Hard lessons

You know it is a special swim set when it contains not one but two 1000m efforts. That was the delight that was presented to us this morning. A fun little session thoughtfully named Twin Peaks by coach Paul Newsome. An interesting exercise in pain and pacing.

I say both pain and pacing because whilst the session hurt, it also held some interesting lessons for the squad.

In swim training we use Finis Tempo Trainer Pros a lot. I mean every session a lot. Very handy device, so much so that I own one of my own. The Tempo Trainer allows you do to many things, one of which is to dial in a pace for you to hold. You can dial it in so that it prescribes your pace for whatever distance you like. For us we often use 25m pace, 50m and sometimes 100m pace. How it works is if you want to swim 50m in 50 seconds, you set the Tempo Trainer to 50 seconds. It will beep after 50 seconds, if you have got to the pool in this time you have been on pace. Alternatively you could set it to beep every 25 seconds and then you would get a nice little reminder of your pacing at the 25m mark. Really handy tool as the distance of your effort increases. Doing a 1000m effort it helps you pace the beginning of the effort conservatively, but it also keeps you honest once the fatigue starts to creep in. As I said, very handy.

The different aspects of the Tempo Trainer featured heavily in today's learnings.

For the first 1000m the Tempo Trainer was set to beep every 50m. A nice regular reminder of pace. Also it was set, not as a pace to hold, but on a slower pace which we were required to beat. The idea was that by the end of 1000m we should be 1 minute ahead of the beep. As well as all that we were specifically told to only be 20 seconds ahead at 500m. So the idea was to go out easy and come home harder. I have to say, all up the effort went quite well. We probably went out a little bit too hard, but managed to get 63 seconds or so ahead of the designed pace. Success.

After a fatigue adding 12 x 100m set, it was then time for the second 1000m effort, the second peak. This one was set up slightly differently. This time the Tempo Trainer was set to the same pace as we held for the first 1000m. On the surface that is fairly generous, it wasn't quicker, all we had to do was a repeat performance of the first effort. However, the psychological difference that comes with having to hold a dictated pace, rather than just having to beat a fairly relaxed pace is massive. In one you feel like you are just hanging on, whilst in the other you feel like you are king of the world, smashing this time you were given. On top of that we were now significantly more fatigued (the second effort started after 3400m), which made holding the intended pace just that little bit harder. The final trick with the second effort was that the Tempo Timer was set to only beep every 100m. A funny thing happens when the beep is set to every 100m. Suddenly you don't have much feedback on your pacing. A lot can happen in 100m. In 100m you can go out way too hard and set yourself up for fatigue and failure. In 100m you can go way too easy and get too far behind the beep that you can't make it up. Setting the beep to every 100m forces you to be very conscious of you own pacing (a bit like a race). It makes getting that pacing perfect very difficult and as such it is also a great tool to show you just how disastrous going out too hard can be, or alternatively how good it is when the pacing is right.

I think I can speak for the squad when I said some hard lessons were learnt by all. Avery solid session indeed.

Probably the last one on the program before race day.