Finding Your Trim Speed

If you've ever ridden in a speed boat and seen how it accelerates from zero, you'll notice all the effort the boat makes to get started. Once at speed, the bow lowers parallel to the water and the boat skims almost effortlessly through the water. I'm finding swimming is like that.

When I have my days where I'm achy or tired for whatever reason, my speed is naturally slower than usual. It's these days I notice that the effort to just go slow seems unreasonably difficult. Shouldn't it be easier to swim slower than faster? I find that the answer, surprisingly, is no. If I can break out of the achies - sometimes just working the muscles for a while helps - and I can pick up my speed, the "efforting" I'm engaging in seems to actually decrease. Yes, you read that right. I find myself streaming through the water easier, my strokes more efficient, and my speed unproportionally faster for what additional extra effort I've engaged. This is because my body becomes more horizontal in the water (as opposed to the more diagonal angle of slow speed). It's my trim speed.

This may explain, at least in part, why some fast swimmers are seemingly less tired after a long workout than slow swimmers after a short effort. Sure fitness has a lot to do with it, but finding and maintaining your trim speed helps a lot too.

Can Rest Make You Faster?

Can rest make you faster? When I take a long time off from swimming - say, over three days - I am definitely feeling the need to work hard just to do a comfortable speed. If I take a weekend off, I feel great on Monday and can usually go full bore. If I take no time off (go weeks without a break), I can get sore and take almost my whole workout just to get loose. So given all this, I see there is a fine line between taking too much time off and too little. Finding that perfect mix of "efforting" and rest is a delicate balance. I've found five days of swimming and two days of back-to-back rest is about perfect for me. I usually do some sort of physical activity on the two days off, but its usually not swimming (laps). I've heard that this recovery time is good for muscles to allow them to grow.

Tracking Efforting

To use ESPN Radio's vernacular, I really did a lot of "efforting" today. It's been warm for several weeks now and averaging in the 90's each day. Needless to say, the outdoor pool is starting to heat up - even with the chiller running at night. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that's when I start complaining. Today I had a double whammy. The pool temp was high and the weather forecasters were saying that there was an ozone warning - a health warning - even the fit were waned to avoid exertion. Well I'm not one to follow the weather man's advice all the time so this AM I did my swim thing ... and I paid for it. Not only was my speed poor, despite some serious efforting, but I could feel my lungs hurting, like when I had the flu some years ago. I can only conclude that the extra ozone in the atmosphere makes oxygen uptake more difficult (hence, the warnings). But all is not bad, dear readers. I came away from all this with a new idea! I am going to add two new columns to my exercise log - "efforting" and "speed". I'm hoping I can use this daily info to see patterns and trends in my bio-rhythms, swim performance, etc. I expect knowing what has been and may be (projections) will help me understand my own body system better and maybe even push me to the next level. While none of this is posted on this blog, I will be sure to let you guys know if this helps any. In the meantime, could you just cool things down a little?