Understanding your Race

 

It's Friday which means another week of training is about to end, but ask yourself, Did I accomplish anything this week?  Did I get better?  

Last weekend as I thought about the plan this week I thought about this, we the coaches sometimes just assume and expect you to be able to swim the mid distance events but do we really prepare you to swim them.  We talk about how you need to set yourself up for success, so you should expect the same from your coaches. 

This week the swimmers from the gold and prep group spent a lot of time working on our 200 free and 200 back events.  The Gold group also started to work through the 200 breast stroke event.  The senior Prep group spent time working through our IM events.  

We worked on some stroke drills at the beginning of each set and then proceeded to longer repeats of 100's and 200's with the goal of starting out as fast as possible and maintaining that tempo and effort as long as we could with the idea that if we could  feel and recognize a certain feeling of speed we would better understand the event.

At meets coaches take a lot of time trying to get your splits to each of you for the purpose of understanding how to better swim the event at your next meet.  As for the 200 free we talked about how important it was to be fast but you also have to find that easy speed that sets you up for a good race.  We talked about the mistake of backing off that second 50 only to have a slower 3rd 50.  

We talked about how it will change with your growth an experience down the road.  We put up on the white board of what coaches look for in the splits.  For you math genius the formula looks like this (x)+(x+1.7)+(x+1.6)+(x+1.5).It looked liked this for a swimmer who had a time of 27.5 in a 50 free. (29.5+31.2+31.1+31.0).  The big thing that should stand out to you is how close the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th 50 are.  A common mistake that swimmers make is that they go out to slow and think that they can put it all into that last 50 but the problem is while you may get as good time at a young age it will not work out at the next level.

As for the 200 backstroke we talked about how it is crucial to do these four things one, is a steady head position, 2 is to have good hip rotation to generate power in the arms , 3 is to develop great underwater's

and 4 is to incorporate the spin drill to help with your tempo.  We talked about having that soft kick for the first half of your race and when you have a 75 left start building that kick into a burst for the final 50 to get home.  if you focus on negative splitting this event you should be in good shape.