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

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.

people who decide to engage in an activity daily (especially a skill-building activity, though that is not under discussion here) and use their time efficiently in such pursuit are not nuts, psychos, skimping on their family's needs, have issues, and so forth I will step up my efforts to change your mind on this! Non-sequitur directions to a pool that doesn't exist didn't do it, so I will have to come up with something better. :santa3:

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! Haters gonna hate. Keep swimming! :applaud:

People who spend 2 hours a day practicing an instrument don't get asked, "Do you read?" "What do you do about work/life balance?" I think it all depends on where your priorities lie. I swim an hour 4 or 5 days a week - less when it's cold out. My main goal in swimming is to enjoy it and use it as a vehicle for health, focus, mood management and quality of life. It is my "down time." In addition to swimming, I work hard at two careers, travel quite a bit, read a couple of books a week, and spend a lot of time hiking and doing activities with my family. But I admire people who work really hard to achieve goals and can put in those kind of miles. You are the ones who hit the wall before me at Nationals :)

I have respect for anyone swimming that much for sure. I am merely curious about their training schedules and what they're training for!

I * GTD is about the free swimsuit at 500 miles. I'm cheap. I like free stuff. The rest of the miles are gravy. Oh, I definitely joined the challenge for the prizes!

Dude! Like Pete's pretend celebration was the most awesome E-ver... Are we doing it again next year? At midnight on Dec. 31, I donned my GTD swim cap and hit the noise makers and fireworks pretty hard... my ears are still ringing; oh, wait, that's not pretend... uh-oh.

have respect for anyone swimming that much for sure. I am merely curious about their training schedules and what they're training for! I'm just training to make sure that I don't drown if I ever fall off a boat in the middle of the ocean and have to swim 10 miles to the nearest island... if I could do the ten miles as IM, well, that just gives me a better chance, right? Saturday's workout will be 5 x thru (5 x 200 free + 400 IM)--not including warm-up and cool-down.

I will make the general point explicitly: people who decide to engage in an activity daily (especially a skill-building activity, though that is not under discussion here) and use their time efficiently in such pursuit are not nuts, psychos, skimping on their family's needs, have issues, and so forth, as this and another recent thread implied. I regret that Go the Distance should inspire such a conversation. I see a couple cracks about these people being "nuts" but it all seems pretty lighthearted to me. The original question is valid and was not negative toward these "high mileage" people in any way. Just a simple question about how these people are training to rack up that kind of mileage. And my personal feeling is most of the high mileage types are training like John K. They get in the pool nearly every day, start swimming and keep swimming for a long time. Pretty simple, really.

Kudos to all the hi-milers out there. I peronally have a hard time believing that anyone would inflate their mileage in GTD. I can't see why you would do that. When I enter my workouts it asks for time spent. It would be interesting to see this total up and listed along with the mileage in the total results.