EFFORT LEVEL

What an interesting Monday we had, first with the prep group in the morning followed by the gold group in the afternoon. The past couple of Monday’s we have been doing a cycle set for a couple of reason, first as part of our training and the second to help you understand how to train hard and race fast.

Often there are times that we tend to believe we are doing things correctly when in fact we are missing something that we are unaware of.

We discussed our effort level at both the morning and afternoon workouts and tried to explain our chart of A1 to A5. A5 is race speed and it drops off as you go down with A2 being warmup and warm down. A3 are normally recovery swims.

Now unless you are watching the clock on the A4-A5 and getting your times you are just lap swimming and you may or may not improve.  Your choice but keep that thought when you come up short at the next meet.  Coach Shannon drew up a chart for you to help better understand this concept

For the coaches it’s frustrating when we are trying to swim at A5 and hold it and you guys have no clue what your coming in on.   Furthermore some are way off their best times or they are not very consistent and their times look like the clock above.   YOU NEED TO TAKE OWNERSHIP OF YOUR TRAINING AND RACES.  Don’t be the one that waits until a week out from the big meet and try to get serious.  As an athlete as you progress through the levels, you need to become more focus in your training approach, nutritional habits and yes it takes sacrifice.  How bad do you really want it?  Stop and think about it and be honest with yourself.  Saying it doesn’t make it so. 

FEBRUARY QUALIFYING MEETS

The two meets that are approaching will be our last chances to qualify for the championship meets.  The first one is the Snow Meet which is a one day meet.  The second meet is the Presidents meet which will have finals on Saturday. When choosing events let’s have a plan in place.  The events you should be looking at are the ones that give you the best chance of achieving qualifying times.  These times are posted on the Potomac Valley web site.  When looking at these events consider where they fall in the meet.  There are times that swimmers are entered back to back to back events with no recovery time in an effort to get out quickly.  Not the smartest way to pick events when trying to be successful, you can’t have it both ways.

If you have all your qualifying times already use one of these meets to swim off events or distances to get some racing in and to better times in those events.

As for suits we will wear them only if we are trying to achieve cuts.  To wear a suit is a decision for the coaches and swimmers to make period.

BEST EVENTS

How often should I swim them?  Every meet? Once in a while?  😵help me coach I’m confused!
Here is an example and for our purposes we use two swimmers Courtney and Lauren who are both 10. There friends see them playing in the pool one afternoon and encourage them to join the swim team.  There is a swim meet that Saturday that is open to anyone so the girls decided that this might be fun so they make plans to attend.  They really like backstroke and so they enter the 50 back and get a time of 55.00.  The next week they swim the event again and get a 49.00.

 They like the event so much that for the next 5 weeks they keep swimming it and their time improves to a 37.00. The seventh week brought out the tear drops as their time in the event jumped back to 40 and the girls were devastated and now thought that they were bad swimmers.

What the girls did not grasp and what was not explained to them is that the stop watch starts at 0 and the more you improve and get near that 0 the harder it becomes. Also while only racing in the same event the girls were not experiencing or growing in the other events the sport has to offer.   Sometimes it is better to take a break practice your technique, work on the little things, get stronger and then swim the event rested and fresh and see how truly amazing and gratifying this sport can be if approached correctly