Lately I have been pretty tired in the pool and my times are off from where they were 4 or 5 weeks ago. A little background on myself – started “serious” swim training back in September. At that time I couldn’t swim more than 200 yards without needing to stop for a break. Put in a decent amount of work over the winter and have done a 2100 scy TT in 31:30. I’m currently training for the Spirit of Racine ½ IM, my first, and am swimming, biking, and running, 4 times a week each. I’m currently in week 8 of a 20 week plan. In the first 4 weeks of the plan I was doing 4 tough swims a week, something like 6 x 400 on 6:10, 8x300 on 4:40, 15x100 on 1:30, and 12x200 on 3:10. I began to realize that that was a bit too much intensity and I decided on 3 higher intensity swims a week and a long easy swim. This week is the second week of a 3 week on/1 week recovery cycle and I’m already tired in the pool. This morning was a planned 8x300 on 4:40 and by number 4 I wasn’t even making the 4:40. Last week I did this workout and came in on an average of 4:17-18. Obviously I’m a bit overreached in the pool. My question is how do I handle this? I’m thinking the best approach might be a 3 hard, 1 easy/2 hard, 2 easy/2 hard, 2 easy/4 easy. Is this a good idea? Last week I swam 14,400 yards, the most I’ve swam in a week. I feel like I can handle that volume, but that I need to scale back the intensity. I’m just not sure how to do that. I would appreciate anyone’s thoughts. Thanks.
This is coming from a slow swimmer–my mile time in a race is probably about 30min., but it seems to me that you are working quite hard out there and getting a lot of mileage in in the pool. I may come from the Total Immersion school of thought, but they say form and efficiency is important over distance. When you think about it, you only spend 20% or less of your time in a race swimming. So calculate how much training time you are spending in the pool versus bike or run. You are going to gain more on the bike and run by spending time there. Also, you are early in your 20 week plan and should still be doing base work, not speed work. Seems to me you are doing speed work…Base work should be 60%-70% of max HR–are you training in that zone when doing these sets? I doubt it. I would knock myself back down to base and get rid of the speed work until weeks 12-16…Think LSD–long slow distance and good form. But that’s just me and what my coach advised me, I could be wrong.
Check resting HR, have 3-4 days off, and start back progressively. If you’ve overcooked it you need to get yourself out of the hole. Recovery is everything and if you’re swimming HARD more than three times a week and you’re not a Pro you’re doing too much.
Do you have a rest day built in to your weekly schedule? How about a rest week built into your monthly schedule?
You may not need cut back your average intensity, but you could be burning out because you are training a ton in all three disciplines at the same. Your fatigue during swimming may not be just from the swimming, but it may be more evident there because you have more specific benchmarks to aim for and when tired your technique can suffer in swimming more than in biking/running.
The three weeks on/one week recovery that you have planned looks good, but you may consider focusing on a different discipline each of your on weeks so you can really get a lot out of that discipline in that week but the other two are more in maintenance mode. Some people find that even with a recovery week they start breaking down if they are going hard in all three disciplines for all three weeks.
Well, if you think you’ve overreached, the short term thing to do is take it easy for your next few swim workouts - basically take a recovery week. Don’t look at the pace clock at all. Swim short and easy, not long and easy, e.g. swim a lot of easy 50s or 100s with 10sec rest. Mix in some drills and stroke work such as swimming with closed fists. Swim the other strokes, too - fly can be pretty instense but back and breast give your freestyle muscles a nice break.