Woohoo!! Swimming accomplishment - and stupid question!

With only a month under your belt, the last thing you need to worry about is pace.

This is a very generic statement, but it gets floated around:

If you are swimming at anything over 2:00/100, then you need to work almost exclusively on your form.  Once under 2:00/100 then it is time to work on the yardage and getting faster.

Have you had any sort of instruction or lessons?  I would highly recommend a few simple one on one lessons with a good swim coach where they can observe your technique and give recommendations on how to correct form issues.  I did 3 lessons at around $35 each through my gym and it made a huge difference in my stroke and abilities.  I swim faster now on very little yardage than I did when I was flailing out 20k yards a month with worse form.

Your comment got me thinking as I'm right at 2:04-2:30/100m depending on how I feel.  Swam through h/s(47 now) and am quite comfortable in the water(bilateral, OWS, etc.). Not aspiring to podium but would like MOP or even back of the MOP.

x2 on continuing to focus on form. Like with the run and the bike, the more you practice the more you'll grow faster naturally. If you try to push your pace and your form and technique isn't firmly established your stroke can start to get sloppy and you run the risk of developing bad technique habits that can be hard to break later down the road.

Me too...do you mean over 2 minutes/100m just 100M by itself or during a HIM?  There would be a big difference with the pace, right?

Just in case it isn't obvious, the reason (at least as I understand it) that folks are telling you to focus on form is that if you go out and do hard intervals or some such with bad form, then you will just be ingraining bad form, and once bad form is a habit, it's hard to break.  Of course, it's a balancing act -- you do have to get some fitness! -- but you will likely make improvements in pace more quickly right now if you don't worry about pace, and just think about form.

Personal experience:  The above was hard for me to accept, as I am (overly) focused on being 'fast', but I trusted my coach, and I went for a several month period without even looking at the clock while swimming.  Lo and behold!  When I started timing myself again, I had made huge gains.

I don't think that one ever gets to a point where concentrating on form is no longer an emphasis. You may do different types of workouts where yardage and speed/pace are relevant to your training goals but do you think that even Phelps doesn't continually work on form?

As I said, it's a balancing act -- the balance goes in both direction.  Of course everybody works on form -- I've seen some of the fasties here on BT mention that they tweaked this or that aspect of form to make an improvement.  My point (not my point really, as I'm just repeating what more experienced swimmers here say) was that if someone is going 3 or 4 min per hundred, then it's a good bet that that person has serious form issues that no amount of fitness will overcome, and simply swimming harder with bad form is not the best road to improvement.  The priority should be on fixing those form issues.

Didn't say that you needed to stop working on form when you hit some arbitrary number in pace.  What was said is that if you are not under a certain range, then you should be focusing almost exclusively on form and getting comfortable in the water.

As for race pacing Noelle?  Since every open water race is an entirely different beast (even the same course from year to year), using OWS splits doesn't really come into play.  Just like with running, if you want a consistent measure of ability you use a course that allows you to minimize all outside influences (like running on a track for calculating a field LT or doing intervals).  So you use a pool as your measure of fitness ability.  If you can swim 1:45/100 in shorter stuff but still do 2:15/100 in a POOL swim that is 2100 yards, then it is a fitness issue and not so much a form one - or one's form breaks down as they get tired - which is a fitness issue again.

I just want to give you hope... my times are consistently slow, and continue to be slow.... but while I remember counting over 30 strokes per length, now I count 20 strokes per length... how did I do that? with a stroke clinic... they taught me how to swim as opposed to "fixing" my old stroke. Of course I'm still working on it, and I'm building endurance again, since I'm using different muscles than I had been using. It's a process... but I'm improving MUCH more now that I KNOW what to work on... someone just saying focus on form, and you have no clue what that form feels like or looks like is worthless... I strongly recommend lessons - you'd be surprised at how much you improve!