Over the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to improve my swimming endurance. At each triathlon, I usually would make it about 100m before I was gasping for air and switched to side stroke or breast stroke…for the rest of the race. Ugh. In previous years I tried to meet with a swim coach or follow regimented workouts that included drills and speedwork but it just didn’t work for me. So this time I made a plan for myself to swim twice a week and slowly build endurance. Instead of focusing on swimming quickly, I decided that the only rule I had to follow was that I wasn’t going to get to stop and take breaks. I started with 8 sets of 75m freestyle, 25m side stroke or breast stroke. That way I could focus on just swimming 75m before I got a short (active) rest and it allowed me to control the length of the rest more accurately. Each workout I increase the freestyle distance or number of sets. Recently I did 1200m total with 8 sets of 125m freestyle, 25m active rest. After the workout I was remember what all went on in my head during this swim and thought you guys might enjoy what 1200m feels like to me…
