In July we saw two tragedies in our area during triathlons only one week apart. First there was the death of a 32-year-old man in the New York City Triathlon on July 20. The following week 52-year-old John Hobgood of Princeton Junction, N.J., died in the New Jersey State Triathlon.
Slow, intermediate or fast – fitness lapper or Ironman, this article will help your swimming. My objective is to get you to concentrate on the three most important day-to-day aspects of swim training: having a workout to follow, understanding training theory and a tech tip to concentrate on.To start, you must watch the clock, know your times and your send-off intervals. From the first to the last lap of any workout, you should be tracking your swim times. Then do one even better: predict your time, even when you are going easy in the warm up. What you are in effect doing is increasing your feel and awareness of yourself and the water and getting an incredible jump up on the sport.
START: Three easy 50s (50 percent effort), 20 seconds rest. Track your times and try to get good enough to predict within one second of your time.
DRILL: Three more 50s doing your favorite drills. Even on the drill swims, GET YOUR TIMES, predict your times.
HARDER: Take a minute extra rest and do three 100s with 70 percent effort and again, predict your times on each 100 and get good enough that you are within four seconds. When you can do that you are increasing your swim smarts.
HARDEST: Let’s double that! Three 200s with 90 percent effort. Try to predict your times within 10 seconds. When you can get within five seconds doing a 200, you will be an elite swimmer.
CONCENTRATE: Your times should be even and well paced so that all three distances within each set are the same speed. Don’t go too fast on the first one or you’ll crash and burn. Now do an easy 50 and you are up to 1,000 yards. Great! Now, depending on your stamina –
COME BACK DOWN: In reverse order, go 100 percent all the way: 200s, 100s, 50s. Even at all-out effort, predict your times and pace yourself evenly.
At SCAQ we have some tough workouts (but space and lanes for beginners too), but the second-most difficult one is our Sunday morning Ironman 2 1/3-hours mega monster (next month: the most difficult). This is by special invite only. It starts with doing the first thousand in the beginner’s workout (above) as the warm up.
THEN: 100, 200, 400 and 600 with 30 seconds rest in between. As the distances lengthen, the swim times get faster. In other words, the 600 is faster on average than the 100!
REPEAT: Two times with a minute rest in between. Before each round I ask the swimmers to predict their next round’s times.
KICK: An entire round with fins. I love fins! And lots of kicking even for the triathletes that wear ocean wetsuits and hardly kick in their races.
ONE MORE UP: After some extra rest, one last round going uphill finishing with the 600.
AND FINALLY ONE LAST DOWN: 600, 400, 200, 100 hard all the way! Now that’s a workout! An easy 200 and you have done 9,000 yards!
What is the single most important technical thing a new swimmer can do? I would have to say it is learn to relax, and apply pressure at the same time. It is what separates the mortals from the immortals in swimming. It is the ability to conserve your energy and then focalize your energy expenditure on what you have to do. (Hint: move the water molecules backward!) That is why great swimmers seem to glide so effortlessly. Trust me, they are not doing it effortlessly. It is just that what you see is resting and gliding recovery to conserve for the only effort necessary: grabbing and pushing those molecules backward.
“Thumbs, all thumbs”. In the forward crawl (freestyle) stroke cycle you want to have the thumb down, thumb long, thumb barreling, thumb out, thumb flat and thumb following. I will start with thumb down at the start of the stroke. That is when your hand enters the water (at least six to eight inches in front of your ear). Your thumb should be tilted downward. That means the palm of your hand faces outward away from the centerline of the body. The reason for this is that you slice into the water using this tilted hand position, you are more streamlined, you’ll avoid over reaching, have your elbow facing up in a more relaxed position, tend toward a longer glide and will be less likely to lead with your elbow underwater.
For the other five thumb positions, come to a SCAQ workout or wait for subsequent articles. Check us out at www.SWIM.net or call 310-390-5700. Email me your swim questions.
POOLSIDE GUIDE
BEGINNER’S WORKOUT
3x50; 3x100; 3x200, 20 seconds rest in between – repeat – follow directions in above article.
ADVANCED IRONMAN WORKOUT
One round of above for warm up
100, 200, 400, 600 three times
One extra round of kicking
Extra rest and another round of kicking
One more round, and finally –
Coming down: 600, 400, 200, 100
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Recent deaths make people wonder if they should keep running. 
