Best Swimming Tests

With Escape For Alcatraz being my first triathlon of the season (March 3) and given the difficulty of the swim, I’ll really need to put in some pool time this off-season.  One of the first things I’ll need to do is perform a field test.  This will give me the benchmark which all my other swim exercises will be based on.  Gale Bernhardt gives nice an easy instructors on how to perform a field test (as quoted from the article):

Sprint test: Swim 3×100 fast. Recover for 20 seconds between each. Note your time for each 100, aiming for no more than 5 seconds’ difference between each one. Your T-pace per 100 is the average of all three times.

Olympic, half-Ironman, Ironman test: Swim 3×300 fast. Recover for 30 seconds between each. Note your time for each 300, aiming to have less than 15 seconds’ difference between each. Average the times to determine your average 300 pace. Your T-pace per 100 is that number divided by 3.

Once you have determined your T-pace, use it to design swim workouts. For example, let’s assume your T-pace is 1:45 (105 seconds) per 100. If you’re a sprint distance racer, swim a set of 5–8 repeats of 50 on a repeating send-off of 1:15. Your goal would be to swim each 50 faster than your T-pace (105 divided by 2, or 52.5 seconds). By swimming shorter segments faster than T-pace, you can work toward improving your speed over longer distances. Retest your T-pace every six to eight weeks so you can make adjustments to your workouts.