Your attitude is the point. "Challenging" as in you can't finish the set? Great. When you chop down the interval, you are accelerating the rate of fatigue. The set has to be shorter. A yardage queen like yourself should know the downside.
There are other ways to challenge yourself. Like, say, swimming fast. Try that one sometime.
Since when do descending interval sets have to be short? That kind of defeats the whole purpose. I think the value of descending interval sets is making them quite long so that you increase your speed incrementally, develop some pacing at each speed interval. Added bonus is great endurance.
I know what you are saying about speed work, we do that as well. Can't always do the same thing over and over, unless you are John Smith.
When you coming to Charlotte for a visit now that you are an east coaster?
I swam a variant of this yesterday, although it sucked because the pool was packed and I had to share a wall lane with a changing lineup of 3 different eh... very casual swimmer types... you know what I mean. Not quite floaters, but definitely not conducive to fast swimming.
I didn't remember all the rules about how high the interval was supposed to go so I just did from :20 up to whenever. Originally I intended to swim it all IM, going free-fly-***-back in each distance, but I quickly gave up on that when I saw how crowded it was. (need to get my ass out of bed early!) I ended up swimming 25s AFAP until :45, then 50s AFAP until 1:40, followed by 1 100 AFAP which was definitely NOT anywhere near my best 100 time. In fact it was so far from said time that it demotivated me and I quit the set after 2 or 3 more 100s. I think I stopped at 2:05 or 2:10. How high was the interval supposed to go?
The rest of my workout was almost all Fly, which I've been working on a lot lately. I don't know if that affected my performance or not. All I know is that I enjoyed swimming the fly and hated the increasing intervals set. I think I would have liked the "whistle" set better if it were done with a group.
