People who are already over 100 and 200 miles for the year?!

Hi! I joined the USMS FLOG (love the acronym...) at the end of January. I am excited about the prizes for various milestones! However, I noticed some people are already at 100 or 200 miles for the year. Holy moly! I thought I swam a lot! Are any of these people reading? Why such high yardage? How do you structure your week? Singles, doubles? Intrigued. Allison
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  • so I guess you're calling me a liar? At 59 I can't compete with the likes of you "fast" swimmers and I do it to stay fit and only about 4000 yds an hour! If you don't believe me, spend a wonderful week in Greensburg Pa, a join me!Just some quick calculations--let's say these top 1% folks are swimming two hours a day, seven days a week. That would conceivably be in the ballpark of 8000 yards a day (assuming they are swimming mostly free, and swimming moderate paced sets) and 56,000 yards a week. At 56,000 yards a week, that would put these folks at ~364,000 yards on the year (6.5 weeks x 56,000 yards). That comes out to ~207 miles year to date. That seems pretty achievable to me. To note, I'm not one of those folks, seeing as I'm only sitting at about 60 miles so far. Still, going back to John K, his results seem pretty out there. He hit 200 miles on 1/30, and hit 311 on 2/13? 111 miles in 14 days? That would imply that he averaged ~13,950 yards a day. While that is certainly theoretically feasible, I personally find it a stretch to think that someone can spend 3-4 hours (or more, depending on their pace) in the pool day in and day out. We've got an English Channel, former pro OW swimmer on our team, and a very heavy day for him tops out at around a 14,000, and he can't hit yardages like that every day. His average workout is around a 10,000, I believe. On the other end of the spectrum, the longest pool workout he's told me about was a 22,000 (10x1000, 8x1500), but he did that years ago. Not to disparage any of the high mileage GTD swimmers, by any means! I just find it very peculiar that they can devote as much time in the pool day in and day out as their recorded distances would seem to require.
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  • so I guess you're calling me a liar? At 59 I can't compete with the likes of you "fast" swimmers and I do it to stay fit and only about 4000 yds an hour! If you don't believe me, spend a wonderful week in Greensburg Pa, a join me!Just some quick calculations--let's say these top 1% folks are swimming two hours a day, seven days a week. That would conceivably be in the ballpark of 8000 yards a day (assuming they are swimming mostly free, and swimming moderate paced sets) and 56,000 yards a week. At 56,000 yards a week, that would put these folks at ~364,000 yards on the year (6.5 weeks x 56,000 yards). That comes out to ~207 miles year to date. That seems pretty achievable to me. To note, I'm not one of those folks, seeing as I'm only sitting at about 60 miles so far. Still, going back to John K, his results seem pretty out there. He hit 200 miles on 1/30, and hit 311 on 2/13? 111 miles in 14 days? That would imply that he averaged ~13,950 yards a day. While that is certainly theoretically feasible, I personally find it a stretch to think that someone can spend 3-4 hours (or more, depending on their pace) in the pool day in and day out. We've got an English Channel, former pro OW swimmer on our team, and a very heavy day for him tops out at around a 14,000, and he can't hit yardages like that every day. His average workout is around a 10,000, I believe. On the other end of the spectrum, the longest pool workout he's told me about was a 22,000 (10x1000, 8x1500), but he did that years ago. Not to disparage any of the high mileage GTD swimmers, by any means! I just find it very peculiar that they can devote as much time in the pool day in and day out as their recorded distances would seem to require.
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