Seconds Count

Wednesday means a morning spent down at Claremont Pool on the deck with Paul Newsome and the Swim Smooth squad for a little bit of Red Mist.

The session today was a lesson in perception and deception. Making a session look easy, but feel hard.

The look easy bit came because the set contained nothing longer than 600m. While 600m sounds long it is actually quite short for Red Mist which can contain distances up to 1200m or even 1500m. Sweet the swimmers think when they see such short efforts, easy Red Mist today. Oh how wrong they are.

While shorter efforts may seem easier on paper, it really comes down to how much recovery you give yourself between those efforts. A series of 9 x 200m for instance can be quite easy, or really very painful. That set was the warm up today and over the course of the 9 efforts they graduated from quite easy to quite hard simply because the amount of rest decreased. Over the set the amount of rest decreased from a leisurely 20 seconds rest per 200m down to a rather more painful 5 or 6 seconds rest per 200m. The impact of this decrease on the difficulty of the effort was remarkable. Without making swimmers go any quicker the set went from warm up intensity to just this side of flat out.

Such is the power of that recovery period, or rather the power of not having that recovery period. As Paul explained it, the session may look easier because the intervals are shorter, but with such short rest, in effect it is like doing the set as a continuous swim.

It is this reason that a good session should pay just as much attention to recovery times as it does to swim set distance and intensity. Doing 15 x 100m flat out with 60 seconds recovery in between is going to feel very different to 15 x 100m done at your threshold but with only 10 seconds rest in between. Both sets are going to be hard, and both sets are going to be beneficial, but the first is probably going to be more effective for a shorter distance pool swimmer and the second set is probably going to be more useful for an Ironman triathlete.

The importance of recovery periods is also why we need to be honest with ourselves when it comes to recovery times. If a session calls for 10 seconds rest between sets, then we alter the effectiveness of the session significantly if we push this rest out to 30 seconds. We might feel good with ourselves because all of a sudden we can hold the target pace, but the reality is that we are recovering much more between efforts and so the session is not really doing what it is intended to do.

Manipulating the amount of rest (down to the second) to get just the right impact on the swimmers is something that Paul is a master at and something that is impressive to watch. Although perhaps not so much fun to watch from within the pool...