Over the coming 12 weeks, I will post a series of workouts building your swim fitness as you prepare for either Challenge Wanaka (18 Feb) or Ironman NZ (04 Mar). I am a multiple Iron-distance finishers including doing both these events in 2011 (the year of the wind in Wanaka and the year of the rain in Taupo).
12 weeks out from Challenge Wanaka started the week of Monday 28th November. For those of you doing Ironman NZ two weeks later, your sessions commenced the week of Monday 12th December.
This is the fourth week. You can find the first week’s sessions here, the second week here, and the third week here.
Each week will have three pool sessions for you to complete. I also encourage you to get in the open water once a fortnight to develop those skill sets. This can either be part of a triathlon or as a group open water swim. The pool-based sessions work well when completed on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday or on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
This week’s training is continuing to develop your base fitness with a strong focus on technique and endurance.
Session One
This session is designed to assess where you are fitness-wise and help us set some future performance goals. You can use this to gauge your performance compared to the first week of the programme and compared to future weeks as we will repeat this in weeks 7 & 10 as well.
- 1,000m Warm Up;
- 12x 50m (25m Drill/25m Swim);
- 8x 25m Pick Up 10sec RI;
- 400m Time Trial (TT);
- 10min rest including easy swimming of at least 200m;
- 200m TT;
- 400m Cool Down.
Start by swimming 1,000m for a warm-up. Keep a nice steady pace and feel free to pause occasionally to stretch or grab a quick drink. The idea of the warm-up is to get the blood flowing and muscles loosened up before some of the more intense sets later in the workout.
The set after the warm-up includes 12 repetitions of 50m. This 50m is done continuously with the first 25m done as a drill before going straight into the final 25m of regular swimming. Pause after each rep and have a short rest while you focus and mentally prepare for the next drill. Here are some drills that you can include in your programme. Complete each drill twice:
For the drill, set wear a pair of short fins. These will provide you with a small amount of momentum whilst you are focusing on what the upper body is doing. I recommend Finis Zoomers.
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