I don’t usually write about specific workouts here on my blog. Maybe that’s because I have a training journal that I document everything I do on Jogg.se. Since the fall of 2018 our Masters group has been greatly improved by the presence of a former Syrian distance swim coach Nidal. During his first fall session with us he was there to help our newer swimmers with their technique. Watching everyone in the pull and offering tips on how they could improve their technique. That kind of one on one feedback was greatly appreciated. Then I am not sure how it happened, but with all my traveling in 2019 he took the initiative to offer our distance swimmers a distance workout on wedensdays as an option to the sprint workouts I was writing. With only three lanes, that group swam in lane 1. Up until 2019 we rarely swam anything over 400m at practice, and when we swam what I thought were hard series it was usually base pace for the shorter series and base pace +5 for the longer series.

For example
20x 100
1-5 st1:35
6-10 st 1:30
11-15 st 1:25
16-20 st 1:20 (see how many you can make)

Nidal had a very very different view on what a hard series should be, and maybe after watching us swim for 4 months he saw a pontential in us, that I had not seen. He has no problem asking us to swim 15×100 st 1.25. His practices usually run between 5300-6000m in 90 minutes.

Since I was not able to swim consistantly in 2019 it took me until Jan 2020 for me to even attempt to join that lane. I was happy in my little sprint world with 60 minuets on wednesday’s.

I do not have a clue on how tough 2019 training was, but I do remember him asking Hampus to start at 18:00 instead of 20:00 so that he would have time to swim 6x 1500 with 5 minutes rest. What I do know is that we are 3-5 swimmers each Wednesday that swim sets that for 2 years ago we would have consider a test series, or we would have adjusted the start times during practice. But not in 2020! We might not be the fastest Masters team, but on Wednesday we work just as hard as the teenagers do in the practice before, if not harder.

Last night is a perfect example of being pushed and us swimmers responding:
600 choice
30x 50 swim a3 st :45 (my practices have been start :50-1:00 and based on who is there we pick a time that works that day)
50 easy
2x 400 swim a2 st 6:00 (unusually slow start intervall for Wednesdays, usually we do these on 5:40-5:45)
1500 pull for time
200 easy

When you have a coach standing over you calling out your times, you don’t want to dissappoint. Right now I am nursing shoulder injuries from my 42km swim, so it makes swimming at a fast tempo with little rest difficult. I lost a lot of speed in the fall, but these Wednesday Lane 1 practices are trully the best workout of the week.

Last night I swam the 50’s with fins to save my shoulders, but was able to manage a 20:05 in the 1500m with my new paddles from TYR.

Splits from the 1500m I got lapped twice by Hampus and you can see when. My times jumped up to 1:24 and 1:26 when I let him pass on the turn.

Ryan – Pär – Hampus