3 min depending on where I am in my training cycle and how I feel. If I can't do the race pace part at my goal time I give myself more rest.

I was doing too much at race pace (holding my pace for the 1650) for 75% of practice. That accounts for the mega drops in my distance events. Now that I am trying to get some sprint speed I am doing about 25% sprint speed and 25% distance race pace the remaining 50% is moderate or EZ. In practice I find I have been able to beat my best times on a good day. My 50 Back has already gone down. With the change in percentages I find I recover faster and can handle double practices now with ease.

I think I'm about at Allen's ratio. I don't swim more than 25% of my workout at true "race pace." How could you? As Ande notes, there is a big difference between true race pace and 80-90%. If you're at race pace, you need a serious rest interval to make it meaningful. It's effectively a timed swim. When I'm doing that kind of workout, I mix a lot of easy recovery swims and DPS swims in with the race pace sprinting. I might, for example, do 20 x 50 on 1:00 alternating easy, DPS, fast, easy, etc. A hard aerobic set is completely different than race pace swimming. Both have their benefits, although I'm a believer in quality over quantity. As for the question of hard swimming versus quality yards, I think you can have both or do them in alternating workouts perhaps. But if your stroke starts falling apart from hard swimming on a short interval, I'm not sure how productive that is. Yeah, it's very macho, but so what? Will that make you swim faster in a meet (assuming that's your goal)? I'll very occasionally bang out a hard set of 10 x 100s. But more often I'll descend 1-5 and 6-10 to get more bang for the buck and preserve technique and SDKs. I guess it depends somewhat on your event focus. And everyone trains differently and benefits from different training. Although I've read on the forum that race pace training can work for distance swimmers too. For me, among other things, I'm going to attempt to focus on race pace and timed swims more in practices this season. I'm convinced it's a good idea to time yourself from the blocks fairly regularly, although this is difficult if you swim alone or your team doesn't do this much. If there's no blocks, time yourself from a push off. And, wait a minute, you can't make 50 kicks on 1:05?! I think your 100 free would improve if your kicking improved!

Very little hard pace for me ever. In my Sprint days gone by about half of my 800m a day was a warm up warm down the rest was all out 25s, 50, 75s or 100s. As a distance swimmer 20 percent was all out swimming, 80 percnt race pace about 22 or 23 min mile pace.

When I was training regularly we would do a "lactate set" once a month mid-season. It was 10 x 100y on 3 or 4 minutes. I would be swimming about 1:12/1:13 from a push (best race at that time was 1:10 from blocks). Total workout was 4,000 or so. By the end of the lactate set I would be on the verge of tears and hanging in the gutter. Not sure what hurt exactly, but still felt like I had been run over by a truck. Next morning it was a struggle just to get out of bed to go to work. A few days later I would be faster, but no way I could do those very often both from the physical punishment and also getting psyched up to do them hard. These days: much less swimming, much slower, much more rest between swims. I did a 4 x 100y fly and still the next day I slept 14 hours.

Any more rest and the other swimmers complain and want to shorten the interval. I could see where this would be a problem. I think a lot of swimmers want to get in X amount of yards in their hour or whatever and get kind of annoyed if they fall short. Also it's tough to crank it up like that. A few hundred yards of fast swimming is way more difficult than just keeping an aerobic pace up for an hour or so. Not everyone wants to work their tail off.

Very thought-provoking post, Kevin... after thinking about it, I don't do nearly enough true race-pace efforts. I do a lot of 90-95%ish stuff, but not race pace. I enter all my workouts in excel and color code each workout for easy (green), medium (yellow), and hard (red). It's a totally arbitrary coding, and probably somewhat dependent on how I felt during/after the workout, but still looking back since June 1, I've only had 3 'red' days. Granted, our team's focus in the summer is geared toward the open water swimmers and tris, but still... Sadly, I am a sprinter and my focus event is the 100 free. I really need to do some more all out race pace quality in my workouts! I think you nailed it with people complaining about too much rest and wanting to shorten the interval. Unfortunately, lots of people don't understand that 5x100 ALL OUT on the 5:00 is wayyyyyyy more excruciating than say 20x100 on the 1:30. Hoping to put a lot more RED in the worksheet next season, Carrie

Race Pace to me is just that,not "all out" swims(except for 25s).For instance on 100 pace days I am swimming 200s as 50 at"race pace" and 150 as recovery. For this,race pace means the time of the 2nd 50 of my 100. That is my goal time,if I can't make it I lengthen my interval.On 200 pace days I swim 300s with the first 100 at the speed of the second 10 of my 200. These are not lactate tolerance swims,the idea is to get my body used to that pace so that when I am in a race I go that pace without thinking.As I said I do 50 pace one day,100 pace one day and 200 pace one day. On the forth day I will do lactate tolerance set sometimes or other different things,but on pace days I pretty much stick to the above. Just to add another thing set I do rarely on the forth day,200s,sprint the first 50 all out and then try to hold good form and DPS the next 150. It's is a good way to get confidence(or not) that I won't fall apart if I take my 200 out too fast.