One of our swimmers on the Elgin Blue Wave Masters team brought up a guy who swims 14,000 yards a day each and every day to achieve his yearly total. I find this really difficult to comprehend. Has anyone heard of such swimmers?
Phew! I just wish that when we swimmer were talking about his much distance that we could use miles instead of yards/meters. I don't want to have to do the math to figure out 14,000 yards is eight miles.
Dan
Just doing the napkin math, I think during peak training I was averaging ~ 50,000 a week in college. I probably hit close to that a few times as a post grad in my mid 20s. Now on a great week I am 22-27,000 a week.
There was someone with over 2000 miles swam last year. When I see the people who are already at 75, 100+ miles 15 days into the new year, I assume they are mostly open water and marathon swimmers. To get to the 1500+ marker in a year though these people are swimming twice a day, every day, 90ish minutes each practice. If I extrapolate out what I can do in 90 minutes, and did it twice a day every day, I would average about 70,000 yards a week so 3,640,000 yards a year or 2068 miles. That's assuming I do workouts. If I just swam straight for ninety minutes (shoot me in the face that sounds awful), the yardage would be higher. And I read back over this post and say, "yeah no way in hell that is happening." Personally, my body (shoulders, and really just the left one) wouldn't hold up to that kind of punishment for 365 days. Also my wife would kill me. Don't have 3 hours a day to devote to in water training.
Yikes. Kudos to the people who pull it off!
Swim programs in the 80’s had that kind of volume, and even some elites in recent years. Bowman’s group at NBAC did like 14-16K every day. But that was with guys like Phelps. It’s not impossible, but for a masters swimmer it’s unnecessary to the point of being ludicrous.
It depends on your goals, if your goal is to swim as much as you can in a day or year, fine. If your goal is to swim fast, then I doubt this mega-yardage is especially good for that. If you are doing marathon type swims, then it probably is worthwhile. Anyone know many of these mega-yardage swimmers are making Top Ten, or All Americans?
It depends on your goals, if your goal is to swim as much as you can in a day or year, fine. If your goal is to swim fast, then I doubt this mega-yardage is especially good for that. If you are doing marathon type swims, then it probably is worthwhile. Anyone know many of these mega-yardage swimmers are making Top Ten, or All Americans?
Georgia Masters members Pat Eddy (60-64) and Chris Greene (55-59) both went over 2,000 miles last year. Chris is a marathon swimmer and doesn't compete in the pool, but Pat does. Here is his Top Ten record: www.usms.org/.../toptenind.php
I wrote profiles on both of them, if you want more info. about their backgrounds. Just let me know!
Just doing the napkin math, I think during peak training I was averaging ~ 50,000 a week in college. I probably hit close to that a few times as a post grad in my mid 20s. Now on a great week I am 22-27,000 a week.
same 10-12/day 4 days a week and then another couple days of 6-7k... and that was low compared to what I did in club before college. Now? 12-14/wk rather than per day. Come to think of it... maybe that is why I am so much slower!
same 10-12/day 4 days a week and then another couple days of 6-7k... and that was low compared to what I did in club before college. Now? 12-14/wk rather than per day. Come to think of it... maybe that is why I am so much slower!
When I was doing the napkin math I came up with the following (from my recollection):
I trained in what we called the "upper mid-distance" group. We sort of carved out the group amongst 5-6 of us who raced the 200/500 or 200s of stroke, and felt we needed more training than the typical "middle distance" group, but didn't need the 1000/1650 race specific work (or absolute volume) of the "distance" group.
M: 3k morning/7.5k afternoon (between 7-8k usually)
T: 7k afternoon
W: 4k morning/6k afternoon (Wednesdays were off the block)
H: 7k afternoon (recovery)
F: 3k morning/7.5k afternoon
S: 8k morning
10.5 + 7 + 10 + 7 + 10.5 + 8 = 53k yards per week
And that was really only from last week of September to the third week of November. Training Trip was first week of January which was a different animal unto itself, and then maybe the above formula might repeat for 2 more weeks after that and then we started winding down for conference. I would imagine over a six month period (mid-August to mid-February), we actually averaged out to closer to 40k a week. 53k was just peak, and then probably 65-70k for Training Trip week.
