Lots of Swimming Actually SHOWING PROGRESS!

On September 2nd, I did the broken 400s and 200s swim that I wrote about here. It's a great workout with some nice variety (and yet it's easy for me to remember without having to write it down and have it pool-side).

Exactly 3 weeks later (on Sept 23rd), I happened to do the exact same workout. But I noticed as I was logging it that I was exactly 60 seconds faster. If anything, I pushed a bit harder in the first workout, and took it a bit more easy in the "faster" workout. I'm sure my rest times weren't all exactly the same, but still, my overall workout time was 60 seconds faster the 2nd time I did this workout.

The only explanation is that suddenly swimming 3x/week (instead of 2x/week when I'm biking and running the other 5 days) has started to pay off. And I'm starting to get faster in the pool.

Comparing the 20 "reps" in this workout from the same workout on Sept 2 and Sept 23, 3 were slower, 3 were the same, and 14 were faster:

The difference in time in seconds (the change from Sept 2nd to Sept 23rd):

WU: -10

400: +4
200s: +4, even
100s: even, even, -2, and -3

200: -5
100s: +2, -4
50s: -1, -1, -1, and -2

Kicking with board: -13, -14, -7, and -11

CD: -7

So I made up the most time in my 4x75 of kick drills at the end of the workout. Maybe I made a nice leap in endurance over those 3 weeks, and I wasn't feeling as tired at the end of the workout. Or maybe I was just pushing harder.

And then 2 weeks later, I again swam this workout, but this time, I TRIED to be fast. I wanted to beat both of these previous times. It's weird, because knowing that my overall time also contained my rest time made me want to cut each rest short by a second. But that wasn't the point. I just swam hard throughout. I ended up beating my overall time from 2 weeks before by 14 seconds, and my time from 5 weeks before by 74 seconds.

Almost everything was faster than the workout from 5 weeks before, so I'll compare it to the workout from 2 weeks before. This time, comparing the 20 "reps" in this workout from the same workout from 2 weeks before, 3 were slower, 7 were the same, and 10 were faster:

The difference in time in seconds (the change from Sept 23rd to Oct 7th):

WU: +2

400: even
200s: +1, even
100s: -2, even, -1, and -3

200: even
100s: -4, even
50s: -1, even, -1, and -1

Kicking with board: even, -2, -9, and -6

CD: +7

(And only 2 of those 20 reps were slower during this final workout than they were in the first workout 5 weeks before. And those 2 were the 400 and a 200, both early on, showing that I maybe just went out too hard 5 weeks before. [Or I'm going out too easy these last 2 workouts.])

So the silver lining to not having run or biked in the last 8.5 weeks is that my pool time is making me faster there!

Related: here's my monthly swimming PR set last month, and here's my first PT visit this past week proving (YET AGAIN) that I have a crappy podiatrist.