No Novelty

There, all done for the year. Well more or less anyway.

Coaching is complete for the year, other than writing a few programs over the weekend, there are no more sessions to run. I have a couple of days of work next week, but other than that, from now until New Years is a gentle slide of relaxation.

That slide into relaxation wasn't so apparent at the Swim Smooth session this morning. Paul had concocted a fairly tough end to the year for the squad and it really put everyone through the ringer. Talk about finishing the year off with a bang. I suspect a lot of people had been hoping for a bit of an easy novelty session, perhaps some relays or that sort of thing. There were more than a couple of groans when we told the squad what the session was. But still, I suspect the group at Swim Smooth also would have groaned if we had made the session too easy. The guys at Swim Smooth come there for a reason, and that is to get quicker, they might moan and groan, but deep down they are always up for the challenge. And that is what they got.

For the session this morning Paul had pulled out the classic Goldilocks session. The Goldilocks is one of my least favourite threshold sessions to swim, but I have to say it is an interesting one to coach. The session is made up of a 200m, 300, and 400m threshold effort, all separated by sets of 100s. It is a very hard session. For extra spice today the last 400m was done as a timed effort, just to see what people had left in the tank at the end of the set. All up it was impressive just what was left.

The interesting part of watching Goldilocks is seeing the pacing of the session unfold. Really for Goldilocks to work it has to be paced very well. Even with good pacing it is difficult, but with poor pacing it becomes impossible. If people go too hard in the early efforts then the 300m and 400m efforts just become implosions. It is very common to watch people smash through the 100s and the 200 only to explode in a spectacular fountain of fatigue later in the session. We certainly saw a few fountains this morning.

However, what we also saw this morning was some squad members absolutely nail the final 400m time trial. What was even more impressive is that some of these squad members had really suffered during the set, struggling with the target times during the 300m effort in particular. However, once we reached that final 400m and the squad was given the  license to swim as hard as they could some squad members seemed to switch gear and really get back on with it, delivering impressive 400m times. They were great performances.

Still, I suspect would probably still have preferred the novelty relays instead.