CSS, bringing out the child in me

I, like many people in their mid 20's am pretending to be an adult.  I spend time at work and university every day working and in the case of my job even sometimes successfully appearing like a functioning adult to the pupils in my care.  This however is far from the truth and like many competitive people and most children, if I can turn a job in to a game or a race, then it becomes a whole lot more appealing.  Enter CSS.

CSS stands for Critical Swim Speed and is a threshold swim speed, generally considered the maximum pace that could be held for a 1500m swim time trial.  Thankfully this is established through not a 1500m tt, but a 400m and 200m tt and using a calculator (available on the swim smooth website - see link at bottom) a figure is presented.

Tempo trainer pro - the boss of the session.  

These times allow very focused endurance based sessions, ideal for anyone swimming over 400m in event.  These session are something as an individual I feel have really brought on my swimming and as a coach can not recommend highly enough.  Sessions are differentiated based on this pace, however are predominantly based around the idea of shorter (100m - 500m) consistently paced threshold based efforts with shorter recoveries.

This pacing is controlled handily through the use of a tempo trainer pro as shown above.  This handy little gadget is, in my humble opinion the best value for money gadget I have bought in my entire sporting career (bold claim I know!).  This small reasonably inexpensive (~£32) turns many swim sessions
in to my childhood dream, everything becomes a game, that game being, how close can I get to the beep when I get to the end of each length.  It is unbelievable how quickly 120 lengths can tick by with this distraction.  The tempo trainer can be programmed to beer at regular intervals allowing for each length of a session to be consistently paced.  This also develops pace awareness, an essential skill come race season!

Red mist session overview on strava. 

My personal favorite session the Red Mist session, this set of 10 x 400m reps getting progressively faster through the session I feel has massively contributed to the falling of my CSS pace from 1:40 to 1:31 in the last three months (in theory a saving of 2:15 over 1500m!).  The premise of the session is:
4 x 400m @ CSS + 6 secs
3 x 400m @ CSS + 5 secs
2 x 400m @ CSS + 4 secs
1 x 100m @ CSS + 3 secs
Give this session a go and you very quickly realize where the Red Mist name comes from!  For those a little bit worried about 4k session distance, the Pink Mist is exactly the same session, however with 300m reps, ideal for the time crunched swimmer!

A huge variety of CSS sessions are available and I would highly recommend anyone looking at swimming distance to explore the options available with these sessions.  Anyway, I will leave that thought with you as I need to head to bed soon before a set of 20 x 100m @ CSS off 1 beep recoveries in the morning, it will be a fantastic game!

www.swimsmooth.com - a fantastic website with a huge quantity of information available for distance freestyle swimmers and the method of coaching adopted by BTF coaching framework.