15 April 2022
With apologies to Bruce
Got a wife and kid near Barrie, Jack
I went out for a swim and I had to come back...
...
Don't make no difference what nobody says
Ain't nobody likes the pool a-closin'
I had to make two attempts at my swim today because it's Good Friday, which is a public holiday here in Canada, and, for some reason, LA Fitness didn't open until 8am, instead of the normal 5am. I guess I could understand if they were just going to close the whole day for the holiday (though I would not like that), but why just open three hours later? When I showed back up at 8am, it was apparent I wasn't the only one who found this confusing as 3 of the 5 swimmers in our three lane pool were also complaining. I didn't let this ruin my Heart Rate test set day, though!
On my standard warmup, I felt pretty good on the descending efforts:
100s free - 1:10+, 1:09+, 1:08+, 1:05+ (a little slow to get going)
100s IM kick on back - 1:28, 1:26, 1:25, 1:21
50s build IM order - 29+, 33, 38+, 29+
That's the first time in awhile that I've seen a sub-30, 50 fly.
Today was a test set day, a repeat of Dave Salo's "Pulse Plot" test set. I've described this elsewhere, but here's a clear explanation of this from Peter Hill, a coach out of Belfast who has a nifty You Tube channel, "Water We Doing"
I like to compare my performance either to recent tests, or to times when I know I was in most excellent shape. I have been doing and tracking this since back to 2010, so I have lots of good comparators. My results today in green are compared to:
Red was about a week before Masters Nationals in 2012 when I was 45
Blue was about a week before Masters Nationals in 2016 when I was 49
I had great performances at both of those meets, the main difference being that, in the 2015-2016 SCM/SCY season, I was focused on training for the 800/1000 and 1500/1650. As your fitness improves, the line moves down and to the right, so these lines "line up" intuitively with what kind of shape I was in at each time period:
I'll aim to repeat this test again in two and four more weeks, hoping to see more movement towards my younger self ;)
To push myself to 4,000 yards, I finished up with a speed set, done as follows:
4 x "100" on 1:40, 25 FAST stroke IM order, 75 easy
1 x 50: on 1:40 scull easy
4 x "75" on 1:20, 25 FAST stroke IM order, 50 easy
1 x 50: on 1:40 scull easy
4 x "50" on 1:00, 25 FAST stroke IM order, 25 easy
1 x 50: on 2:00 scull easy
4 x 25 on 0:40, FAST stroke IM order
6 x 50: active recovery on 0:40, 0:45, 0:50, 0:55, 1:00
I very consistent on these going 14s on my fly, 14+/15 on back, 17+/18 on breast and 13s on free.
As hungry as my heart was for air throughout this workout, the other encouraging heart rate note was this: my max heart rate was 154 on the 8 x 100 Test Set and on the 25s, as measured by my Garmin Swim 2 watch. As I was really blasting the 25s, that gives me some measure of satisfaction that my "100% effort" on the 100s was truly that.
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