Pacing

As I may have mentioned last night, I was down at the pool yesterday.

The session I was coaching last night was a fairly standard threshold session, albeit it a tough one. A couple of 400s, 2 x 300m and then some 100s. The challenge that I put to the squad for the session was to try and pace it evenly all the way though. That meant pushing the 400s a little, but not so much that they faded away completely in the 100s. We wanted the pacing for the 100s at the end to the be same as the pacing for the 400. Fair to say there was differing levels of success in the group.

As is always the way, some of the folks headed off in the first 400m way too hard. Waaaaay too hard. Others paced that first 400 much more reasonably. It doesn't take Einstein to guess who was swimming stronger at the end.

The pacing throughout the session prompted an interesting discussion about swim pacing in races. Nothing demonstrates quite as well as doing, and what everybody saw from the session was just how damaging it can be to go out too hard. The guys who went out hard in the first 400 fell in a huge hole by the last few 100s. Any time they might have gained by going hard in the early part of the session was more than lost in those final 100s. Conversely those who started the 400 more controlled finished the session nice and strong, really pushing those last 100s.

So it is with racing.

When it comes to the swim leg of a triathlon everyone I know goes off the line hard. Your adrenaline is pumping, you're nervous and excited, the gun goes off and you hammer it. Whether you realise it or not you will nearly always be pushing hard.

While going hard off the line is pretty natural, it is important to reign that urge in fairly quickly. As the squad saw last night, it only took swimming 400m too hard to blow the last part of their session out of the water. Hammering off the beach to the first buoy could do exactly the same thing to you.

By settling into your rhythm early and finding your own pace you give yourself the best opportunity to finish the swim strong. Sure draft if the opportunity presents itself, but more importantly than finding a draft is swimming at the pace that you know is sustainable for you. If that means swimming solo for a while, so be it.

As the swimmers experienced last night, if you start off pacing well, even a little conservatively, then you allow yourself to chance swim strong all the way to the beach, really pushing the pace in the second half.

Getting this pacing right takes practice, which is exactly why sessions like the one done last night are so beneficial. It is important to spend time working out what pace is right for you so that you can swim 1.9km or 3.8km strongly and consistently and finish strongly. The guys who went out too hard last night had a tough go of it by the end of the session, but the lessons they learnt about pacing will be just as beneficial to them in the future as the physical work they did.