Here’s some footage from the 23rd Black History Swim meet, held Feb. 13-15th this year. I still get excited watching a race start. I wish I had been there! Maybe next year. . .

Here’s a lovely scene. An outdoor classroom full of eager learners. The rainbow swimsuits are a nice touch, too. As we head into winter in these parts, a picture like this gives me hope for the future.

As a swim parent, I spent enough time at the pool to hear the coach talk about negative splits. But I had no idea what that was. As as fitness swimmer, I don’t have much need for this racing technique, but as a wanna be triathlete/master swimmer, I could see the value in working on it.

A negative split is swimming the second half of your set faster than the first half. There are various ways to work on a negative split, and uncannily, they all involve a lot of yardage! Random aside: I remember looking at charts of exercises with their pros and cons and swimming was listed as not the best aerobic or fat-burning (?) exercise because you had to swim so much for it to work. None of the kids in my kids’ swim club kept their baby fat for very long. You end up putting in the yards if you’re swimming at all, is what I’m saying.

So you can train a 1000 yard set by swimming it 10 x 100 style, or swimming 100 yard sets with a brief (10 seconds ) rest between. To work on your negative split, you would start off swimming at maybe 85% and gradually speed up until you’re sprinting the last set. This would take a little trial and error if you don’t know yourself well enough to know whether you’re swimming all out or not.

Another technique for working on the negative split is swimming ladders. Ladders are when you start out swimming 500, then 400, and so on until you get down to 100. This set would have you swimming a mile or thereabouts. (the wheels are turning–I know what I’m capable of, and these are exciting ideas to change up my set). Again, pace yourself so that you’re swimming the last set the fastest.

You’ll also need to determine whether you swim faster because you’re negative splitting, or because you swam the first few sets too slow.

Try this one: 10 x 100 with gradually decreasing intervals. You would swim 2 100s at one pace, 1:30, for example, then the next 2 100s at 1:25, and so on until you’ve finished the set. This has the speeding up built into it.

These sets will identify what areas you need to work on in order to have a decent negative split. It would be worth all the effort for a racer. You can’t overestimate the psychological power of passing your competitors in a race.