My Sprint Triathlon Swim Training Plan

As for Tuesday's swim workout, I have realized that I am starting to love swimming.  In middle school, I participated on the swim team.  I hate to say I was on the actual swim team, because I was so terrible.  I later decided to take the daredevil and flexibility skills I learned from 10 years of competitive gymnastics to the diving board.   I competed as a 1 meter springboard diver on the swim team throughout high school until I was recruited to the swimming & diving team at Colby College.

Ever since I made the transition from swimmer to springboard diver, I convinced myself that I hated swimming.  After a week and a half of training for this sprint triathlon, however, I have realized that it is actually the most enjoyable part of my training...don't tell running that I'm cheating on him with swimming, though. ;-)

Despite how surprisingly easy swimming has come back to me after a 12 year hiatus, I have been absolutely clueless about how to properly train for the 0.25 mile (440 yards) swim I will have to complete in my upcoming triathlon.  As I was searching for a swim training plan on one of my favorite triathlon blogs, Meals and Miles , I came across a link to Courtney's blog, Passionate 4 Life .



I contacted Courtney , a former swimmer turned triathlete, and asked her for a couple of good swim workouts that could benefit my training.  Out of the kindness of her heart, she devised an entire 8 week swim plan for my sprint triathlon (click on the link to see her awesome post)!  And this, my friends, is why I love the blogging community soooo much!

For my Tuesday swim workout, I did an easy 4x25 yard warmup to increase my heart rate and practice the freestyle technique I learned in my swim lesson last Wednesday.  I was then advised to first find my 100 yard pace.  I used Option #1 , which was basically 4x100 freestyle with 30 second rest.  The key here was to remember my split for each set of 100 yards, and average the time over 4 sets.  My times looked like this

1st set of 100 yards:  1 min 59 seconds

2nd set of 100 yards:  2 minutes and 1 second

3rd set of 100 yards:  2 minutes and 6 seconds (hair elastic malfunction!  forgot my swim cap)

4th set of 100 yards:  2 minutes and 3 seconds.

Therefore, my average pace for 100 yards was 2:02.  Courtney advised that I round up to the nearest 5 seconds so that I can keep a steady pace, with the idea that I will get faster as my workouts progress.  This made my average 100 yard workout pace to be rounded up to 2:05.

After finding my 100 yard pace, I continued with Workout #1a from the swim plan.  Since I was already warmed up, I skipped the 200 yard warmup, and continued with the rest of the workout, which looked like this

Main Set: Repeat 1 or 2 times (I only repeated 1 time for this workout)

3 x 50's @ 1:15

3 x 100's @ 2:20

Note:  If you finish each 50 or 100 before the allotted time is up, you get to use the remaining time to rest.

1 x 200 yards @ steady pace (for time)

Cooldown:

6 x 25's @ 10 seconds rest

Alternate every other 25 yards going FAST and then easy focusing on technique.

//  TOTAL = 1300 YARDS