Three Nice Swims

My last 3 swims have been nice workouts:

I'm in a routine of usually swimming on Tuesday, but I swapped my Tues/Thurs swim and bike 2 weeks ago so I didn't bike hard on Thurs only to have tired legs for the Fall Classic Duathlon 3 days later. (I knew I could swim hard 3 days before a run-bike-run race and be OK.)

All these swims had a 200 yard warm-up, then the main set, then 300 yards of kick drills, and finally a 300 yard cool-down. So looking at those totals, the "main sets" were not that long. (I don't know if this is right or not, but it's just the way I've been swimming! Over the years, my main sets have stayed about the same, but I've added more in terms of drills and cool-down at the end.)

So THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5TH was just a simple 8x200 yard workout with 0:30 rest. I averaged around 3:06 for those 200s - nothing too great as I wasn't pushing TOO hard being I knew I was racing in a few days.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 10th was one of my favorite longer workouts: "broken 400s and 200s" done as 3x400 and 3x200. I know I've talked about this before, but it's been a while. It's the most complicated workout that I have memorized as it's alway just dividing things in half - as long as you can remember "3x400, then a 60 sec rest, then 3x200." Between the big sets of the 400s and 200s there's a 60 sec rest. Between the individual 400s and 200s, there's a 30 sec rest. And "within" the 400s and 200s, there's a 15 sec rest. (The REST has been divided in half each time, and now lets talk about the DISTANCE being divided in half each time...)

It starts with a 400, then a 30 sec rest. But the next 400 is 2x200 done as 200, 0:15 rest, 200. (Then 0:30 rest.) Then the last 400 is 4x100 done as 100, 0:15 rest, 100, 0:15 rest, 100, 0:15 rest, and 100. The 400s are now done, so then it's the only full 60 sec rest. Then you do the 200s the exact same way with the same rests: 200, then 2x100, then 4x50. Whew. It's a fun one with lots of different speeds of swimming.

Finally, on TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17th, I did another (kinda) favorite swim: a simple pyramid workout of 100, 200, 300, 400, 300, 200, and 100. I learned years ago that I'm "good" at swimming one speed, so this pyramid workout (and the previous "broken 400s and 200s" workout) is good for me to be doing - it keeps my body guessing and makes me work at the "proper" speed for that individual set, which might be a different speed than the set before or after that.

Oh, and as a bit of an update from Monday's post about possibly overtraining, I took a closer look at my "nightly" HRV numbers as what is usually displayed is an average of the last 7 days. It shows my HRV taking a big drop from within the baseline on the 8th, which was the Fall Classic Duathlon. I held my finger over it (so it looks a little visually messy) so you could see what night had the big drop:

So notice how low the nightly numbers have been since then. I had 3 nights over 3 weeks BEFORE that race that were below "baseline," and then 6 nights below baseline over the last 9 days. I think that's telling me I went hard at the race and didn't fully let my body recover. So as I mentioned in Monday's post, I think I'll be taking it easy for the rest of this week.