September 23, 2026 – Breaststroke Speed During the Taper and 14 Days to Huntsman

The gradual taper continued today with another small reduction in swimming volume. After 2,600 meters on Monday and 2,400 meters yesterday, today’s workout came down to 2,200 meters.

The reduced distance was intentional, but reducing volume doesn’t mean eliminating quality. Today’s workout provided a good example of what I want from the taper: less total work and lower training stress while continuing to swim fast enough to maintain race-specific speed.

The most encouraging result came immediately. I opened the workout with a 200-meter breaststroke in 3:22.52, my fastest recent training 200 and approximately five seconds faster than my previous 3:27-range efforts.

Today’s Workout

Total Distance	2,200 m
Duration	37:40
Average Pace	1:43/100 m
Normalized Pace	1:43/100 m
Training Stress	51 sTSS
Intensity Factor	0.93
Calories	548

The overall pace isn’t particularly important today because the workout mixed freestyle and breaststroke. The individual sets tell a much more useful story than the combined 1:43/100-meter average.

Opening 200 Breaststroke – 3:22.52

The workout began with five alternating 200-meter breaststroke and freestyle repeats. The very first 200 was breaststroke, and I completed it in 3:22.52, or approximately 1:41.26 per 100 meters.

Rep	Stroke	Time	Pace/100 m
1	Breaststroke	3:22.52	1:41.26
2	Freestyle	3:10.39	1:35.20
3	Breaststroke	3:43.19	1:51.60
4	Freestyle	3:13.93	1:36.97
5	Breaststroke	3:45.36	1:52.68

The opening 3:22.52 is approximately five seconds faster than my established 3:27.54 training benchmark. I also swam approximately 3:27.30 on September 18, so today’s result is another meaningful step forward.

I’m not interested in repeatedly testing the 200 breaststroke between now and Huntsman. Today’s swim accomplished what I needed. The speed is available, and with the race getting closer, preserving it is more valuable than continually trying to prove it in training.

200 Breaststroke and Huntsman

The 200-meter breaststroke will be my first race at Huntsman on October 7. Comparing today’s training swim with last year’s Men 60–64 results provides some useful perspective.

Benchmark	Time	Difference
Today’s Training 200	3:22.52	Current
2025 Silver	3:38.74	16.22 faster
2025 Bronze	3:39.92	17.40 faster
2025 4th	4:00.27	37.75 faster

Training and competition are different environments, so I’m not treating those comparisons as predictions. What today’s result does show is that my breaststroke speed remains available as training volume begins to come down.

Freestyle Speed Was Still There

The freestyle portions of today’s workout were also encouraging. The two 200-meter freestyle repeats were 3:10.39 and 3:13.93, only 3.54 seconds apart.

Later in the workout, three 100-meter freestyle repeats were even more consistent:

Rep	100 m Freestyle
1	1:31.85
2	1:31.98
3	1:33.10

Only 1.25 seconds separated the three 100s. That’s useful speed for me to retain while reducing the overall amount of swimming.

Controlled Breaststroke After the Fast 200

The later 100-meter breaststroke repeats were 1:52.95, 1:54.80, and 1:54.23. Those weren’t attempts to reproduce the intensity of the opening 200. Instead, they provided additional breaststroke work later in the session while remaining very consistent, with less than two seconds separating all three.

That combination worked well today: access the faster swimming while fresh, then continue the workout at a controlled effort rather than turning every set into another test.

The Taper Is Taking Shape

The last three workouts show the gradual reduction I wanted to begin this week.

Date	Distance	sTSS	IF
Sep. 21	2,600 m	65	0.96
Sep. 22	2,400 m	58	0.95
Sep. 23	2,200 m	51	0.93

Over those three workouts, distance has dropped by about 15 percent and training stress has dropped by more than 20 percent. At the same time, today’s opening breaststroke showed that reducing the workload isn’t taking the speed away.

I don’t intend to continue reducing every workout by exactly 200 meters. This isn’t a mathematical countdown. Some upcoming workouts may be similar in length, some may be shorter, and rest days will fit wherever they make sense around recovery and everything else going on outside the pool.

TrainingPeaks

TrainingPeaks currently shows Fitness at 60, Fatigue at 53, and Form at +8. Fitness has remained essentially unchanged while the recent swimming has brought Fatigue back up.

I’m continuing to use those numbers as information rather than targets. I’m not trying to preserve a particular CTL number, nor am I trying to force Form to a particular value. The purpose of the taper is to reduce accumulated workload while retaining the swimming ability I’ve already built.

Today’s workout is a good example of why the actual swimming matters more to me than any single TrainingPeaks number. The workload came down again, but I still opened with a 3:22.52 200 breaststroke.

14 Days to Huntsman

There are now exactly two weeks until my first race at the Huntsman World Senior Games. I am entered in four events: the 100-meter breaststroke, 200-meter breaststroke, 800-meter freestyle, and 1500-meter freestyle.

Date	Event
October 7	200 m Breaststroke
October 8	100 m Breaststroke
October 8	800 m Freestyle
October 9	1500 m Freestyle

Checking Off the 200 Breaststroke

I wanted to swim each of my four Huntsman race distances at least once before September ends. After today’s 3:22.52, I consider the 200 breaststroke checked off that list.

There’s no reason to schedule another hard 200 breaststroke test simply to see whether I can reproduce today’s time. I know the speed is there. The remaining job is to maintain it while continuing to reduce fatigue.

I still want to touch the 100 breaststroke, 800 freestyle, and 1500 freestyle before September ends. Those don’t all need to be maximum-effort time trials either. The goal is race-distance familiarity, pacing, and confidence rather than accumulating additional training benchmarks.

Today’s Takeaway

Today’s 2,200 meters continued the gradual reduction in volume and training stress that began this week, but the opening 3:22.52 breaststroke provided an encouraging indication that the speed I’ve developed hasn’t gone anywhere.

That’s exactly what I want to see from the taper: less work, less accumulated stress, but the ability to swim fast when I ask for it.

Fourteen days remain until the 200-meter breaststroke at Huntsman. At this point, I’m increasingly interested in preserving what I’ve built rather than trying to build something new.