Swimming for Hammers and Spoons

Sea temp is 20C and air at 7am this morning was about 14C- that’s wet suit territory in my book. 90%+ of people will have one on Friday I reckon, at least they did last year.

But yeah, it was a bit warm in the heated pool just now :hot_face:

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The sea temp has dropped to 19.9C & wetsuits now compulsory for the tri on Friday. Guess they don’t like it cold here. Glad I brought the thing over now. There’s a massive split in the side unfortunately which Christmas bingo wing bulges grotesquely through, will get some super glue on it

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Like a summer’s day at Skegness :laughing:

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Tri Club pool boom is broken again, last time it meant a year out of the pool, yesterday we decided to run the session. Its 16m to the boom, challenging is an understatement. Did lots of UW fly kick lengths, not necessary really in most triathlon circles, but the super series and academy trials are all pool based and for super series the older kids do 800 SCM so 31 turns and the best in class ALL have good turns. Did some 2 lengths trying to get stroke count right down, some 2 length sprints, some drills and skills. Not sure this is going to work long term

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Googled it, you mean the temporary wall set up half way to divide the pool ?

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yes most 50m pools have them in some inclination, LAC has one at the end closest to the glass wall and it slides along manually, Sheffield has 2, 1 at each end, but West Norwood is only 25m and has a wall that comes up from the floor “electronically” to split an area for lessons, its now stuck open. The last time it got stuck they shut the pool for a year!

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I think one at Leeds has the same thing

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It does, it sometimes breaks

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Ah stuck open….i was wondering how a broken boom would halt play

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speaking to a coach on weds eve who has a broken boom…never really understood why they had them on 25m pools

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So they could sub-divide the pool even further for children’s lessons or even private hire bookings to maximise income.

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yer this, one end has a raiseable floor so they can do lessons on widths with varying depths, but still seems pointless as its not like the remaining 16m means it keeps public or club sessions viable so why bother.

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yep, but…

the cost of a boom and movable floor would never pay back through parties or swimmers…

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Talking of booms, Kent Champs 800m tonight at Crawley K2. Lets ignore the fact its an hour + drive from most of Kent, that has a boom which broke today, leaving the county champs as SCM. Could be worse and luckily not in the national window but this country needs to start spending some money on facilities.

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it was ever thus…

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Making a bit of progress on the swim 1500m in <= 22m30 goal.

With the bleeper, I know that I can swim 1m40 per 100 pretty comfortably - not easy, but am in control.

Today swam at 1m35 per 100 for the whole 1500m, felt hard, I had to concentrate but knew I was going to finish the 1500m.

But 1m30 pace feels like a different beast. Longest I have managed so far is 3 x 200m off 4 minutes at that pace, and failed on the 4th.

Don’t know if I’m going to hit this goal. I guess I probably should try do more swimming at 1m30 pace or faster? But it feels grim.

(We have 2 pools on the compound, a 25m and a 20m. I’m currenty cheating and swimming in the 20m pool, it makes the maths easier & not sure the finis can beep at half-seconds which would be needed for 22.5s per length in the 25m pool)

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If you’re to hold 1:30 for 1500m, I’d guess you need to be sustaining <1:25s for sets of 100s. Building towards 8-10x200m off 4 hitting 2:55-2:59 would be a good start, but still a long way to go from there to go without that rest.

Infinite ways to skin the cat, but some easier sessions of >1500m total (continuous or broken short rest) swimming slower than 1:30 pace.

Some sessions around target pace:
Eg

  • 300s off ~5:30 at 4:25-4:30 etc.
  • 100-200-300-400-300-200-100 at <1:30 off 1:45 cycle (or 15-30-45-60s rest if you’re a pace clock luddite).

And some occasional sessions of swimming faster than 1:30 pace, eg hard 50s and 100s, maybe up towards a 200 (eg 1x200, 2x150x 3x100, 4x50 quicker than 1:25 pace). These could just be a short session of 8x50s (or 40s or 60s) added on to another session sometimes.

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Thanks for the tips and ideas :+1:

Will try those two examples, think that pyramid would break me at present but maybe could try it with a longer rest :thinking:

edit: also am thinking might try to see how far I can hold 1m30 pace for, say once every fortnight for the rest of the time we are here or until somehow hit the target. Hope not too boring if I post the results of this little experiment here.

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Yes it would if only managing 3-4x200 now. Would probably fail after first 300m
Would need to be able to do 15x100 on 2, then 8x200 off 4:00 at <3:00 first.

Then could try reducing rest to go off 1:45 or 1:40 per 100m.
Or alternate things like 4x100 2x200 X2
Or 100 200 300 X3, or 1 2 3 2 1 X2

Given you can do 1500m at 1:35 already with some in reserve, it’s not too much of a stretch to think you could do some of these sessions already hitting say 1:32 pace, even if 1:29 is a bit hard now.

That pyramid up to 400 and back would be a late stage challenge to work up towards when you’ve achieved 1:30 pace across shorter distances, and got the rest down time from 2:00 currently.

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The Finis can do 0.01 of a second, you need one of the other modes. Don’t have mine to check right now.

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