Main Set Thursday - How Far Can You Go?

The title of this may get you thinking it's something other than what it is... read on.

As I explained at practice today, this can either be a very easy practice, or one of the toughest.  Depends how far you can... well... go.  It's a very simple set in explanation, but the group dynamics will be tested greatly.  The drill that was sent out prior to this practice was MATH. 

Get ready to add - Main Set (short course yards)
 - Each lane will have a time to start with, our fastest lane started with :50 seconds for 50 yards.  All they had to do was to start with the first 50 on the :50, then subtract :02 seconds for the interval on each 50 after that.  So the intervals for the 50's would be as follows:
   - :50 :48 :46 :44 :42 :40 :38 :36 :34 :32 :30 (as far as you can go)
 - 200 kick relax and recover.

At this point, realizing just how tough this is, not just to swim your last 100 as a 1:06 negative split... or 1:02 if you're faster than us (or more), it's the math that's the killer.  To turn this into a "teaching moment", we regrouped.  When we did these sets long ago, it wasn't enough to just follow the leader and hope they got it all correctly, the 2nd and 3rd swimmer had to help.  Each time they got to the wall, they'd say what the leader was supposed to leave on.  It's called teamwork, and helping each other... or, two minds are better than one.  When the times get further down, it gets easier mentally to figure, but tougher physically.  That's what I love about sets like this... there's no turning off your mind or your body.

For those swimmers who thought the first few 50's were just too easy, one option was to start off swimming stroke until you were unable to make the interval anymore, then switch to freestyle for the last few.

We repeated the set again... much more successfully I must say.

Final part of the set -- reverse it:
 - 6 x 50 on the following intervals
  - :32  :34  :36  :38  :40  :42

This works well as a sort of warm down.

Heads should be realing after this, but it should also be challenging physically.  Enjoy.