Training plan for the 2014-2015 season

After a more or less disappointing Nationals meet last weekend (disappointing solely due to myself), I'm re-energized and ready to hit the pool hard for the fall and spring. As mentioned...uh, several times...in the previous post, I do not like long course. More to the point, though, I don't like swimming outdoors at the pools we train at during the summer. Half of them don't have flags or clocks, and some have cruddy lighting, so swimming in the evening is an exercise in futility. I'm an indoor swimmer through and through. Give me flags, a clock, and no worry of storms or losing my place in the lane, and I'm happy.

With all that in mind, I'm pretty pumped for Nationals in the spring. It's going to be in May at a brand new facility, presumably state of the art facility in San Antonio. The competition pool is an outdoor 50m pool, with the pool split into two 10 lane 25y courses (there's another, older, 50m pool and a 25y diving well inside). While it's outdoors, the lighting and signage should be just fine. I'll have to get used to swimming with mirrored goggles prior to then, though. On top of all that, there's an outside chance we can convince Alaina to go, so I'm going to try my best to get in tip top shape and drag her with me! :-D

I want to focus on two events this training cycle, the 200 fly and 200 back. As I've seen over the last two years, I can't seem to be able to find that top gear in my sprint backstroke, and to a slightly lesser degree the same for butterfly, so I'll focus on the events that don't rely on that top gear.

Training for those two 200s will also take care of their respective 100s, so I'm just going to focus on the longer distances. Successfully training to improve in those events will require significantly different training than I've done over the past 3 years. In the past, I've trained just doing Masters practices, and while they work well for general conditioning, they are really pretty terrible for competition training. Our practices are generally written for the lowest common denominator, so there isn't much competition focused training. This time around, I'm going to try and get in a good amount of competition focused training. Here's how I am currently planning to have my training schedule break down each week:

• Monday: Swim 1 hour short course on my own, focusing on technique and underwaters
• Tuesday: Swim 1.5 hours long course with age group team's senior prep group
• Wednesday: Swim 1 hour short course on my own, focusing on stroke yardage
• Thursday: Swim 1.5 hours long course with age group team's senior prep group
• Friday: Swim 2 hours short course with age group team's senior prep group
• Saturday: Swim 1 hour with Masters team
• Sunday: Rest day

Tuesday and Thursday will really serve to bring my aerobic base and endurance up--long course training kicks my behind, but will really help the back end of my 200s come San Antonio. I'll focus on stroke specific training on Monday and Wednesday on my own, focusing primarily on getting in a lot of quality stroke yardage (fly and back) and working my underwaters. Fridays will serve to get me used to high yardage workouts, which will also help the back end of my race. Saturdays will serve as a more or less recovery swim for the week.

I have three key focuses with this training plan:

1. Get my yardage base up high enough that I develop a good back end on my races. Looking at my best races from the past couple of years and comparing them to my best races back in the day, while I can take them out nearly as fast, my back end isn't even remotely close to what it used to be. Building up a high aerobic yardage base with the kids will directly impact my ability to bring races back.
2. Underwaters, underwaters, underwaters. I'm comparatively much stronger underwater than I am on the surface in backstroke, and also stronger (albeit to a lesser degree) in butterfly. Especially since I'm focusing on the 200s, that's a lot of underwater time that I can capitalize on if I can improve my underwaters. Every time I swim on my own, I'm going to work on breath control and my underwater dolphin kick. Hopefully by the end of the season I'll see a marked improvement over my current underwaters.
3. Racing technique. I know there's something jacked up with my fast fly and back, but I don't have the same problems when I swim at a slower pace. Hopefully I can work with the age group coach to identify what I'm doing wrong and how to fix it.

If I can nail those three things over the course of the season, I should be able to have some monster swims in San Antonio. I had a monster swim in the 200 back in Indy in 2013, and that was without those three--with them, who knows? I could theoretically put lifetime bests in the 200 fly and back in my sights. I'm a lot stronger now than I was as a teenager, swim a lot smarter than I did then, and *should* have better technique, so I think it's just a matter of putting all the pieces together. I haven't been able to do that yet, but hopefully this season will get me closer!

Also, one final point--I'm planning to compete in as many Masters and age group meets as I can. All the training in the world means nothing if you can't put it into play when it counts, so I intend to race as much as possible in order to get used to putting it all on the line.

If all this training plays off, here are my goal times for San Antonio:

200 backstroke	2:08.50
100 backstroke	58.50
200 butterfly	2:12.50
100 butterfly	58.50

I don't know what the other two events I'll swim at San Antonio will be, but I fully intend to swim these four and try to hit these times.

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Outside the pool, I'm going to focus on three things, too.

1. Getting stronger. From this past weekend, I can tell my lats and hamstrings aren't very strong. I'm going to add in a dryland program a couple times a week that will include squats/lunges/pushups/ab work/pullups, as well as some medicine ball and resistance cord work. If I can, I'll also join the Golds a block from my office and add in some weight lifting. Even without all that, I'm stronger than I was as a teenager, so hopefully I'll get substantially stronger with that training.
2. Flexibility. I'm woefully unflexible right now. When I got my massage at the meet, the massage therapist had to actively push my legs into positions that I used to be able to just swing them into with no assistance. I'm really tight and can't really extend or contract my hips and lower back like I used to. I'll have to add in a stretching routine at least a couple times a week, too.
3. Massages. I felt fantastic after the massage at the meet, so I think I'm going to look into getting a sports massage once a month going forward. With the amount of training I plan to do, I can't see this being anything but a good thing.

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Yep, I know I've set some pretty darn lofty goals, but I'm hoping I'll have enough motivation from friends and Alaina to push me to hold my goals!