Over the last 6 weeks, I have been trying to increase my yardage from my typical 12K to 15K a week to about 20K to 25K a week. While I'm exceedingly fortunate to train often with people like Laura Winslow and Paul Smith on deck, business travel, family commitments and balancing my workouts with my wife's runs has meant that I'm doing most of these "extra" workouts by myself. As I'm not good at improvising, I've been taking workouts from the masters of the game -- Laura, Paul, Whitney from the few days I've been traveling in Austin and from my 12 year old's coach at Scottsdale Aquatic Club -- and remixing them for my solo workouts. I figured I'd post some of these and invite any suggestions for further improvement.
Note: My fave events are the 400/500 free and the 400 IM, so I generally aim for workouts that are targeted there.
Today's workout was taken from a SCY practice I did with Longhorn Masters under Whitney a couple of weeks ago. The only real "re-mixing" I did for this was to simply do the same workout, same intervals in a SCM pool.
Reasons I liked this one:
Bangs out the yardage/meterage very efficiently -- was about 80 minutes from dive to exit for 4600 meters
Nice blend of some kick/drills with hard stuff
Nice mix of some mid-distance work blended with sprints
1200 warmup: 400 free - 200 IM kick - 400 free - 200 IM kick/drill
Main set:
4 x 400 free descend on 5:30
interspersed with 50s hard (not all out, but very strong) on 1:00
4 x 50 fly after 1st 400
3 x 50 back after 2nd 400
2 x 50 *** after 3rd 400
1 x 50 free after 4th 400
800: 200 IM kick - 200 scull - 200 IM drill - 200 IM
16 x 25: on 0:30, 4 each stroke, odds ALL OUT, evens easy
100 warmdown
I don't know about most of you, but the first thing that goes for me in my 400/500 free is my stroke count, followed quickly by my breathing pattern. I'm a bilateral breather and generally do a 2-3 count (2 left breaths, 3 strokes, 2 right breaths). As the race wears on though, that soon degenerates to a 3-3 count and by the last 100 or so, I can get into an almost random, breathe whenever I can mode. This is something I need to work on.
I knew this morning was going to be tough for me motivation-wise. I have done four days of hard 4k to 5k workouts after having swum at the Ron Johnson meet at ASU over the weekend. On top of that, I had to be in the water solo by about 4:50am to be out by 5:30am to get on with commitments for the day. (Aside, for those of you who have a Lifetime Fitness -- www.lifetimefitness.com -- near you; it can be a great investment).
I needed something simple with minimal focus points and found it last night when perusing Terry Laughlin's blog over at Total Immersion (see www.totalimmersion.net/.../How-to-Use-Test-Sets-to-Personalize-your-Training.html). Terry was the head coach of my club team way back when I was a young age grouper and coached me to my 1st junior nationals. I "re-discovered" him and began trying to apply his stroke drills to my freestyle earlier this year and have become a real fan.
Again, my only remix was to do this in SCM (another advantage of the LTF pools) and only slightly faster intervals given my compressed timeframe:
1 x 500 on 7:30
2 x 250 on 3:45
4 x 125 on 1:50
5 x 100 on 1:30
10 x 50 on 0:50 (got tired!)
My sole focus throughout was on trying to maintain my stroke count (12 strokes per lap) and my breathing pattern.
Result: Tougher than I thought ... not from a physical exhaustion standpoint, but it was much harder to keep my stroke count long as the distances got shorter. I went up to 13 strokes per lap near the end of the 2nd 250 and struggled to get it back to 12, even hitting 14 on some particularly bad laps. I'm looking forward to doing this one again at some point at a more reasonable time of day when I'm maybe not so wiped.
I ripped this one off from my college self, but adjusted it for age and income disparity.
Post-taper meet / "off-season" workout:
Increase sleep "yardage" by ~25%
got 8 hours last night!
Decrease emphasis on "nutrient quality" meal sets
man, I loved the bacon, swiss, cheeseburger I had for lunch today and the wings with ranch at dinner were quite good
Increase wine "intensity" by ~15%
upped from cheap Merlot to quality Shiraz with slight positive change to volume
Decrease daily average heart-rate via reduction in "espresso repeats"
on account of improvements in #1
I've only got 6 more days before I start back again, so I'm going to repeat this workout every day this week:)
