it was meters..

I may have been deluded, but was swimming best effort 50m repeats in 33-5s, and getting passed consistently at that pace. So I sat out for a bit to time the repeats and 59 is what I saw..

Yes, you were deluded. If you think about it, Katie Ledecky would have a hard time doing a set like that. Doing lots of 100's with 10 seconds rest at well above her race pace, would be very hard. In fact, I would presume that a set like that for Katie would be very few 100's in the 59 range, that's 14;50+ pace for a 1500meter. And that is a time that even she has not gotten close to in a big meet, about 30+ seconds off actually. And when you factor in the rest of the women field is another 30 seconds to a minute behind her, well you can see how doing those times in workout would be virtually impossible.

To keep that kind of time in perspective, only the best women in the world shaved and tapered, can hold 59 for a 200 free, from a dive, in a race.

Maybe fully doped up Sun Yang, shaved and tapered can do that workout :-)

Here is a Ledecky workout. Not a set of 100's but bottom line, she couldn't do 100's on 1:10 sub and hold sub 1:00 for very many. Maybe 3. And neither could True Sweetser who has broken 15:00 in the 1500.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go_5eROAiRg

Thus my comment that she could maybe do a "very few"... But really ridiculous to think any woman would be doing any workout even close to that one, maybe in 20 years when they break 15 for the first time..

I think that maybe Katie could do 10 of those under a minute, with a dive and on something like a 6 to 7 minute interval. But even that might be tough, a lot of lactate is going to build up on those first 3 or 4...

One other anecdote to put this to bed. Yuri (her coach) said his favorite drill for her: 30 x 100s on 1:20 all under 1:02.