About South City Masters Swimming

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To send an email click on 'view my complete profile' (below) and click on 'email'. South City Masters Swimming swim at the Lloyd Elsemore Swimming pool located on Sir Lloyd Drive in Pakuranga, Auckland. We have 3 sessions per week of 1 hour duration each. Monday evening from 7pm to 8pm, Wednesday evening from 7pm to 8pm and Sunday morning from 8am to 9am.

Monday, November 30, 2015

Last Race Night of the Year

Good grief, who's done their Christmas shopping? Not me. How did Christmas roll around again so quickly?

Anyway, it's race night on Wednesday. The last one for 2015. On the menu is:
25 Back or Free
50 Fly or Free
100 Breast
200 anything (so long as it's swimming)

Saturday, November 7, 2015

Race Night, SOM and Wooden Spoon

Results for Wednesday's race night are now up in all the right places. All the usual suspects were there, along with a few unusual ones. Out of the 14 swimmers racing 6 new records were set so that was a good effort. Four records went to the women and 2 to the men; also 4 records were for breaststroke, one for freestyle and one for backstroke. As a club we seem to be very good at breaststroke. I don't know why, I'm just making small talk.

Swimmer of the Month
This month it was awarded to Angela Oliver. Angela has really dedicated herself to her training and built up her fitness and her speed. She went to the North Island champs in Levin and swam a PB in every event, and absolutely walloped her 400IM PB in particular. This took a lot of dedication - great work Angela!

WS - aka Enthusiasm Award
The North Island champs gave a few opportunities to award the wooden spoon. In reality, this month it is more of an enthusiasm award. Just like Angela, Dave B was showing great dedication, this time in a relay. He was putting so much effort though that by a whisker he missed his turn. Fortunately, so did the IOT. We like your style Dave.

Why do we sometimes swim at easy pace?
If you find swimming at cruise (basic endurance) pace boring or difficult you are not alone. As athletes we tend to want to work hard and push ourselves. Not only that but our bodies are very good at tricking us into thinking we are working at an easier pace than we realise. In other words we are often putting in more effort than we think we are.

However, to make gains we need to work at a variety of paces and intensities, both lower and higher. I've been promising a venn diagram (remember those) for some time and finally produced it. It will nicely show the different benefits derived from the 3 main endurance training zones. If you are interested then head over to the Technical Tips page on this blog or be lazy (like me) and just click this link.

Benefits of Endurance Training (Venn Diagram)

I will post it on Facebook plus I've saved the diagram as a pdf if anyone wants me to send it to them.

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Get Your Game Face On

We have race night on tomorrow night (Wednesday 4th) so if you want to practice your starts, try and beat your lane mate or simply feel the rush of water past your ears then show up ready to race.

Races on the menu include 25m Br or Free, 50 Free, 100 Back and 100 IM or Free. Afterwards please stay for a mellowpuff (not too many though coz I don't like to miss out) and a laugh at the expense of whoever is being handed the wooden spoon. On that front, all I can say is the North Island champs presented many wooden spoon opportunities.