After the Swedish Masters Open, I shifted from training for pool events to longer open water races.
On July 11th I will swim the Swedish Open Water 5km and the following Sunday swim a 3km race along with 4500 others. I feel that my tempo and distance training has gone well. last year I swam the 3km race in 45:15. based on my pool work outs and the few lake swims I have done I think I have a chance to get down to 40:00 (goal is under 42:00 to be seeded in next yrs race). For the Friday night 5km race, I am guessing there will only be 15-25 swimmers. I am hoping not to get last, but timewise hoping to go under 1:10 (1:15 is the slowest I want to go).
anyways, this weekend I am going to race with the kids. 50-100-200 ***, and potentially the 4x100 medley relay and 4x200 B-team relay.
So last week and this week I have changed my workouts to concentrate on breaststroke technic and speed work. I do technic drills, 25 sprints, broken 100's, 200 neg and I do my work outs about 80% breaststroke.
since I will only have 3-5 races over a three day meet, I am thinking of taking advantage of the pool time and swimming 1-2 hours during the session I have no races.
Here's the question, will this two week pause from my distance training have a noticable effect? Should I be able to just go back to my distant passes in the lake on Monday?
I was hoping to get right back in and do 5km on monday, 4km on tuesday and wednesday.....thursday off day, then friday (july 4th), saturday and sunday get in a 90-120 minute swim, since my goal is to get the race done under 75min, I want to know what it feels like to swim 75 and then push myself 15-45 minutes past that point. with out pushing myself, I have done a 4km on 58:20 and a 3km approx 43:00 (but on the 3km I had a hard time concentrating in swimming and swam about 25-35m off course, side to side, almost never in a straight line.)
My last pace workout I did 10x100 start 1:40 followed by a 50 ez and then 5x200 start 3:00. was able to hold for the most part 1:12 (:35/:37) and 2:30 (1:14/1:16) granted it was a lot of rest.
