Sunday, December 12, 2010

Holy Swim Sprints, Batman!

Sunday afternoon swims are a highlight of the winter off season for me.  My swim buddies Kyla, Carrie, and Brent have a standing weekly swim meet up on Sunday afternoons at their corporate fitness center.  I go as a guest and figure the guest fee is well worth the intense workout!

Today we started with a 400yd warmup, 300yds of drills, and 200yds of kick.  The drills are done as 75yd per stroke.  Brent and Kyla are swimmers that also do triathlons so they don't stand for any of this steady swimming of free style as a workout stuff that most triathletes do! Carrie is an awesome swimmer who has a collection of tough workouts that she shares with us. 

The first main set of the workout was a 1000yd ladder.  The ladder went like this: 25, 50, 75, 100, 150, 200, 150, 100, 75, 50, 25.  For the shorter steps the rest time was around 10 sec. The longer ladder steps of the 150-200s got 30 sec rest.  I'm a little slower than the others so sometimes I have to shorten the workout to not fall too far behind.  I only shortened one of the ladder steps and instead of doing the 200, did a 150.  We did a bunch of different strokes during the ladder...I managed the first 25yd with butterfly but that was all the butterfly for me.  We all finished and took a short rest break before starting the second main set.

The second main set was 12 x 25 on the 1 minute.  The trick was that the 25's were done with dive starts and were crazy fast sprints.  I'm not comfortable diving off the blocks so I just did my dives from the pool deck.  I also didn't feel comfortable with shallow dives so I just did a wall push for those starts.  Our group was hitting the wall around 18-20 seconds for each sprint.  Let me tell you, I needed all that rest to get ready for the next sprint! These were a tough finish to the workout especially since we were trying to minimize the number of breaths during each sprint.  The goal was no breath but I'm not there yet!  These sprints definitely had my heart rate up super high.

We finished up with a short cooldown.  Typically we close out our Sunday swims with hot tub time but Kyla and I both had things to do after and we couldn't stick around. 

I'm so lucky to have such talented friends that let me join in their workouts.  Sometimes their pace is more than I can handle but I try to hang on for as long as possible.  I have improved so much in the last year in both speed and form because of these great swim buddies and their workouts. 

2 comments:

  1. The swim portion of tri's have kept me from not entering one. That part freaks me out!

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  2. That sounds like a great swim meet up! I wish I had something like that here!

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