Just to get the ball rolling here, I'd like to post a practice we did last night. It was written by one of our team's co-coaches, Bill White, who swam at the University of Louisville and is the most knowledgable swim coach I have personally had the pleasure to meet (this includes, by the way, one year at the U. Michigan.)
Anyhow, Bill's workout seemed impossibly challenging, but somehow he coaxed us into making it.
5 x 200 on 2:45 warm up
5 x 200 on 2:35
4 x 200 on 2:30
3 x 200 on 2:25
2 x 200 on 2: 20
1 x 100 all out sprint
1 x 100 cool down.
We got about a minute and a half rest between each of the sets above. Our team only gets the pool for 60 minutes, so the total practice was 4000 yards completed in 60 minutes. I suspect this practice would be pretty easy for younger type swimmers, but I am 49 and it was quite challenging. I should point out, however, that when it was over, all of us who made it felt a tremendous sense of satisfaction!
Our coach, a great guy named Bill White, has designated Mondays as our distance-y challenge workout. Here's what we did tonight, which is quite possibly the hardest practice I've managed to finish since I was in college 35 years ago:
300 pre warm up
10 x 100 on 1:25 warm up
10 x 100 on 1:20
10 x 100 on 1:15
4 x 100 on 1:10
4 x 50 on :35
1 x 100 sprint
1 x 100 easy
further cool down if there was any time left (alas, there wasn't)
It might be interesting to see what others out there consider to be extremely challenging workouts that they've actually made (or come close to making.) I propose this not as a "Mine Was Harder!" kind of competition, but rather just to see the kinds of sets other people around the country are doing. It probably would make sense to comment on age and gender here so we're comparing apples to apples, so to speak. The four swimmers in our lane who swam the above tonight were the coach himself (31 year old male); a 40 year old male; a 23 year old female; and me, a 49-year-old codger in the making. The other three all swam for four years in college; I got cut from our team (Michigan) after my freshman year, but have kept swimming masters fairly consistently since getting out of grad school in 1983.
Our coach, a great guy named Bill White, has designated Mondays as our distance-y challenge workout. Here's what we did tonight, which is quite possibly the hardest practice I've managed to finish since I was in college 35 years ago:
300 pre warm up
10 x 100 on 1:25 warm up
10 x 100 on 1:20
10 x 100 on 1:15
4 x 100 on 1:10
4 x 50 on :35
1 x 100 sprint
1 x 100 easy
further cool down if there was any time left (alas, there wasn't)
It might be interesting to see what others out there consider to be extremely challenging workouts that they've actually made (or come close to making.) I propose this not as a "Mine Was Harder!" kind of competition, but rather just to see the kinds of sets other people around the country are doing. It probably would make sense to comment on age and gender here so we're comparing apples to apples, so to speak. The four swimmers in our lane who swam the above tonight were the coach himself (31 year old male); a 40 year old male; a 23 year old female; and me, a 49-year-old codger in the making. The other three all swam for four years in college; I got cut from our team (Michigan) after my freshman year, but have kept swimming masters fairly consistently since getting out of grad school in 1983.
