Having benefitted tremendously from advice gleaned from this forum on how to swim the 200 butterfly, and having no intention of doing the 200 butterfly again for at least a year, I would now like to switch my request for strategic advice to the next event I am hoping to swim well: the 100 yard freestyle.
Over the years, I have had several coaches tell me several different things about how to race this distance, and I would like to hear what my fellow masters have found to work the best.
Here are the two main strategies I've been given:
Strategy #1: The Don't Die Strategy
Swim the first 50 as fast as you possibly can while staying smooth and under control; this means it's a little less frenetic and exhausting than an all out 50 sprint.
Swim the 3rd 25 length long and smooth, resting ever so slightly. Make sure to stretch your stroke. As you approach the final turn, pick up the pace to full sprint, do a very fast turn, and continue sprinting all out till you finish.
Strategy #2: The Don't Save Anything Strategy
This one is a little easier to remember: just sprint the whole thing as fast as you possibly can from the get go. The rationale here is that even if you die on the final length, the time you save by sprinting early will more than make up for the time you lose by dying late. The advocate of this strategy suggests that when you die, you feel like you're swimming in molasses, but the truth is, you don't really slow down as much as you feel you're slowing down, especially on a distance as "short" as a 100.
One of the good things about the 200 fly is that if you can finish that, the pain of a garden variety 100 free seems relatively less intimidating. Still, I want to do my best time, and all considerations of pain notwithstanding, does strategy #2 really work better than strategy #1?
Or is some amalgam of the two the way to go--i.e., do strategy #1 without "resting" on the third length?
Final question: I feel I am in pretty good aerobic shape now, with my times in distances of 200 and greater the best they've ever been. My 25s and 50s, however, have noticeably slowed. The 100s are still pretty good--this year's best 100 free of 52.5 is not that far off last year's best of 52.09, whereas this year's 100 fly of 59.59 is better than last year's best of 1:00.20.
I suspect that my "slow twitch" muscles are much better trained now than my "fast twitch" muscles (and at 49, I also suspect that the latter are atrophying faster than the former.) Our next meet is in about 4 weeks. Should I start doing more sprint training at this point in the season, and if so, how much? And would it make sense to do weight lifting now (I've let this slack off during the hard swimming phase of the season.)
Thanks as always for your advice, fellow swimmers. I truly appreciate it.
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Former Member
A true sprint is an event that is powered nearly entirely by the anaerobic alactic (Creatine Phosphate) system. These exertions are done at the body's maximum effort level but do not produce much or any lactic acid - hence the term "alactic" - and therefore performance is not limited by lactic acid accumulation. The CP system can provide energy at max output for about 10 seconds. Carl lewis running a 100m dash is doing a true sprint. We have no such sanctionable events in swimming.
Once the CP system is depleted, nearly all the energy being used is provided by the anaerobic-lactic (ATP) system. This system cannot produce energy as rapidly as the CP system - hence only a somewhat lower intensity of activity can be supported beyond 10 seconds or so. So the 50 in swimming is not true sprinting - but the closest thing our rulebook allows.
The ATP system also produces lactic acid and at a rate faster than the body can clear it from the muscles. Hence lactic acid accumulation. At continued maximal effort levels lactic acid will accumulate to the point that it begins to hamper performance somewhere in the 40 second range. At this point, despite your best intentions, your body will begin to cut back on the work output. Any work beyond this point will be decreasingly less intense untill you reach an activity level low enough that lactic acid can be cleared as quickly as it is produced - anaerobic threshold. If you have accumulated a very high level of lactic acid you will slow down well below anaerobic threshold - this is called dieing in a race - until the excess has been cleared sufficiently to again allow for greater exertion - second wind.
The above explains why the 100 can be successfully swum "all out" by very few people. If, at the end of your race, lactate accumulation (fatigue) is what controls your speed, rather that your conscious intentions, I will guarantee you have not swum to your fastest potential speed. You have to go out slowly enough to have conscious control of how fast you finish (and then martial those resources well enough that if you had to swim 5 yards further you would no longer be in control) to swim to your potential.
A true sprint is an event that is powered nearly entirely by the anaerobic alactic (Creatine Phosphate) system. These exertions are done at the body's maximum effort level but do not produce much or any lactic acid - hence the term "alactic" - and therefore performance is not limited by lactic acid accumulation. The CP system can provide energy at max output for about 10 seconds. Carl lewis running a 100m dash is doing a true sprint. We have no such sanctionable events in swimming.
Once the CP system is depleted, nearly all the energy being used is provided by the anaerobic-lactic (ATP) system. This system cannot produce energy as rapidly as the CP system - hence only a somewhat lower intensity of activity can be supported beyond 10 seconds or so. So the 50 in swimming is not true sprinting - but the closest thing our rulebook allows.
The ATP system also produces lactic acid and at a rate faster than the body can clear it from the muscles. Hence lactic acid accumulation. At continued maximal effort levels lactic acid will accumulate to the point that it begins to hamper performance somewhere in the 40 second range. At this point, despite your best intentions, your body will begin to cut back on the work output. Any work beyond this point will be decreasingly less intense untill you reach an activity level low enough that lactic acid can be cleared as quickly as it is produced - anaerobic threshold. If you have accumulated a very high level of lactic acid you will slow down well below anaerobic threshold - this is called dieing in a race - until the excess has been cleared sufficiently to again allow for greater exertion - second wind.
The above explains why the 100 can be successfully swum "all out" by very few people. If, at the end of your race, lactate accumulation (fatigue) is what controls your speed, rather that your conscious intentions, I will guarantee you have not swum to your fastest potential speed. You have to go out slowly enough to have conscious control of how fast you finish (and then martial those resources well enough that if you had to swim 5 yards further you would no longer be in control) to swim to your potential.
