1000 Yard TT

I swam my 1000 yard TT for the Dark Star ePostal Swim Meet today.  To give a little background, I typically swim about 8000-15000 yards per week.  In the swimming world, that's not much volume.  In fact, for elite swimmers that's one day of swimming.  

So, with my plan of improving my swim this winter, I ramped up my volume to about 25,000 yards per week.  It was a big jump, and put a hurting on my left shoulder so I decided to make this week a very low volume easy week to make sure I don't injure myself.  Prior to this week, I had put in a little more than 90,000 yards in 28 days.  Big volume for me.

So with this being an easy week, I was well rested and in the best swim shape of my life going into this TT.  Needless to say, I was expecting a PR.  Not hoping.  Expecting.

My previous best for 1000 yards was 14:00.

I started out somewhat conservative hoping I could pace myself well enough to negative split the TT and finish strong and fast.  I didn't check all of my splits, but I did see that I started out with a 1:22 then a 1:20. I hit the halfway point at 6:46, a 1:21 pace.  This had me on target to break 13:30, so that became my new goal.  I was feeling strong so breaking 14 was a given in my mind. I needed to completely fall apart not to break 14 at this point.

So I bumped up the effort on the second half trying to continue building my pace little by little so that I was swimming all out for the last 100 yards.  I finished in a time of 13:23, a 1:20 per 100/yard average pace and a PR by 37 seconds.  

Best of all, I finished feeling like there's more in the tank.  I think I could have pushed a little harder early on, but I was already swimming a PR pace and didn't want to blow up.  I wasn't sure what I was capable of, so I don't feel like I didn't pace it well.  I just think there's another PR coming down the road.

First half = 6:46  (1:21 pace)
Second half = 6:37 (1:19 pace)
Total = 13:23 (1:20 pace)