Our main club coach has 4 guide paces. Fast, tempo, cruise and slow. He specifically uses slow instead of easy, as he thinks people associate “easy” with sloppy swimming, whereas as H indicates above, when he says slow he almost wants even better form as you have loads of time per stroke to focus on technique. Slow swimming is some of the most demanding in a session.
Anyway, slow would be easily 5-10s/100 slower than cruise. Cruise is in the range of 70.3-full distance pace. Tempo is more what you’d hold for a 1k effort (maybe 1500 if fully conditioned) and he’d expect that to be at least 5s/100 faster than cruise. And fast is what it says on the tin, and again, should be 5-10s/100 faster than tempo.
Before I got my recent wrist injury, I was just getting back into some decent shape. I was doing high teens per 100 on fast 100s, my tempo pace was high 20s, cruise low 30s and slow in the 1:40 range. So that’s a good 20-25s difference across the various paces.
I’ll caveat that those paces were helped by the draft effect as I only occasionally led the lane. Solo, I’d got back to doing a 1500 in under 24mins, so 1:36/100 pace.
Few was the wrong word, yes 5-10s for me but it varies depending on the day and the swimmer . I wanted to convey that it wasn’t a huge amount.
Some days a moderate perceived effort gives me 1:40, 1:45 or 1:50. Easy, perceived, can be a few seconds off that if my form is good or ship out to 2:00/100.
So I also want to convey that when you’re training by perceived effort don’t aim for a pace, aim for an effort. If you have a coach on deck, you can ask for a technique check that might put your pace back into expected.
This is largely what we work too as well. I really enjoy the sessions that are mixed with fast and slow/easy. The fast is just balls out and the slow you can really concentrate on your stroke.
I’m in a bit of situation where I’m the fastest in the lane now but moving up one seems a big jump. I suppose I might be alright clinging onto feet
Easy is easy
CSS you can calculate, 1500 pace in theory.
Tempo, between CSS & hard. Higher stroke rate for me without pushing the effort too much & not too disimilar to 750m race pace.
Hard is hard.
Sighting, deep water starts, mass starts, no goggle mass water swimming and back stroke turn around bouys practise with the club tonight. That was a lot of fun. Cleared quite a few out of the pool though and I’ve genuinely got jaw ache from taking a solid kick to the face. But that could be race day, loved it
If I can do 5/7 stroke breathing, then it’s easy
I tend to glide and/or overreach, though.
Current form has my easy at about 1:43/100m.
Hard would be 1:24/100m.
It’s then a bit of an odd jump to 1:32/100m for something tempo-ish. Not yet under that 1:30/100m mark, which is why I’ve held off on a 400m TT
Then cruising is 1:37/100m.
Pretty pleased with what I’ve done over just 21 swims, 11hrs and 40km since April 9th
I’d like to be faster, get back to doing 4km in under and hour of moving time, but there’s a whole year to do that
Pretty bored of my own swim plans now, need to
Mix it up with some new stuff, but it takes time finding sets and printing them, learning them, etc etc
For me “easy” is currently about 2 minutes per 100 I think. That’s the sort of equivalent of jogging, could keep this going as long as needed & can happily daydream away.
Tempo - the sort of pace I can keep going for half an hour or so - seems to be about 1m40 per 100m
Think I could possibly still just about bash a 400m out in 6 minutes, but it wouldn’t be pretty, that would be a hard pace. Might give it a try next time the pool is free of NPCs
I’ve not yet gone sub 6min for a 400m, PB is 6:06 from back in October & I’ve improved a chunk since then so optimistic it’s in there just need the pool space to go for it.
