A long effort

Real tough session for the Swim Smooth squad down at the pool this morning. The sort of session that ends with a 1600m effort. Ouch.

The Swim Smooth Red Mist session is all about long, medium intensity efforts. This is why the session has a reputation for being so tough, but also why it is so popular among triathletes and open water swimmers. The Red Mist session is one that is built for them. That was particularly clear at the swim session this morning.

The session was a pretty tough ask even without the long piece at the end. A bunch of descending efforts working all the way down to threshold speed. Never easy when it is part of a 5000m swim set. Putting the long effort on the end was the icing on the cake.

The thing about the long effort was that the target time wasn't actually that quick. To put it in perspective the same target pace was used as a warm up earlier in the session. However, I don't think anyone in the squad would say that the final effort was an easy one. In fact a large chunk of the squad wasn't able to meet the target time.

So what made the effort so tough?

Well fatigue was a big factor without a doubt. By the time the squad got to the final effort they had already swum 3400m, as a lot of it had been pretty solid. It is easy to dismiss the impact of this prior swimming, but as somebody who has done and watched countless Red Mist sessions, I can safely say that fatigue has a real effect on these later efforts. Times that would normally be manageable quickly become impossible. Developing the mental strength to keep working even when fatigued is one of the great benefits that come from these Red Mist sessions.

The other thing that made this effort so tough was that the swimmers had no form of pace control. No tempo timers, no timing prompts, they were just swimming by feel. Swimming by feel can make it quite hard to chase a specific time, particularly when you are tired. The swimming may feel tough, but you may in fact not be moving that quickly. The lack of timing prompts also meant that pacing was critically important. There were a range of results on the swim today, and nearly every group went about the effort differently. There were those who went out hard and faded, those who held steady the whole way and those that went out steady and then came home hard. Predictably those that either paced evenly or started conservatively were the ones that ended up with the best results.

This pacing practice is the other great strength of the Swim Smooth Red Mist sessions. Obviously in most races we have no form of pacing control and so if we want to learn to pace well then we need to practice. One of the focus areas of the Red Mist sessions is giving people the opportunity to practice their pacing, over long efforts, so that when it comes to race day they know exactly what they need to do and when they need to do it.