Last night I swam intervals for the first time ever. I didn’t know how fast to do them, so I pretty much swam all-out. The 100s called for 1:00 rest between each set, and the 200s called for 2:00 rest. I needed all of those minutes to recover, but my splits times were consistent so I don’t think I was going too hard to maintain.
8×100 – 1:38, 1:38, 1:40, 1:40, 1:40, 1:39, 1:42, 1:41
2×200 – 3:43, 3:39
I asked the question “how fast should my intervals be” on the BAFT message boards and they told me that if I was very winded at the end of each 100, but was able to recover enough in the 1:00 to do another without slowing down, then I was doing it right. So apparently more or less sprinting is what I needed to do. During each rest period I had to take some deep breaths to get recovered, but I was able to maintain the same pace for each set. My form started to get pretty sloppy at the end though. Next time I’ll concentrate on that more.
That’s the hardest I’ve worked in a pool since, well, probably since I was on swim team as a teenager. While preparing for all my triathlons over the years, I never tried to swim particularly fast — I just tried to swim long. For the Half Ironman, I was much more concerned with distance than with speed, so I swam easy and long.
I wonder if swim intervals make you faster like run intervals do? I guess I’ll find out.