Chapter 11 Time to Get Organized—Swimming by the Clock

Are you a pool robot? Pool robots are swimmers who just jump in and start swimming, like a big toy with fresh batteries, plodding mechanically up and down and up and down. It’s the work ethic with a dash of chlorine. And even though training like this is the least effective, it’s how too many of us willingly squander our training time. That’s why we’re about to discuss intervals—a much better way to work out.

Meantime, if the description above sounds like you, don’t be embarrassed. You have plenty of company. You may also be smiling broadly because it seems to you like that last chapter on slow swimming finally justified your mind-numbing, metronomic workouts. In fact, it did no such thing. Yes, you need a certain amount of purposeful, thoughtful swimming to build skills, but endless workouts with no objective are dead-end exercise.

In the Total Immersion program we want to be sure you don’t put speed before good technique, so we don’t stress a lot of timed swimming early on. But staying in second gear is not the point either. To get ahead, you need a plan, you need structure, and you probably need some workouts where you push the throttle a bit harder.

You need intervals. And in this chapter, you shall have them. But not the scary, swim-’til-you-drop exercises in exhaustion most people think of when they hear the word. Total Immersion intervals are scientific swimming that make the most of your time without asking you to beat yourself up.

Although many of us probably know that hanging out on medium-throttle autopilot until our energy or time runs out won’t take us far, it’s how most fitness swimmers spend their time. Grab them between laps—if you can get them to stop at all—and you’ll hear why: “I want to swim a mile.” Like the 10K in running, it’s a kind of gold-standard distance against which everyone wants to measure him- or herself.

Nobody understands this better than pool lifeguards, who know from experience that nearly every new swimmer will come up at one time or other asking, “How many laps to the mile here?” Most pools now simply post the number for all to see. Armed with that intelligence (in a 25-yard pool, by the way, the magic figure is 70.4), they begin trying to chip away at the mountain. If they can’t make it non-stop right away, they’ll settle for doing it piecemeal. Knock off three sets of 20, then finish up with an easy 10 or 12. The goal is inevitably to go longer and rest less until they can finally patch it all together into one nonstop triumph. They congratulate themselves, as well they might, but the glow doesn’t last long. Because tomorrow, naturally, they’ve got to come back and swim it faster. Then that new challenge remains interesting for a while until the times simply level off and go nowhere. All that’s apparently left then is to soldier on because “it’s good for you.”

That’s not you? For one thing, you don’t have the time to squander on that kind of distance? Well, then, maybe you’re the clock-watching type who dashes into the health club at lunchtime with 40 minutes to spare. On day one, you probably peter out after 10 or 20 lengths (to coaches and competitive swimmers, by the way, a length and a lap are the same), even with a minute or two of rest between each. But you keep whittling away just as any would-be miler would, adding laps, subtracting rest, anxious to pump up that 40-minute lap score. And true enough, after a while you’ll probably be able to swim the full 40 minutes without stopping, which may even add up to a mile (70 lengths). With luck, you’ll even be able to pile on a couple more lengths just for good measure. But eventually you too will reach your swimming equilibrium (“terminal mediocrity,” one of my campers called it) and the end of anything remotely interesting about your workouts.

That’s what always comes of making the lap tally the holy grail of your swimming. You waste time fretting over how many or how fast—instead of how right—you are doing each one. Instead, you should be fretting about stagnation. The body gets so used to what you’re doing that there’s no stimulus to improve. The principles of adaptation and overload will see you through for a while in the beginning since, if you’ve never swum a mile, the preparation for it is an overload that does train your body. But once you’ve done the mile and done it again, where do you go? The world’s best swimmers, the human fish who train with coaches, are always baffled by the lap swimmer’s dead-end routine. “Doesn’t it get boring?” they ask, since they know there’s a much better way to invest their time. “Well, yes,” answers the lap swimmer. “But it’s good for me.”

Well, it could be a lot better for you and a lot more fun too if you’d switch to intervals or, for the less technical, to what I call stopping-on-purpose-with-a-plan. You need to know how to make the clock work for you. So let’s do some interval training the Total Immersion way.