I've been swimming for Masters for 34 yrs (age 58 on 1/27/13) and like to swim 6 days/week, 4000 to 6000 yds/day, across most of the year, taking maybe 2 weeks off per year. Obviously, I tend to get tired over time. The key issue seems to be how tired is too tired??? I've read Maglischo's books ("Swimming Fast", "Swimming Faster") and he uses a % effort formulation based on HR and/or best time in an event. If you're doing repeats at say 30-50% slower than your best race time, is there value in that from the long term development perspective??? When I rest and taper for a meet or race, I seem to recover pretty well and I'm much closer to the national 55-59 records than I was in the 25-29 AG, so it seems like I must be doing something right, but wondered what long-time Masters swimmers thoughts are. Also, FWIW, I do most of my training on my own, but just race whoever happens to be in the pool.
Suppose that you were to insert some rests into that period of weeks of feeling exhausted so that you got the "boom" effect (or at least little boomlets) in practice every 10 days or so. Would you get an even bigger BOOM at taper time? I don't know, but I wonder about this kind of thing sometimes when I am feeling tired. Should I go swim another hard workout, or rest? Sometimes when I am tired and decide to do another hard workout I have a great workout, but this is not consisteltly true. Sometimes I have a terrible workout and I think to myself, "you would have been better off resting." I wish there were some way to know. This is only during periods of sustained hard training though. Usually like throws enough "unplanned rest days" (meetings etc.) into my schedule that scheduling rest days isn't an issue.
Ya, it would be great to be able to know with some certainty, but such is swimming life. I've gone through periods when I just swam slowly 99.5% of the time for several months and then all of a sudden, I start to be able to get back to swimming at a stronger pace in just 2 or 3 weeks. Due to the fact that I can never seem to tell when this might happen, my conclusion is that I should just swim as much as I want to, without holding back and only resting when I really feel the need for it. You just can't be the fastest swimmer in the pool on every 100, every workout, for years on end.
Suppose that you were to insert some rests into that period of weeks of feeling exhausted so that you got the "boom" effect (or at least little boomlets) in practice every 10 days or so. Would you get an even bigger BOOM at taper time? I don't know, but I wonder about this kind of thing sometimes when I am feeling tired. Should I go swim another hard workout, or rest? Sometimes when I am tired and decide to do another hard workout I have a great workout, but this is not consisteltly true. Sometimes I have a terrible workout and I think to myself, "you would have been better off resting." I wish there were some way to know. This is only during periods of sustained hard training though. Usually like throws enough "unplanned rest days" (meetings etc.) into my schedule that scheduling rest days isn't an issue.
Ya, it would be great to be able to know with some certainty, but such is swimming life. I've gone through periods when I just swam slowly 99.5% of the time for several months and then all of a sudden, I start to be able to get back to swimming at a stronger pace in just 2 or 3 weeks. Due to the fact that I can never seem to tell when this might happen, my conclusion is that I should just swim as much as I want to, without holding back and only resting when I really feel the need for it. You just can't be the fastest swimmer in the pool on every 100, every workout, for years on end.
