I'm curious how people go about deciding which events they will train for and enter in meets. Do people pick events they enjoy swimming or events they do well at or events they think they can improve at or...? Is there any way to determine which events you are likely to be best at? I've always thought of myself as a distance person, mostly because I've never been particularly fast, but as my technique improves I seem to be getting faster in the shorter distances more than the longer distances, even though I am training for distance! After doing some timed sprints this week my coach told me he thought he could reduce my 50fr time by 3-5 seconds if I wanted to train for that. Naturally that idea appeals to me but I had never considered concentrating on free sprints before. There seem to be several ways I could go that look promising and I'm not sure what to concentrate on, or even on what basis to choose!
I'm also curious to what extent people train specifically for their specialty events. A lot of the people in our club only swim during the club workouts and so don't really tailor their training for specific events, at least to the extent that those of us who also train on our own have the opportunity to do.
Two of the 5 events I swim are the same in all meets, but the other 3 events I select are varied. The choice of others usually depends on what the meet order is.
Two events I always swim I try to train for. The others are "fun" events. My selections are based on both criteria you ask about: the ones I am good at and ones I like to swim ( ie. which I stink at.)
Our coaching program usually allows some individual choice of stroke to concentrate on during regular workouts , and we have designated distance lanes one workout a week (which you will never find me in). But I still try to have one workout on my own during the week to concentrate on what I want to.
Two of the 5 events I swim are the same in all meets, but the other 3 events I select are varied. The choice of others usually depends on what the meet order is.
Two events I always swim I try to train for. The others are "fun" events. My selections are based on both criteria you ask about: the ones I am good at and ones I like to swim ( ie. which I stink at.)
Our coaching program usually allows some individual choice of stroke to concentrate on during regular workouts , and we have designated distance lanes one workout a week (which you will never find me in). But I still try to have one workout on my own during the week to concentrate on what I want to.
