Thursday, March 6, 2008

Pace Awareness

Dear All,
 
Another day, another time-trial!
 
Results of this morning's swim time-trial can now be viewed here:
 
 
These can be compared with your last times at:
 
 
Repeating this session every 4 to 6 weeks is great for monitoring progress and re-evaluating your training levels / target paces for the next few weeks. You shouldn't view time-trials as something to fear, after all as Andy Coggan, (sports physiologist) says:
"Training is testing and testing is training!"
 
What was great to see was that after yesterday's cycle time-trial where 100% of those who had repeated the session from 6 weeks ago did a P.B, it was a similar story in the pool today with ~80% "repeaters" posting P.B times - a really great result!
 
What we had chance to do with the second squad session at 10am this morning (see bottom photo) was get everyone's split-time through the first 100m and compare this with their finishing time. In an ideal world where the 400m would have been either even-split or potentially even negative-split (i.e. last 200m faster than first 200m), we then said, "OK, if they have done their first 100m in 1:40, then they should be hitting close to 6:40 for the 400m assuming optimal pacing". What we found was (in some cases) very different, and this is not at all unusual. Click on the bottom photograph for a clearer view and see that the figures in a small red circle next to their finishing time is the difference in seconds between what time they did finish in and what time they "should" have finished in, with the lower the number, the better. Ideally we'd like to see values here of 5 to 15s as opposed to some which were as high as 60-seconds. Rather than this be a "name & shame" thing though (we've all done it, trust me!), we need to learn from that, and at this point I'd like to draw your attention to this excellent article on Perceived Exertion and Pacing:
 
 
The article by Charles Howe looks at how many of the world records in track running in the last 30 years have been set with a slightly negatively-split time. Makes for very interesting reading, especially before our 5km run time-trial this evening!
 
Enjoy!
 
Paul

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