Swimmers, I need help, especially if you're in masters.

[mrs.jacinthe]

Today was my am masters coach's last day - he's going on vacation and then will be going back to school, so will be unable to continue.  I volunteered to take over coaching duties (I have experience as an age-group coach) until the season is over (around October-ish?).  Normally, I wouldn't be freaking out about this, but it just occurred to me this morning that I haven't done the same workout as everybody else ONCE this season - we have a lot of recreational/fitness swimmers on the "team", so I'm the only one who's really got a training goal and our coach has been writing special workouts for me all season.  So I have no idea what their normal workout actually looks like.  

It's an hour workout in a 30m pool, which means that every "50" is actually 60m, so I have to be aware not to make the workout too long or crazy.  Presuming time for warm-up and cool-down, it seems like 2000m would be a decent distance to write for - that comes out to about 2625 yards.

If you swim masters (or just recreationally with a workout), what are some of your favorite workouts or sets?  What do you wish you did more?  What do you wish you did less?

[Susie]

I am sure this is really, really individual, but I hate workouts that have tons of drill. Drills don't help me with form, I just want to put quality yards in. I also prefer things on intervals as opposed to "10 sec rest" kind of thing. Once you figure out what interval works for people, you should be good to go.

Can the previous coach give you some of their workouts just so you can see what they've been doing and get some ideas?

Lately we've been doing a lot of things with 300, 400, 500, and up segments.  Those are easy for slower folks to just lop off a 50 or a 100 (60 or 120?) and stay with the group.

[katandkevin]

Ours generally consists of a warm up (300-400), 4x50 drill, a pyramid of some sort, a short cool down set, another set of pace work and then cool down.

This was today's work out

300 warm up
3x50 catch up drill with kickboard
1x50 catch up drill without kickboard
25 while doing stroke count
50 keeping within the previous stroke count
75 with same stroke count
Pyramid: 50, 100, 200, 400, 200, 100, 50
100 easy kick
50 easy kick (this was done so the slower people could catch up)
300 on 7 minutes
200 on 3:30
100 on 1:45
100 easy kick

There was probably more after this but we had had enough since the pool was like 85 degrees this morning.