Speed sets kicking my a$$

A week ago, I received the newest issue of Swimmer in the mail. There was a fun little article about developing a sense of pace and getting better at negative splitting long sets. With only five weeks left until the Great Salt Lake swim, I figured it's probably time to work on my speed a little more, now that my distances are on the rise. Doing one mile is no sweat now. I'm actually almost back up to three miles again. But I want to smash my time from last year's GSL 1-mile swim, so I'm going to focus on speed a little more, at least for the next month or so.

The newest edition of Swimmer.

A few days ago, Gordon blogged about Brandon Slaugh, who won the GSL swim with a time of 26:17 last year. That's pretty dang fast and the dude did it backstroking the whole way. I finished in 33:39 (13th out of 23, and 8th out of 15 non-wet suit swimmers). I'd love to be able to get around 28 minutes this time, perhaps finishing in the top 10 overall and top 5 in the non-wet suit category..

Warm up
200 free
Core
10 x 100 free (on 1:30, rest 20 seconds)
4 x 200 free (on 3:15, rest 20 seconds)
250 sprint
Cool down
300 breast and free (alternating every 50)

The sets were seriously tough. There's a huge difference between being able to go long distances at a leisurely pace and being able to do those same long distances quick and getting faster as you go. Today was a big wake-up call. Just the 100 free sets were difficult to keep my time. Twice I ascending to 1:31, which isn't good, but once I descended down to 2:49. I kept the rest of them consistent, though. However, I was able to negative split the 200s, doing 3:16, 3:15, 3:15 and 3:13. Still, that's only 1800 yards (about a mile) and I had 20-second breathers between them. I need to be able to drop those times a bit and slowly eliminate the breathers.

Total distance: 2,550 yards