Sunday, September 30, 2018

The "results" of our 10 week CSS Development Plan are in!


Swimmers completing the tenth week of our 10 Week CSS Development Program - this was the fastest the squad has EVER swum - well done if you were part of it!

Dear Swimmers

Zoggs coming tomorrow and Tuesday!

Don't forget, Zoggs International will be with us on pool deck tomorrow and Tuesday 2nd October to do some testing of their new products. Anyone assisting in the trials will receive a FREE pair of Zoggs Predator goggles just for helping out - can't say fairer than that! Of course, this will be slightly disruptive to the flow of your normal session (so is not compulsory) but given that this is the first 2 days following on from the last 10 weeks of diligently working on your CSS pace, I'm hoping the vibe will be a little more lower key anyway - enjoy and get a FREE pair of goggles for your efforts!

Serena conquers the Channel

News just in from Dover, UK, is that squad swimmer Serena Wells successfully swam the English Channel on Monday last week, covering the distance in 14h46m - what an amazing swim. We are still waiting on a full report and some photos but this is excellent news! Alan Tietzel was also over there to swim and started about 24hrs later, but sadly did not make it across after having been in the water for some 12+ hours (again, further news to follow). Well done Serena and Alan for both of your efforts - mother nature is a beast sometimes and waiting around to swim as long as you did is very reminiscent of my experience in 2011, so I can well understand the emotions you likely went through!

10 Week CSS Development Results

A massive well done if you were one of the super-committed swimmers who diligently tried to attend as many of the sessions as possible in the squad over the last 10 weeks as we Went Backwards to Go Forwards - I do hope you really enjoyed the program and that it brought a little focus to your swimming. Some of the comments I've heard and over-heard were:

FOR:

  1. gave you focus and motivation
  2. provided a necessary challenge through the winter months
  3. has got you in GREAT shape prior to the season starting

AGAINST:

  1. Hard to get into it if you missed the start or some of the middle weeks
  2. Did Tuesday have to become so challenging too?
  3. Became a bit prescriptive by the end especially as you started to plateau off

As promised, the results can be found here:


What I've done is, somewhat subjectively (based on observation and feedback from you directly), added in a red highlighted cell with white text to indicate which week I believe your group as a whole within each lane and within each squad managed to achieve before plateauing off somewhat and being able to hold the set times. Of course, this whole program becomes quite the dynamic beast as people miss sessions, the structure of the lane changes etc, but I believe that this is a good representation of where we got to and represents about 3.5-4% improvement across the board (or about 3 to 7s per 100m at CSS pace), which in itself is a great achievement - well done!

We'll use the next couple of weeks to consolidate at the RED / WHITE cell level, before looking at new ways to extend this forwards and keeping you on your toes with new, fun challenges. I had played around with the idea of keeping the next 1-2 weeks beeper-less to give you a little break (and may try this in certain sets as a "social experiment") but given that the pool clock spent a good 6 or 7 weeks broken during this program, I hope you can all understand how beneficial they are to keep you engaged and on track, and on that note, a big well done for the large number of you who taught yourself how to use this little gadget and get familiar with switching between modes etc - coach was very proud!

Rottnest Channel Swim & Port-2-Pub training programs

I'm not sure if people have shifted their focus in recent years or are being more coy these days about their intentions to swim these iconic events 😉, but I have heard of very few people committing from the outset to a Solo for either of the two events this year, but there's been plenty of people talking about 2020 as being "their year" so perhaps people are taking a longer term view of this? I'm not sure. Anyway, there are just over 20 weeks to the Rottnest Channel Swim and just over 23 weeks to the Port to Pub Swim

In 2018 we suggested this training program which was well utilised and will be tweaked to include the new race series calendars in sure course of which there are two calendars this year for some racing action:



…and for those keen on a little more structure and direction, our full guide can be accessed here for an additional $13.99/mo:


Of course our 74 minute webinar is always worth a look if you're still in that undecided stage - access that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzwkyl_B0Dk 

…in any case I'm sure there's going to be a great summer of open water swimming ahead of us, why not sign up for an event or two to give you some focus?

Cheers

Paul


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