In a post yesterday on the TI Discussion Forum Sue L asked whether she should resume using a 6-beat kick (6BK) to regain some lost speed on her 50-yard practice repeats. I replied asking for more info  - how much difference in both speed and effort had she seen in a briskly-paced 50 with the faster, harder 6BK, vs one with the easier 2BK.

Sue wrote back: “My brisk 50 yarders are now like about 46-47ish when they used to be like 43ish. The effort exerted doing the 2BK ones is about ten thousand times (okay I exaggerate) but we’ll say a *lot* less. My two mile swims are now 1:02 vs. 1:01 which seems like a small price to pay. But those 50 yarders are somehow always so disappointing to me.”

Sue’s post makes a revealing statement about what is very likely an almost universal psychology of swimmers. While her 2-mile time – which I think highly respectable – has fallen off by less than 2 percent, her 50 time may have fallen off by 7 to 10%.

Yet the loss of speed in her50 looms so large that she’s thinking about doing something – kicking harder — that would undoubtedly hurt her potential to swim the mile or 2-mile well.  This way of thinking is probably widespread beecause  (1) We  measure our performance by 50 or 100 times far more often than by1-or 2-mile times; and (2) We think of 50 times as reflective of Speed, and times for longer swims as reflective of Endurance.

But Endurance is really Speed — Sustained. And who among us is more interested in swimming fast for a minute or less as opposed to being able to improve our pace for a healthful 30 minutes to an hour or more.

I suggested to Sue that adopting a more expansive way of evaluating her swimming  would be helpful in many ways.

Measuring your swim performance is always good. “What gets measured gets improved“,as the saying goes. But a key question is what to measure. Most people focus exclusively, and disproportionately, on Time. But there are really four key metrics:

Stroke Length or SPL – a measurement of how well you combine streamlining and propulsion

Tempo - as measured by the Tempo Trainer

Effort - Land exercisers use a HR monitor but I’ve found them unreliable in the water and have been well-served with my subjective, but well-honed, internal effort gauge. I like a 5-point scale in which 1 = almost literally effortless and 5 = maximum. I train 85% of the time at 3 or below.

Time - what the pace clock or sports watch tell you.

It has been some 20 years since I only used Time as a measure of my swim performance. I now use at least two at all times. Every week, I’m likely to do sets that include all of the combinations below:

• Time and SPL
• Time and Tempo
• SPL and Tempo

And in fact I always use 3 measures  since I never fail to consider how easy or effortful the swim was.  Indeed if I can do a particular combination of Time and SPL or Tempo and SPL at a 3 effort, on my next repeat, I’m more likely to try to repeat the same combo at a 2.5 effort, rather than try immediately to improve the combo.

Measuring more aspects of swimming, and relating one metric to one or more others will:

Give you more information about your swimming,

Give you more things to focus on improving – and the psychic rewards of doing so; and

Give you a more balanced perspective.

Finally, I emphasized to Sue that I’m not suggesting for a moment that she cannot reclaim those lost 3 or 4 seconds in her brisk 50s. I’m fairly certain that when she begins measuring the things that matter, she could aim to break an hour for her 2-mile. I even suggested she set a goal doing so, possibly at this race I’ll be swimming in August.

For detailed guidance on effective TI Training, see these related resources:

Triathlon Swimming Made Easy Part 4, Chapters 11 to 17

Extraordinary Swimming for Every Body Part 3

The ebook Outside the Box: A Program for Success in Open Water Part 3 Chapters 8 to 12