Swim sets compared to endurance

+1000 on what has been said.  Working towards my first HIM and basically substituing my Masters class for the swim portion of my HIM plan with some long swims thrown in.  The long swims are more mental barriors to push thru than an endurance issue.  Being new to swimming the thought of swimming a mile was a bit daunting.  After my first 1600m continuous swim I felt great and thrilled to have hit that mark.  After 1600 meters yesterday in my masters class I felt like I had been beat to heck and the coach was out to kill us (and we weren't even done yet).

Yes, this is the same for me too. My 1 hour swim workouts (I swim with a masters club) are regularly 2500-3000m. I've been in this club for 3 or 4 years and we've swam a set of 400m probably not more than a dozen times.

I agree with David (newbz) that you do not NEED to swim the long swims. In fact, the only way to swim faster over a distance is to swim fast in workouts. The endurance training you get on the bike and run will transfer to the longer distance swims. That being said, I like to do some longer swims just for variety.

Typically, I start each workout with a 1000 warm-up. There are times that that warm-up turns into a 4500 yd straight swim. I tell people that are weak swimmers getting ready for their first triathlon to try to build your warm-up to the distance of your race. If you're getting ready for a sprint, try to build to a 800 yd warm-up. Think about it, if you go into your race knowing that you warm-up with this distance a lot of the pressure about the swim wades away.

I learned about this "short set" training issue in swimming about 6 months ago, and (painfully) changed my swim workouts all to shorter sets of 50-200, and occsaional 400s. It's definitely working - I'm gradually accelerating in pace, after a lot of no speed increase. I had been doing some long continuous swims before that of 30-45 mins, to no effect on my swim pace.

Interestingly - I train at a pool with likely no competitive swimmers, and it seems that everyone else who actually can swim with a decent (or not so decent) form does long continuous swims of 20+ minutes, even when they look like they're going hard. However, the short set swim technique has done me good - I'm passing pretty much everybody who does these long sets now, regardless of time/distance. (Still got a LONG way to go, though!)

As others have indicated, I rarely swim over 400m in a set unless I am doing a test set (1500m).  My typical workouts are in the 2500-3500m range and will involve lots of time around threshold pace with short rest between the sets.  Your body will respond to the broken sets (assuming you are using short rest) as though it was continuous swimming but because of the short rests, you can maintain a faster pace to realize a bigger training effect.

Shane