Saturday January 23 Practice

Saturday January 23, 2016

"It was a cold and windy morning…"

The wind was whipping around on Saturday.  Equipment was flying everywhere and the electricity went out a few times. 

We planned to do backstroke, but because I felt like the Flags were going to be off by quite a bit, we switched to freestyle.  When you look at the print-out of the set, simply replace the backstroke 150s and 75s with freestyle.  This pic is a pic from the weekend and the flags were pretty "off" (and about as good as we can get with a 25 meter rope -- which tends to sag).  The flags on Saturday were even worse.  I would have taken a pic, but I didn't want my phone to blow into the pool!

Great workout everyone!  We got a lot done and we had many fast practice swims.  Some people were pretty tired, but in many cases the tired people had some great practices throughout the week.  There is much to be gained through consistency in training, and having a (only) decent practice at the end of the week looks a lot better if you’ve had 2-3 really good practices throughout the week. 

Practice goals for today: Swim at 200 meter pace or very close, during and at the end of a 50+ minute training set, for 150 and 75 yard increments.   So, a 1:20 plus a 38 is a 1:58.  A 1:26 plus a 41 is a 2:07.   A 1:30 plus a 43 is a 2:13.  

Obviously, we are doing this coming off of 1800 yards of fast kicking yesterday.  It’s part of the mindset of our Staff that we not only do things well as single efforts (one day at a time), but also that we link one thing to another and look at the total sum (stack great practices on one another, and then stack great weeks on one another, and then stack great months on one another….and YES stack great years on one another as well).

National group absences for today: Bean, Maura, Alex, Aaron. 

Athletes who were not at the 6am got to the 8am, which for Saturdays can be acceptable if recommended or at least ok’ed by a coach.  The ACT test was today…hope all who took it did well!

Our top 3 performers, in terms of raw data, were: Jack, Cole, and Shawn.

Last three rounds for Shawn: 122.5 + 38.3 / 121.0 + 38.4 / 1:18.8 + 36.6

Last three rounds for Jack: 122.0 + 39.8 / 121.2 + 39.0 /  120.3 + 38.7

Last three rounds for Cole: 122.9 + 39.1 / 123.9 + 39.2 /  121.7 + 38.3

If you add-up Shawn’s 150 and 75, you get 1:55.4, which is close to his 1:54.6 200M best time.  We do this set often to practice this pacing.  225 yards and 200 meters are the same distance, but of course you get more turns in the SCY pool, which are faster and allow a break for the athlete, so they make things easier as well.   So Shawn did a very good job.

Grades:

Shawn (4.75) – the best he has done on this set by far, and the best anyone from T2 has done on this set.  Kicking full body past the flags on the 75s is the only thing missing from a 5.0 set.  Keep going, ShawnJ

Jack (4.25) – above average for Jack

Cole (4.75) – the best he has done, by far, and also an extra bonus for swimming well on all of the moderate swims as well.  Cole’s last meet saw him out in 1:22 at the 150.  I’m thinking this performance in practice will help him race an even better 200 Free.  We have much room to improve and we are doing it!

Jacob (4.50) – probably would have been a 4.75, but Jacob’s 1:20 + 38 were done going :10 back, so there is a slight shade there.  Jacob, you are BACK – time to lead the lanes more often!  You can do it and do it well.

Karen (4.25) – above average for Karen based off this year’s times.  Getting back to the 2014-2015 Karen with training times.  Karen went 1:25 and 40 on the end of the set for a 2:04 LCM add up).

Overall group grade was 3.50.  Too many people had to miss laps from the National group and from the Senior Performance group, which is for all of us to own.  We can be more vocal towards our teammates, and our top performers today could have found a way to pick up the athletes who were not performing well.  This is a fine line, because we certainly need to be concerned about ourselves first and foremost during a training set.  But if we went back and did the set again, perhaps our more veteran members could have gotten our least-experienced athletes into the practice more at its onset.   There is always a step to take as a Team even when the individual practices are strong overall.