These practices are written for the competitive USMS swimmers that meet at the Swim Atlanta pool in Roswell at noon.
If you feel you're not in the shape that you once were, come anyway. If you can't make every practice, that's fine. If you have to come late or get out early, that's fine. If you don't want to compete, then you are in the majority because most don't. If you can make every entire practice and you do want to compete, that's great too.
Not all of the swimmers do the intervals listed below. They scale the intervals or repeats as needed.
Come join us! Contact aaron@swimatlanta.com or (770) 992-7946 or send me a private message.
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Some examples of common acronyms that will be used:
KDS: Kick drill swim
300 IM KDS: 4 times through in IM order (25 kick, 25 drill, 25 swim)
1000 SKIPS: 200 Swim, 200 Kick, 200 IM, 200 Pull, 200 Swim
1000 SKIDS: 200 Swim, 200 Kick, 200 IM, 200 Drill, 200 Swim
IMO by round: The stroke for first round of a set should be fly, second round should be back, etc
RIM or RIMO: Reverse IM or Reverse IM order
FRIM: IM except replace the fly with free
UW: underwater
BC4: Breathe every 4
CH: Choice
Str: Stroke. Usually not intended to be freestyle.
V-Sprint: #1 as fast/easy, #2 as easy/fast, #3 as easy, #4 as fast
- These are notes on my own performance. For example, means I went :28
Each post consists of the practices for an entire week.
Note that extra spacing between portions of the practice indicates that we took a break. For example, the following would indicate taking an unspecified amount of rest after the first 5 100's on 1:20 before moving on to the next 5 100's on 1:15.
5x100 1:20
5x100 1:15
Whereas, the lack of extra spacing in the following example means that we swam everything straight through with no break after the first 5 100's.
5x100 1:20
5x100 1:15
But sometimes I might designate rest between portions as follows:
5x100 1:20
:60 rest
5x100 1:15
The exception is warmup. The warmup set almost always consists of 1000 yards or meters but I group all of the parts of the warmup together even though we might (or might not) take unspecified rest between each portion. For example:
400 Swim
300 IM KDS
200 Pull
100 Kick
If you reference my performances (designated by square brackets), note that I am a relatively slow kicker and that my best races are 50, 100, & 200 Freestyle and 50 & 100 Fly.
The plan for 2019-2020 is...
Aug-December: Training for early December shave/taper SCY meet
December-March: TBD
March-July: Training oriented toward an end-of-summer LCM shave/taper meet.
Only swim practices are specified here: any supplementary strength & conditioning activities will not be included in this thread.
SCY Taper: Best swims...
100 FLY: 54.12
100 IM: 55.52
50 FR: 22.20
100 FR: 49.96
50 FLY: 24.61
I was very disappointed in the 100 FR. I was just not pulling any water.
In the 50 FR I wanted to go 21.99 but 22.20 beats my prior best of 22.23 from 19 years ago. So I cannot complain about that! However, 19 years ago in that same meet I could also go 1:48 in the 200, just under 5:00 in the 500, and hold :31 per 50 in the 1650. I have no illusions of ever breaking any all-time PRs in the 500 or 1650.
The 100 IM was great. It was over a full second off my prior best from March 2019 and 2 seconds better than they year prior. I need to go back and compare the videos of these 3 races to see where I saved so much time.
Overall, the story of the meet was details, details, details. Same as always. I rarely practice starts and so of course it shows when it comes to competition. I'm lazy at practice with turns. I breathe in and out of walls. I don't work enough on underwaters. I don't kick enough and fast enough. I don't count my strokes and I get sloppy.
This season (Aug-Dec) was weird. I stopped swimming for a 1.5 weeks in the middle of September and then decided that I wouldn't compete anymore but I would still stay in shape. In the last week of October, the deadline was approaching for a local USA meet that a USMS friend had entered; I felt some measure of peer pressure to swim in the meet so that he wouldn't be the only USMS swimmer there. I watched a video of my 50 FR LCM race from this summer which made me want to race again, and so I figured I'd give it a shot and see where I was. I ended up swimming every event almost exactly as well (with one exception) as the year prior which was encouraging. So that gave me about 5 weeks to get ready for my taper meet.
The next weekend was a USMS SCM meet. In comparison to my prior SCM meets, it was horrendous. I was somewhat discouraged but I forgot about it and moved on.
I'm glad I competed.
