13 January 2025
I cannot enter a year without setting some goals for my swimming. Not every year's goals are about times and racing. For example, in 2024, my major goal was to train enough to complete my longest ever open water swim, which I accomplished through the brutal Winderemere Chillswim.
But, 2025 will be about racing and, quite particularly, about putting together a good (maybe great) 400 meter freestyle, be it in either short course or long course meters. I honestly feel like I haven't swum a good race in this event since 2016 (and my last "almost perfect" race was in 2009). Given that we do a fair amount of freestyle training at the Barnet Copthall Masters club and that I have excellent lanemates to train with, this should be fun to target.
After a hard workout on Sunday evening with the team, I was back at the London Olympic pool this morning for a solo test set:
After some standard warmup sets to get to 1,500 meters, the focus set was supposed to be 4 rounds of:
8 x 50: on 0:55 at target race pace
4 x 50: on 0:55, 1:00, 1:05, 1:30 (or so) active recovery
As my most recent time racing the 400 long course was 4:44.44 (yes, exactly that) back at the 2022 USMS Nationals, I had set my target race pace at 35.0/50, to add up to a 4:40. For anyone trying this set at home, set your interval by adding 20 seconds to your target race pace. Then, use a similar approach to the active recovery (e.g., start at the same interval, then add time to each subsequent repeat to give more rest).
My added-up 400 times (using my FINIS Smart Goggles for timing) were:
4:43.0
4:40.6
4:52.3
You will notice two things about this. First, the wheels fell off the bus on the third round. Second, there wasn't a fourth round! I was a hurting unit and couldn't muster the enthusiasm to go at it again.
I'm going to try to repeat this set every four weeks or so. Over time, as I start to accomplish my goals consistently with 50s, I'll mix this up by adding some 100s in the pattern (e.g., 2 x 50 - 1 x 100 - 2 x 50 - 1 x 100) ... but this established a good baseline, and showed some success.
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