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.
Parents
Former Member
~~ does sprint training ...help your body get better at clearing lactic acid quickly? Or does it help you get better at tolerating it? Or something else? ~~
Yes, yes and yes. The third aspect is that it helps to build your body's ability to produce energy at high rates. It also allows you to bring more and more productive muscle fibres into play - the "ramp effect" in muscle fibre recruitment.
~~ I know this is difficult to do, but could you translate the physiology as best you can into a 25 by 25 recommendation for pacing the 100? ~~
In general, you want to have a fast start, a period of easy speed and an "all out" finish.
Start planning your race from the finish and work backwards.
Through experimentation (ie. you gotta swim some races with a plan and analysis) determine how much of the back end of your race you are capable of going "all out" on and still be in control of your speed and DPS - almost certainly at least a 25, most likely more than that. For most people this is a point BEFORE their brain is confident of - ie you need to be "risky" in selecting this point as you experiment. You'll also find that this point moves around depending on what kind of training (and how much) you've been doing. For instance, if you are overtraining you'll find this distance gets shorter and shorter.
Let's assume you have determined, through such experimentation that you can go "all out" from no farther than about the 65 yard mark. Prior to that point you want to be swimming with "easy speed" - the fastest pace you can go that still allows you to have "something left" at the "all out" breakpoint. For some people this may be very slightly slower than their "all out" pace - for others there may be a bigger difference in speed. Your technique will determine how fast you can go at submaximal levels. In either case it will be faster swimming that you are capable of after you start to die due to LA accumulation.
Also consider tweaking the above to use the CP system to its fullest capacity by sprinting 100% out of the blocks for 8-10 seconds (because you actually start swimming AFTER the start this will get some people all the way to the first turn with great momentum) before settling into "easy speed" swimming. The greater your percentage of FTa muscle fibres the more likely this part of the strategy is to be beneficial to your race.
That's very general. Mike Collins does a great presentation on race strategy that elaborates on the above. Mebbe he'll post a response here too.
~~ does sprint training ...help your body get better at clearing lactic acid quickly? Or does it help you get better at tolerating it? Or something else? ~~
Yes, yes and yes. The third aspect is that it helps to build your body's ability to produce energy at high rates. It also allows you to bring more and more productive muscle fibres into play - the "ramp effect" in muscle fibre recruitment.
~~ I know this is difficult to do, but could you translate the physiology as best you can into a 25 by 25 recommendation for pacing the 100? ~~
In general, you want to have a fast start, a period of easy speed and an "all out" finish.
Start planning your race from the finish and work backwards.
Through experimentation (ie. you gotta swim some races with a plan and analysis) determine how much of the back end of your race you are capable of going "all out" on and still be in control of your speed and DPS - almost certainly at least a 25, most likely more than that. For most people this is a point BEFORE their brain is confident of - ie you need to be "risky" in selecting this point as you experiment. You'll also find that this point moves around depending on what kind of training (and how much) you've been doing. For instance, if you are overtraining you'll find this distance gets shorter and shorter.
Let's assume you have determined, through such experimentation that you can go "all out" from no farther than about the 65 yard mark. Prior to that point you want to be swimming with "easy speed" - the fastest pace you can go that still allows you to have "something left" at the "all out" breakpoint. For some people this may be very slightly slower than their "all out" pace - for others there may be a bigger difference in speed. Your technique will determine how fast you can go at submaximal levels. In either case it will be faster swimming that you are capable of after you start to die due to LA accumulation.
Also consider tweaking the above to use the CP system to its fullest capacity by sprinting 100% out of the blocks for 8-10 seconds (because you actually start swimming AFTER the start this will get some people all the way to the first turn with great momentum) before settling into "easy speed" swimming. The greater your percentage of FTa muscle fibres the more likely this part of the strategy is to be beneficial to your race.
That's very general. Mike Collins does a great presentation on race strategy that elaborates on the above. Mebbe he'll post a response here too.
