Training Long Term

This weekend I'm swimming a 5K OW near Atlanta. That will be it for OW this year, but I'm doing it. Cool! I'll see you there! I have swum the 3K & 1K over the past few years, so I'll be there swimming it once again. Unfortunately, the weather conditions will NOT be ideal: hot weather and hot water. :whiteflag: Sorry for the :hijack:​, folks!

I'd like to know how to maintain motivation when you're in an enforced layoff. I'm having surgery on my shoulder and the doc said it will be from 3-6 months before I can swim. I can water walk (maybe I'll join the shower cap brigade, LOL), deep water jog in a couple of months, but no freestyle or anything that involves using my shoulder until it's well healed. I'm trying to get as much in as I can until then. But I can't even imagine what it's going to be like to get back into the pool after such a long layoff. I'm back swimming after just a couple of months and I'm nowhere near even doing a mile like I was when the shoulder issue started. :badday:

I'd like to know how to maintain motivation when you're in an enforced layoff. I'm having surgery on my shoulder and the doc said it will be from 3-6 months before I can swim. I can water walk (maybe I'll join the shower cap brigade, LOL), deep water jog in a couple of months, but no freestyle or anything that involves using my shoulder until it's well healed. I'm trying to get as much in as I can until then. But I can't even imagine what it's going to be like to get back into the pool after such a long layoff. I'm back swimming after just a couple of months and I'm nowhere near even doing a mile like I was when the shoulder issue started. :badday: Ohhh NOOO! I'm sorry to hear that, Denise. :bighug: I can relate only TOO well, as you know, since I had hip surgery this past December. I can make a suggestion based on recent experience. Set a post-surgery goal to look forward to achieving. Although I had to give up on the idea of going to the National Senior Games (three of my qualified events were breaststroke, and I was only recently able to start breaststroke kicking), I knew I could work towards competing at one of my favorite events: Georgia State Games Open Water Swim (3K & 1K races). Having a goal kept me motivated and gave me something specific to work for in physical therapy. For you, it may be swimming a mile. As soon as you have clearance, DO get back in the water to walk, jog, play, whatever. Anything you do to stay fit will help make the transition back to swimming easier. When is your surgery? Good luck! :agree:

Thanks, Elaine: I have not scheduled the surgery yet, but it looks like sometime in August. I'm not looking forward to it, but I am looking forward to not being in constant discomfort. Thank you for the encouragement.

Essentially "taking a break" from swimming and doing something else for a while. If you've done that has it made you come back more motivated or did it just make it even harder to get back in the pool? yes i have done that twice. June 2011 - shoulder surgery 2 anchors for a SLAP tear - kinda had to take a break and sit on the couch for a while and eat ice cream. and May 2013 - shoulder surgery AFRIGGENGIN - bicep tenodesis - more sitting less doing and lots of ice cream got the fattest i have ever been. urrrppp! i would like to HIGHLY suggest NOT taking this approach. it hellasucks

- change your mindset, stop beeing result-orientated. - get a new spirit and become a progress-swimmer: every moment in your life is a chance to grow up in a spiritually way. - The spirtually way is the only way to become a real human. Else your a clone of your society and environment. - Every workout is a step in the direction to achieve your full potential of body, mind and soul. - you have to forget about your past and focus on the moment (See the book Eckhart Tolle: the power of present). - Where you are now, is the result of your progress in the past but you can`t change it now. You have to look forward. - Forget about your goals also. Goals are brain-orientated and are always bad for your soul-freedom. Let it go. - Your only goal is to become who you are! you have to change your point of view of the whole society ********, who is leading your in the wrong direction. - learn about the way to "let-it-go". Let-it-go is the most difficult part of the spirtually way... - The power to change somethings in your life has always the most drag and resistance.

The problem with taking breaks from swimming altogether is that it is easier to get out of swimming shape and harder to get back into it after some time away. I know you said you were more interested in varying the amount of time spent in the pool as opposed to hearing about training variations, but maybe your break needs to be in the form of different goals for swimming, like what Swimosaur was describing. If your goal has been to get in the mileage in the past, maybe your new focus can be on technique work and increasing efficiency. Given what you've described and the fact that you've had a previous shoulder injury, learning new drills and techniques specific to your needs can definitely help stave off future injuries and give some variety which will in turn (hopefully) renew your motivation to train. There are also other ways to take a break from your usual swim pattern without actually staying away from the water. You can focus on open water (if you don't already), or you can even try something like a swimming holiday. SwimTrek does great trips like this. You've always given such consistently great advice on this forum - hopefully all of the great advice you're receiving on this thread will be helpful in getting your motivation back!

I've been swimming masters now for well over a decade ... how do YOU train long term? I wish I had this problem! I'm about 60% of the way there. With that disclaimer, I have some pwb-like longer range goals. As a kid, the longest range goal you get is "kill the focus event(s) at the taper meet at the end of the season". Maybe "make trials cuts". As masters, we have the luxury of thinking bigger. I want to swim every event in competition. Even the 50 ***, eww. The specific goal is, "swim every event at least once in each course in each age group". So, at the end of the age group, I should have at least one stupid time in the 50 *** in SCY, LCM, and SCM. A supersized checkoff challenge. Simpler and shorter-range: "Swim at least one meet in each of SCY, LCM, SCM, and OW every year". This weekend I'm swimming a 5K OW near Atlanta. That will be it for OW this year, but I'm doing it. More complex and longer-range: "Swim in a FINA Masters World Championships" (done); "Swim the Borboleta" (a 1650 butterfly event offered every spring by the Riconada Masters); "Swim a 1500 LCM backstroke in Australia" (and as many of those ridiculously long events as possible); "Go snorkeling in the Great Blue Hole in Belize"; and "Swim in a finswimming meet". That may require another trip to Europe. Oh, too bad. You'll notice that "swim the English Channel", "swim an ice mile", and "swim an OW 25K" does not appear on any of my lists. That's very much on purpose! I don't want to do any of those crazy things! That's my 2 cents.

Many of you have suggested training variations, but what I'm really looking for is whether varying the amount of time and/or concentration spent on swimming has worked well for you. Yes, it's worked well. Also, it's life. I swam in my first Masters meet 20 years ago, when I was 27. At the time, I had a nothing job, which meant that I had plenty of time for sports but not plenty of money. I ran and swam, and did some hiking, and tried pretty unsuccessfully to learn to cross-country ski (back when we had snow in the winter in California). A few years later I went back to school to get a professional degree. I had access to a gym, and I had a lot of discretionary time, and my swim teammates were a delightful group of people totally unconnected with school. So I set and achieved some more serious swimming goals. My swimming focus then was mostly on open water, because it was new to me as an adult but turned out to be a good fit. When I finished school in 2000 I did a post-graduate fellowship in a city that had a very strong running community. I used that opportunity to improve my running, and I set and achieved some running goals while keeping up swimming as a sideline. I was really glad I had kept up swimming when I injured a knee and had to stop running. Then I started working in earnest in 2001 and I didn't really have time for anything else hard. Plus, in 2004 I developed a pretty serious neck problem, relating to a congenital spinal deformity. I had to stop swimming entirely for a while because I could not turn my head to either side. And even when I could start swimming again, I had no mental energy for goal-setting or competition. I thought for a while that I would never race any more. But eventually my neck got strong enough that I could swim well, and I began to feel enough mastery of my job that I started itching for some new challenges. I re-focused on swimming and swam faster in my early 40s than I had in my late 20s. I swam my first 10K a few years ago, too. For five or six years, I had all kinds of ambition and I felt really strong. Now I'm in a lull. My work took over my life and I had to dial everything else way back. Swim practice became more like going for a nice walk than like working out. I'm trying to re-balance, although I'm also wondering whether I might be able to address my leg problems so that I can resume running. If you like any other sports, do those for a while. Learn a new sport. Or just dial your physical activity back to maintenance mode and focus on something else entirely for recreation. Your motivation for everything will ebb and flow.

Hey Kirk! I was starting to get bored with the swimming routine about 10 years ago and decided to add ice hockey as cross-training. Its a totally different experience and its been a fun 10 years on the ice making new friends and enemies every year. Thankfully, I'm still improving in both forms of water (frozen and liquid), and have started skipping swimming more often when a hockey/swim conflict arrives. The last several years I've gotten bored of training for the 400/500 free (and other distance free) and been training mostly for the 100 fly and 1/200 IMs. Setting the same goal (4:59.99 500 free) and failing every year was wearing on me. Additionally, a lot of our workouts in the last 4 years or so have not had a lot of longer swims in practice, instead focusing on shorter, pace-oriented stuff. More conducive to something like the a 200 IM. Like you, I've also seen a decline in annual mileage - down from ~450 to about 400. And the last ~18mo, we've been taking extended post-season breaks for the first time. However, in that time, I've managed to build a respectable breaststroke and am still being challenged by the blue muppet to try to stay with her in the backstroke. There are still a few events that are consistent with ~2005 muppet, but this shift/branching out continues to yield best times all over the board (except in the distance free, which hasn't been swum in a while). I've not questioned the breaks, lower volume, change in distance, skipping practice - all due to the results. That's been MY experience. As for advice, it seems the common theme here is a new goal in the water. When I met the blue muppet, all she did was 100/200 free and back. It took a few years of my nudging, but she finally branched out to the 50s of those, and then after a few more years of more intense nagging, she's developed a killer 1/200 IM. All this while continuing to kick butt in backstroke (best times in 100/200 this spring) and while she doesn't do much individual event free, she did have the fastest free split of anyone on our team in the 200 IM at nationals. Her: 29.12 1:04.27(35.15) 1:45.34(41.07) 2:16.07(30.73) Me: 27.22 1:00.43(33.21) 1:37.21(36.78) 2:09.14(31.93) oops - hey it was the last event, i was tired!