Race Pace & Target Splits

Sorting lots of papers in preparation for moving apartments I came across two pieces of paper from way, way back. They detailed target race splits and some results from a GBR SC Championships in the mid-1980's. I seem to recall they were held in Cheltenham or Gloucester, anyway somewhere picturesque in the south west.

During the 1980's I was privileged to coach some outstanding age-group swimmers in Britain. They went on to Olympic representation, world top-10 rankings, World Championships finals, Commonwealth medals etc.

The basis of their programming is annually discussed in detail at the SNZ School of Coaching; aerobic-based, multi-stroke development, which is the basis of the XLR8 system used for AG selection and rankings throughout New Zealand. Check into the School of Coaching for the detail.

The physiological basis for the programme design is based on an eastern-European system developed in the USSR which targets main training emphases each day of the micro-cycle. If the physiological preparation is on-target then the race performance should be predictable. Read that sentence again. If the physiological preparation is on-target then the race performance should be predictable. As they said in Ocean's 13, 'It plays,' doesn't it?

Back in 1982 Dr. Ernie Maglischo published his watershed book 'Swimming Faster.' In the previous article on this blog I gave the opinion that it was the best of the three series he published under the same themed title.

Maglischo analysed the splits of the world record holders and other USA national champions and determined patterns in the way they split their races. many coaches have done this and arrived at various conclusions. Probably the most ubiquitous is the one which assigns fixed percentages to each 'leg' of an individual medley. Quite frankly that is the most ridiculous analysis since someone took a lot of dollars to conclude 'Men are faster than women and freestyle is faster than backstroke' I kid you not, by the way, that conclusion was actually reached. Medley splits must depend on the individual prowess of the swimmer on each discreet stroke, not on an 'ideal' percentage of the total race time; it's common sense but apparently that's not very common.

Maglischo's system has two very important things going for it; it's simple and it works. Couldn't be better really. He based it on the swimmer's PB for distances shorter than the race in question so the advice for a 100m freestyle is split the first 50 one second slower than your PB for 50 and split the second 50 one and a half to two seconds slower than the first. Let's say a swimmer has a 50 PB of 25.0. The target splits would be 26.0 and 27.5/28.0 for a total of 53.5/54.0. Of course the first 50 is timed to the feet so to go within one second of the 50 PB and have energy left to back up a good second 50 the approach and execution of the turn had better be exemplary - some swimmers take more than a second to get their feet on the wall so they'd be in big trouble.

Looking at the 200 IM Maglischo advises the fly to be fly PB+1.0, backstroke to be back PB+3.0, breaststroke to be breaststroke PB+5.0/6.0 and the freestyle to be freestyle PB+4.0. Those are all based on standing start PB's so the allowance for no dive on back, breast and free is already built in to the targets. Check out the original targets and patterns (usual advice, click for a bigger view):


There have been rule changes since 1982 - underwater distance of starts and turns, no-hand touch on backstroke and fly kick on breaststroke start and turns. The only change which affects the split strategy is the no-hand touch on backstroke because the split is now measured to the feet whereas it used to be measured to the hand touch. I have adjusted this table to account for that difference onbackstroke and IM:


Most coaches who calculate these end up with predictions which are significantly faster than their swimmers have actually done in races. This 'error' has two possible causes; either the swimmer had paced the races really badly (very common here) or the swimmer is not trained well enough to hold the pace described by the target splits. If the swimmer is trained well and they control the race strategy around these targets it is amazing how accurate they are. Check out these targets and results for two of my swimmers from the GBR SC nationals:


The correlation is amazing. On some of the races the swimmer was faster than their pre-championships PB at the 50 and the splits were recalculated for the final. There are some remarkable fits between the target and the actuals; male 200 fly target 2:05.0, actual 2:04.77, 100 back heat target 1:01.4 for a 1:01.32, final target 1:00.8 for a 1:00.83, 400 IM target 4:26.8 for a 4:26.83 coming in from a PB of 4:33.08. The girl was just as close; 200 back target 2:25.7, actual 2:25.56, 800 free target 8:58.0 actual 8:57.20 against a pre-champs PB of 9:08.0.

Try it. Get your swimmers fit and teach them pace control. then get your calculator out and set high targets.

Bright Start to the Day

Get your nashers round this recipe from Tom.

The Magical Number 7

Cracking article on swimnews which illustrates Katie Hoff could hit seven gold medals in Beijing BEFORE Michael Phelps gets there! And ... they are both from North Baltimore Aquatics. Imagine that. Imagine your club having two swimmers who each won seven golds at NAGs, then up it to Opens, then up it to the Commonwealth Games, then etc. etc. until you get to the pinnacle. Difficult to even imagine let alone achieve. Scary stuff.

Hoff recently destroyed the US 1,650 record (yards I know but they are the top swimming nation in the world) previously held by world 1,500 record holders Kate Ziegler and Janet Evans. Check out her splits here . The 1,650 is way down the list of results so you have to scroll or search for a long time but its worth the wait. Most interesting are the 'reverse' splits:

First 200, 1:51
First 500, 4:41
First 1,000 9:23
Last 1,000, 9:17
Last 500, 4:37
Last 200, 1:49

Now that's great swimming.

Also, while you're on the results page do a search for the 'Surhoff' family of swimmers. They're also from North Baltimore and, by the looks of their ubiquitous appearance in the top results during the meet, they could be the next big thing from Maryland. You read it here first :)

Age Shall Not Weary Them

This from a bbc news web item of 17 August 2000:

At the other end of the age spectrum, 33-year-old Dara Torres won the women's 50m freestyle ahead of 1996 gold medallist Amy Van Dyken.

Torres, who also earned berths in the 100m freestyle and butterfly, is one of the veterans insuring that the for the first time the US women's squad is older than the men.

Of course, Torres could make her fifth Olympic Games in Beijing if she continues her recent form. She set a USA record last year with 24.53 which placed her equal fourth on the 2007 world rankings and sixth on the all-time list. However fifth on the all-time list is Jingyi Le with 24.51 from 1994 and I think everyone is of the opinion that one should not be included (turtle blood?).

Torres is 40 now and heading for 41 if she makes the USA team this year. It reminds me of the wonderfully disturbing story of why Toni Jeffs was not selected for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics by the SNZ Selectors; she was too old. I think we've gone past that type of subjectivity these days. Two years later she won a bronze in Kuala Lumpur and four years after that another bronze in Manchester setting a still standing NZ record of 25.43. (If you're counting that was 2002. She first set a NZ 50m record 13 years previously in 1989! Surely that's a record in itself?) Two years after Manchester she missed the Athens team by 0.1 and two years after that missed the Melbourne Commonwealth Games by 0.2.

Age! What's that about?

By the way, if you're a genuine distance freak and wondering how these upstart sprinters managed to appear on these pages, Toni was brought up on 100km per week. Scary, but true. During 2002 she averaged 35 hours a week of physical training - swimming, biking, weights, stretching - preparing for a 25 second event. She dropped her PB by over 0.5 seconds, thats more than 50 FINA points. Try 35 hours a week, it's fun :)

Vendting your Feelings

Timedfinals.com has an excellent interview with Erik Vendt which delves into the psyche of the resurgent athlete. One of the questions asks about memorable sets:

Your 30 x 1,000’s (10 on 10:45, 10:30, 10:15 right) is the thing of legend. Are there any other sets in your career (Ocean State Squids/USC/Michigan) that stick out in your mind?

My freshman year at USC-and this isn’t crazy like 30 x 1,000’s…but what is? We did 3 x 100 IM’s and a 1000, three times. I got down to 8:58 on the last 1000 and I remember thinking “I can’t believe I just did that.” It was the first time I had ever done anything close to that fast in workout. Another bad one from when I was at Squids was 20 x 400’s…descend 1-20 (editor’s note: that’s impossible). Stuff like that is so hard because you’re pretty much going all out by the 15th one.

But I don’t think I’ll ever get anywhere close to that again. Sometimes we’ll have a 6,000m main set but that’s only once in a very long while. It’s usually 3,000 to 4,000 main sets with a lot higher intensity than what I did before. I think that’s the reason for having so much improvement in my 200 and 400. I already have the aerobic base and I don’t see myself losing too much in the back end so at this point it’s more about establishing that front-end easy speed.

Go have a read.

London's Calling

Taking the analysis of the FINA points a bit further than I did yesterday I've looked at the projection of standards through to 2012. It's an interesting examination ... well, interesting if you're a nerd about these things.


Remember FINA points are calculated using the all-time top 10 performances, one per swimmer, at the end of each Olympic year. Currently we're using FINA2004 points. Tracking the all-time top 10 every four years back to 1988 (Seoul Olympics) we see two interesting facts:

• Relative to the 2004 standard the men were somewhat behind in 1988 (932 points opposed to 947 for the women) but have closed the gap so both genders are level at 1014 points in 2007. This phenomena is probably a direct result of the DDR women's performances during the 1970's and 1980's which artificially boosted the top-10 standards at that time. Fascinating that the women's improvements have been linear since that period albeit at a slightly slower rate than the men's.
  
• The improvement is basically linear across the twenty years, irrespective of rule changes for underwater work and backstroke turns or the introduction of racing suits in 2000 and their updates in 2004 (2008 performances with yet another update are not factored in here yet).

Projecting through to 2012 we get the 1,000 point score after the London Olympics equivalent to the current 1,035 point standard for the men and 1,031 for the women. One point approximates to 0.01 seconds per 50m so the difference between men and women is negligible.

Using the 2004 tables we can predict the time for each event at the various levels used by SNZ. Although a 30+ point increase in standards may sound scary to some it is, in fact a mere 1.15% improvement for men and 1.02% for women, in-line with the tracked improvement across the last 20+ years.

Wrong Definitions

A special acquaintance of mine once said, 'All scientific problems stem from wrong definitions.' You have to contemplate that statement for a few decades to fully understand it, or at least I did, but it has relevence to coaching philosophy. Ages ago, well, last November, I published a piece about Bob Bowmans's 'Five Keys to Success.' One of the elements was Speed and pace training: “How the time is swum is just as important as how fast the time is swum."

This reminds me of a much more succinct encapsulation of the same approach, 'It's not about how fast you swim but about how you swim fast.'
The quote is courtesy of Hamilton Smith, Fellow of the British Swim Coaches and Teachers Association.