How many here are sprinters and how many long distance swimmers?

What about a category for long distance swimmers who want to be sprinters? There was a saying, "When the going gets tough the sprinters get out."

Or the sprinters that want to be distance swimmers? That's what I thought I was - I told myself that I just couldn't make it to practice enough, and that I was trapped at the

phil-- can you explain the details of this test you took? does it involve muscle fiber biopsying, blood tests, or anything else that might be construed as painful? does Ronco make a home test model? also, please explain the normal levels of minimolage (or whatever mmole stands for) in distance and sprint swimmers respectively.

Hi Jim, Here is a website that I found after a fairly quick search - there is probably a lot more out there: www.lactate.com/.../swtstres.htm Anyway, the test is for something called 'lactate' which has some relationship to the 'lactic acid' that swimmers talk about. Lactate is created by muscle activity, the more intense the activity, the more lactate. The better your body is at removing lactate, the less you will have. If you have a lot of it your muscles stop working so well or as efficiently - you lose strength and feel bad. I know that at the end of a 200 fly race I have a lot of lactate (one of my favorite racing stories - I swam my first 200 fly as a master, and went out in a nice 58+ sec. I came back in 1:10+. I could not turn my arms over when I reached the last flag (more accurately, my arms would not turn over), so I kicked the rest of the way to the wall. I had a *lot* of lactate. (and the timer said "you would have done much better if you had taken a couple more strokes.")) Anyway, it is physiologically impossible to operate for any length of time with a lot of lactate in you body. The critical amount is said to be (though the actual number looks somewhat arbitrary to me) 4 milli mole per (liter, I think) of blood. Below that level, you are fine, above that your performance will degrade, until your muscle activity is low enough so that your body can clear the excess amount out. On the other hand, large concentrations can be tolerated for a short amount of time, particularly if the peak occurs at the *end* of a race, when the finish corresponds to when your body needs to rest. So distance swimmers and sprint swimmers will train for different lactate profiles during their swim. Distance swimmers will want to swim at a sustainable pace, one that does not force their lactate to get too high. Sprinters will want to swim such that their lactate peaks at the end of their race, and the larger concentration they can tolerate before their muscles shut down, the better. In really short races it does not matter so much - there is little time for the lactate to build up, so the more power you can apply the better. This also has a lot to do with how to pace a 200 - if your lactate reaches its maximum concentration at the 100, you are in trouble. So in the test I took, the person tested swims a 200 free at an easy pace. the swimmer notes his/her time and heart rate, and someone else pricks an ear and takes a small blood sample. There is a neato device that displays your lactate concentrations in only a few seconds. This is repeated 4 more times, with each swim being faster than the one before, until the last one which is as fast as you can go. five minutes after the last swim, the lactate is taken for the last time. At the end the lactate concentration is plotted against the swim velocity. This curve is critical. The velocity at which the lactate concentration equals 4 mmole is called the swimmers 'threshold', the speed that can be maintained almost indefinitely. (and until now I thought 'threshold' was the threshold for tossing ones cookies - no wonder I thought threshold sets were so hard. Now I know, at least now that I am resigned to being a sprinter, that it is that pace that leaves one feeling good about the world after the workout (it hasn't happened very often to me)). (Have I really typed so much?) Anyway, the curves of sprinters and distance swimmers can be very different. A distance swimmer's lactate will stay low throughout most of the descending set. Once it gets past threshold, however, it does not get much higher and the swimmer quickly tires and can not go much faster. Think of a pretty flat, horizontal curve with a little upward curve at the end. However, the high lactate level quickly falls with rest after the last swim. A sprinter, however, can easily get his/her lactate above threshold and swim considerably faster than threshold velocity. Think of a curve that heads off at a 45 degree angle. Often the peak lactate will be considerably higher than that of a distance swimmer. The lactate may not clear as quickly with rest as it does with a distance swimmer. I think ones curve is influenced both by talent (type of muscle?) and by training. A swimmers threshold has a significant influence on how one trains - swimming at threshold is good for training the body to remove lactate and improving the cardiovascular system in certain ways, swimming faster than threshold less so. In my test my lactate went above threshold very soon, and my peak of 16 mmoles caused a lot of discussion among the experienced testers. It may be fairly high for 45 year-old masters swimmers, but is similar to that of more elite and younger swimmers (but happened *way* to the left (that is, slower velocity.) Most of the other people I talked to about their test managed to get to 10 mmoles, but some less than that, and few more. I've written enough, but this explains a lot about how distance and sprint swimmers swim workouts differently. It also makes it clear that the mild contempt that gull80 has for sprinters may not be appropriate. I mean, who works out at their pain threshold more often?

I wish I would have had the money at the time to take that test with you Phil. I have no idea what type of swimmer I am. I swim all distances, all events. I tend to do comparatively better in the 200 strokes, 400IM and 500 Freestyle, so I guess I would be a middle distance swimmer. This year when I did the 1650 Butterfly I trimmed 45 seconds off of my last years time and felt pretty good afterwards. It could have something to do with going from 254K yards last February to 301K this year but should there be that much of a difference?

I've always been lead to understand that we are all born with either fast twitch/white muscle fiber or slow twitch/red muscle fiber. That being said, sprinters can generate explosive bursts of speed that are limited to the short distance events. Whereas the distance swimmers can maintain a race pace for over half an hour before they finally wear out. It's usually a rare occasion to see a swimmer cross over from sprint events to long distance and vice versa. But putting sports physiology aside,...spartan like training can bring about phenomenal performances irregardless of the fiber theory. For example, an exception to the rule would be Tom Dolan,.. a virtual animal in the water. His five hundred yard record stands untouched. And the splits were broken down with a 47 on the first hundred and 49 and change for the following four. His fifty time was also one of the fastest ever recorded at 19 plus. Here's a unique case of someone excelling at both sprinting and distance swims. P.S. Peter...you are an animal. 1650 fly!!!!!????

Phil, Where did you take the test? I would like to take one. I live in the same area as you. thanks for an interesting topic. Mark Norman

Interesting topic ... takes me back to undergraduate physiology lessons. Just one comment. When lactate (in truth, I understand that it's a build up of hydrogen ions rather than true lactic acid, but heck, what's in a name?!) is produced by the body, you can chart the increasing levels in your peripheral blood over time. I note the last post mentioned having blood drawn after each swim ... crucially, I'd be interested to know how long after each swim had been completed that blood was taken. When I was doing testing in late 1980s, the consensus of opinion was that peak levels were seen in peripheral blood samples (e.g. finger or earlobe stick) around 7 minutes after the exercise had ceased. Alex If memory serves me well, I believe Maglischo's Swimming Faster contains a fair amount of info. about lactate testing.

Actually it was more like envy rather than contempt. I mean, 1000 or 1650 yards of pain vs. 50 or 100 yards? Anyway, lactate and lactic acid are one and the same. It's the byproduct of anaerobic metabolism which begins when the muscle cells are deprived of oxygen. Do these results reflect differences in training, in which case a distance swimmer could become a sprinter?

I understand your problem with 200 yard swims, Phil. Mine is with breastroke. I should be doing around 3:25 to 3:35 given my times in the 50 yard and the 100 yard. I think that there were a few factors that day why I swam a 3:43.98. One the wind had made me have a bad cough before the 50 yard, I had to find into a small place at the meet to stop from coughing. I had trouble breathing and came up real fast on the underwater pull since I lack oxgenpr Second, I already swam the 100 yard breastroke and 50 yard breastoke that day and my legs were tired. Thirdly, I go out slow and don't know how to pace it. At a short course meters I went out slow too but I spilt it much better and I was able to stay down longer on the truns and it was the first event that day. I did the meter swim at 3:53.85 only 10 seconds slower than the yard time. It hard for us when we don't swim breastroke or butterfly that much in races at 200 yards how to pace the race.