Dolphin Diving to Taper to Race

4 August 2025

Forget the diving well, the London Aquatics Center 3M depth competition pool is perfect for dolphin  dives!  I start and end each of my solo workouts here with a playful and relaxing 50M of this drill. 

As for my swimming, after frustrations last week, I finally tasted some speed and my “race stroke” at Sunday evening’s Barnet Copthall Masters workout.  In our 25M pool, we had a main set of three rounds of 4 x 100 on 2:30 done as

1. 25M FAST - 75 EZ

2. 50M FAST - 50 EZ

3. 75M FAST - 25 EZ

4. All EZ

   
   

I managed to be 31.9s on the 50s and 48+/49.1 on the 75s, all while feeling like I was using a 200 race pace.

This morning, I was back at the London Aquatics Centre for a 3,000 meter workout.  My main set was 2 rounds of 8 x 50 on 0:55, trying to hold a target 34/34.5 time while feeling like I was putting in 400M race effort.  I had done versions of this set a couple of times last week and was consistently disappointed in my results.  It took me the first 4 to lock into a decent pace.  Achieving my target times still took more effort (stroke rate primarily) than I could probably sustain over a 400, but rest the remainder of the week will cure that.

I'm feeling much more optimistic about racing this Saturday in Manchester! It will be interesting to see if I can match any of these times when I race without 20 seconds rest at each 50 ;)