Thoughts on pacing

Re: yesterday's timed 400s. (There really must have been three of them, by the way--because I'm pretty certain I did two swimming alongside the guy in the adjacent lane, and then one at the end by myself.)

So the coach said to me for the last one, in kind of advance commiseration if I didn't make my time, that it would be harder without someone to swim next to. And psychologically this is surely true, it's fun swimming alongside (either splitting lane or in adjacent ones) someone at very similar speed, good boost to keep things snappy and kick hard off the wall and stuff...

But I actually went a few seconds faster for the last one, and when I thought about it afterwards it seemed to me--I have no idea, I am just not experienced enough and do not know the fellow well enough to ask him about his subjective impression (all I know is that he didn't want to do the last one--but it may have been for a more respectable reason than laziness!)--that I was definitely the one setting the pace for the first two. We were slightly neck and neck, but my neck was always a bit further ahead, and by the end I was maybe a third of a length ahead. But it's not exactly the who's in front so much as just my strong feeling that I was in charge of our mutual pacing, and that if I had pushed a little harder I probably could have dropped him, but that there was no sign coming from his end that he had any urge to do the same to me!

Now, there must be times when each person feels, for instance, that the other is leading on pace. I know I have runs like this sometimes, where I think I'm trying to keep up with the other person and they think they're trying to keep up with me and we escalate! But in my experience of swimming it does not work quite so much like that--however I do not know whether that is by virtue of the nature of swimming, or the stage of swimming experience I'm at, or the fact of swimming lengths in a pool instead of just moving continuously forward in one line...