Swimming Personal Bests, and lessons learned

I don't usually so my swims with the goal of beating certain times, but I do track my times for certain distances. It so happened that my workout for this morning had several of those distances worked in. (See my log if interested).

To my great satisfaction, I beat several of my previous PBs, crushing the longer distance swims in particular -- I knocked over 20 seconds off my previous best 400 yards time.

It got me thinking as to why I'd suddenly jumped up a level. I think it was a combination of three things. Hopefully my lessons learned will be helpful to those of you struggling with your swim times:

1. Keep swimming! Despite knee surgery in May and a tweaky shoulder in July, I've just kept plugging away at the yards. The more time I've spent in the pool, the more comfortable and confident I've become -- it just takes time.

2. Do strength training. I'm not big on weights (hate them, actually!), but I've been pretty regular in working my upper body this year. It's given me more endurance and power in the water.

3. Mix it up. Try different workouts and combinations of sets and drills. If your swim workouts are limited to slow laps, you're not training yourself to do anything but swim slow laps. Join a master's group or ask around for some different workouts. The variety will keep it interesting, if nothing else (see number 1)

Good luck!