I’ll be doing IMFL this November, and due to hectic personal and work schedules from now until the race, it looks like I’m going to be able to swim only 1X, maybe 2X per week until the race. (1st time in 3 months this morning, 1,500m that, while not tiring, did feel like I had worked). At this point, my plan is to try and train to survive the swim.
My plan is simple - 100m repeats on 2:00 with :30 of recovery, adding distance until the race. Nothing fancy. I did an open water 2,000m at Lake Placid this summer, and felt good coming out, so I want to build on the swim-specific muscle toning. My aerobic base is good, as the B/R are going fairly well.
Three questions:
Is this the best use of my limited pool time? Should I be doing something different, IYOs?
Is there anything that I could do to supplement the pool workouts (push-ups, dips, etc) I don’t have access to a gym.
30 seconds of recovery per 100 is way, way too much for aerobic swim training. That’s how much rest you’re taking when you’re trying to do fast repeats. General rule of thumb is about 10 seconds of rest per 100 for aerobic swim sets.
Figuring in a little bit of slowing down of pace, go with 100s on a 2:15 fixed interval. If you start making 20 of them easily with more than 10 seconds of rest, drop the interval down to 2:10, rinse repeat, all that good stuff.
For dryland, someone else here can probably explain bands to you.
You are not going to die. If you’re smart, you aren’t even going to feel like you’re going to die.
For distance work, light rest 300s and 400s work better in most cases than 500/800/1000 because most people can hold a slightly faster pace at slightly better technique over the course of the sets. During my time in the D-lane, we’d do a 1000 or 800 set maybe twice in six months, and a 500s set maybe once a month tops.