On New Years Day, my Master’s group, LAMVAC, hosts a 10K swim each year. I think this was the first time I actually went and swam this annual swim, although I was pretty sure I would not make it to 10K as I haven’t swam more than 1600y since Ironman CDA!
I did want to test two things, which was to see what my SPL was for a 50m length, and also practice a bit of longer distance tempo training at various tempos.
Here are my results for trying to minimize SPL for 50m:
38, 36, 37, 33, 35, 35 strokes
That was a vast improvement for my usual 50 strokes to hit the other wall of a 50m length!
After that, I did some tempo training by doing 100m laps at 1.6 seconds tempo, and then lowering my tempo by .1 seconds for each 100m thereafter until I hit .8 seconds. Definitely finding that I am limited now, because I really haven’t been training for distance in the last few months but only on refining technique. As it gets warmer, I will begin to add a longer distance swim each week just to practice long distance at various tempos. But I don’t want to turn all my workouts into distance training as I don’t have any race to train for this coming year, but rather want to focus on cementing and imprinting the right body movements for technique.