Technique

Race pace in one minute

"RP" means race pace: the speed you want to hold in a race. A race-pace set breaks the race into short repeats so you can practise that exact speed, with a little rest in between. The rest and stopping rules below come from Brent Rushall's Ultra-short Race-pace Training (USRPT) (see further reading).

Your race-pace time for each repeat

Take your goal time for the race and divide it by the number of repeats that make up the race. For example:

  • 50s at 200 pace: goal 200 time ÷ 4. A 2:40 goal means 40.0 per 50.
  • 25s at 200 pace: goal 200 time ÷ 8. A 2:08 goal means 16.0 per 25.
Race Usual repeats Each repeat Rest
50 25s, timed as fast as you can close to full recovery (see below)
100 25s goal ÷ 4 about 15 seconds
200 50s (or 25s) goal ÷ 4 (or ÷ 8) about 20 seconds (15 after 25s)
400 50s or 100s goal ÷ 8, or goal ÷ 4 about 20 seconds
800 100s goal ÷ 8 about 20 seconds
1500 100s goal ÷ 15 about 20 seconds

Rest

  • Short and fixed: about 15 seconds after each 25 and about 20 seconds after each 50 or longer repeat, for every race from the 100 to the 1500. Don't lengthen it: longer rests after short swims let too much recovery happen, and the set stops training the end of your race (USRPT defined, bulletin 49).
  • Round to the pace clock: your send-off is the repeat time plus the rest, rounded to the nearest 5 seconds so it's easy to read. For a 32-second 50 plus 20 seconds' rest (52 s), leave on 50 for a harder set or on 55 to manage more repeats (Rest-interval selection, bulletin 52).
  • Example: 30 x 25 at 100 race pace on 15 seconds' rest (Ultra-short race-pace training, bulletin 40).

How many repeats

Not a fixed number: swim as many repeats on your target time as you can. A repeat slower than the target is a miss. Stop the set at the second miss in a row, or the third miss in all. Write down how many you made before the first miss, and try to beat it next time (bulletin 49).

Training for a 50

The 50 is the exception (Sprint-USRPT: training for 50-m races, bulletin 56):

  • Swim 25s as fast as you can and time every one: from a dive when the pool allows it, otherwise from a push.
  • Rest until you're close to fully recovered: far longer than the 15–20 seconds above. For 15 m from a dive, that's up to about 4 minutes.
  • Stop when two repeats in a row are more than 0.2 seconds slower than your best of the set.

Your steady training pace

Most of a workout is swum at your steady freestyle pace per 100. One way to find it:

  1. After a good warm-up, swim a 400 as fast as you can hold evenly. Note the time.
  2. Rest 5–10 minutes with easy swimming, then swim a 200 the same way.
  3. Your pace per 100 = (400 time − 200 time) ÷ 2. For example, 6:30 and 3:10 give (390 − 190) ÷ 2 = 100 seconds, or 1:40 per 100.

That's roughly the pace you could hold for a 1500.

Further reading: Brent Rushall's race-pace bulletins

Brent Rushall's Swimming Science Bulletins (San Diego State University), numbers 40–56. All PDFs.

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Planning and using USRPT

Why it works

Technique and debate