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.
Bert--
You may well have seen this already, but on the old USMS forum, there was a discussion of how times change with age. It culminated with a great utility tool that is posted at:
http://n3times.com/swimtimes/
You can enter your age and your current time, and it will compute your predicted future and past times in two ways--the first using some sort of American formula, the second using a more generous Finn formula.
It only works for freestyle, but I tried out your times for fly anyhow, and this is what it computed:
47 0:58.72 ( 0:58.72)
48 0:59.02 ( 0:59.10)
49 0:59.34 ( 0:59.50)
50 0:59.68 ( 0:59.91)
51 1:00.05 ( 1:00.34)
52 1:00.44 ( 1:00.79)
53 1:00.87 ( 1:01.26)
54 1:01.32 ( 1:01.75)
55 1:01.81 ( 1:02.26)
56 1:02.33 ( 1:02.79)
57 1:02.89 ( 1:03.34)
58 1:03.49 ( 1:03.92)
59 1:04.14 ( 1:04.53)
60 1:04.83 ( 1:05.17)
61 1:05.57 ( 1:05.84)
62 1:06.37 ( 1:06.53)
63 1:07.22 ( 1:07.27)
Thus, according to this means of computation, you are swimming faster at 63 than you did at 47! Or perhaps to put it another way, you are swimming like a 57 year old version of yourself! Either way, congratulations.
By the way, do you have any idea what is going on physiologically during your 100 strategy? That is to say, why does taking a hair off the first 50 save you from dramatically dying on the second 50? I 've heard that resistance increases exponentially with speed, so perhaps that slight slowing down reduces the effort significantly.
Anyhow, I will use your strategy the next time I swim the 100--
Thanks.
Jim
Bert--
You may well have seen this already, but on the old USMS forum, there was a discussion of how times change with age. It culminated with a great utility tool that is posted at:
http://n3times.com/swimtimes/
You can enter your age and your current time, and it will compute your predicted future and past times in two ways--the first using some sort of American formula, the second using a more generous Finn formula.
It only works for freestyle, but I tried out your times for fly anyhow, and this is what it computed:
47 0:58.72 ( 0:58.72)
48 0:59.02 ( 0:59.10)
49 0:59.34 ( 0:59.50)
50 0:59.68 ( 0:59.91)
51 1:00.05 ( 1:00.34)
52 1:00.44 ( 1:00.79)
53 1:00.87 ( 1:01.26)
54 1:01.32 ( 1:01.75)
55 1:01.81 ( 1:02.26)
56 1:02.33 ( 1:02.79)
57 1:02.89 ( 1:03.34)
58 1:03.49 ( 1:03.92)
59 1:04.14 ( 1:04.53)
60 1:04.83 ( 1:05.17)
61 1:05.57 ( 1:05.84)
62 1:06.37 ( 1:06.53)
63 1:07.22 ( 1:07.27)
Thus, according to this means of computation, you are swimming faster at 63 than you did at 47! Or perhaps to put it another way, you are swimming like a 57 year old version of yourself! Either way, congratulations.
By the way, do you have any idea what is going on physiologically during your 100 strategy? That is to say, why does taking a hair off the first 50 save you from dramatically dying on the second 50? I 've heard that resistance increases exponentially with speed, so perhaps that slight slowing down reduces the effort significantly.
Anyhow, I will use your strategy the next time I swim the 100--
Thanks.
Jim
