Race Club Article

Perhaps this black and white view is part of the difficulty. Most potential activites for children and youth are willing to offer different programs for different levels of commitment. You don't necessarily have to commit to the same amount of practice as an aspiring concert pianist to study piano. Balance can be a virtue too. You also don't have to train for the marathon, or even the 10km to train for the 100m sprint in track.

Most teams have different training groups based on ability. And of course there is always summer league for those who want just a taste of competitive swimming.

Same thing at the HS in Champaign. There is a tremendous rivalry and the meets can be very exciting. However, USA meets are not like that. Especially the big ones in Indy or Chicago where there are 15 heats of 11-12 girls in an event(can you tell I have a 12 year old?). And I used to have a boy and had to sit through all those heats...

"...because swim meets are so darn predictable." I have to question this one. Although many meets are predictable (like many football/basketball/name-your-sport games), there are the "big game"-type of meets that are completely unpredictable. I'm thinking back to high school, especially with division rivals. One year their team pulls the upset, next year our team does. One (HS) meet that comes to mind was against Spencerport. We were in their tiny pool area, and they had the place packed with loud fans. (My ears were ringing for hours after the meet.) The first place swimmers in each event were "predictable", but the meet was being decided by 4th and 5th place swimmers. Our inspirational moment came when our backstroker knocked a megaphone out of a fan's hand. (He came forward to yell at our medley relay.) My proud moment was when I out-touched their 2nd 500 swimmer (after trailing the whole race) to get 2nd place. Best time by about 5 seconds. Meet came down to the last free relay, very close race for first. (And hardly predictable...)

Originally posted by gull80 Isn't the goal of the coach to help each and every one of his swimmers achieve their full potential, whatever that may be? It seems to me that talking about "full potential" requires consideration of trade offs and balance. Michael Phelps took a year off from school to concentrate on training (leading into the Olympics), something he felt was necessary to achieve his full potential but which I would suggest is not appropriate for every swimmer. If one accepts that some trade offs with the rest of the swimmer's life should be made the question becomes where the balance should be. Perhaps there can even be a training stream for kids who want to use swimming as a lifelong health and fitness tool, or for swimmers that just want to sprint and are willing to trade off a few hundredths of a second in their races for endless hours of 10,000m aerobic development workouts.

Taking a year off to train is an extreme example; it seems as though you're proposing a two or three tiered system: obviously talented kids with Olympic potential (presumably identified through some sort of Eastern European screening process), kids who may win a scholarship to a Division I or II school, and those kids who want "swimming-lite." Life is about trade offs. If you want to swim (or dance, or play violin) and you want to do it well, you will have to give up some time at the mall or in front of the TV. Anyway, that's what I try to teach my kids--whatever the activity they choose. At a certain point, you've got to make a commitment.

And article #2. I think he makes some pretty controversial statements in this one, but it is food for thought. (For those of you asking, no I am not a Gary Hall disciple. I just like the fact that he makes you think.) www.theraceclub.net/.../index.html P.S. I also know Pierre, and like him a lot. He does have a problem with sprinters, but he can definitely make great middle distance and distance swimmers.

Sam, I'm down with you on this one. I don't endorse everything Gary does or says, but he is a terrific and constructive provocateur. Towards the end of his article, he made an observation that really turned my assumptions on their side and got me thinking: "I'm not railing against being in shape or working hard, a positive side effect from distance swimming. I do a lot of aerobic work. I just don't do it in the pool. Define aerobic work. Is it keeping your heart rate up near 200 for over twenty minutes? We do exercise that maintains a heart rate between 150 and 200 for a lot longer than that. "It takes a lot of laps to accomplish aerobic threshold if you only seek aerobic threshold through swimming. If you don't go insane first from all those laps then your shoulder will explode eventually. All those laps hurt your stroke technique, which is absolutely necessary in the 50 free. Your heart is too busy pounding away to know what exercise is making it work so hard. And it doesn't matter! You accomplish the same objective and save yourself from burnout and shoulder surgery. At the end of the season in those last 15 meters of the 100 free you'll have the finish your coach is looking for." WOW! I'm aware of some of the new thinking on dry land exercises; however, my understanding is that they target muscle strength, and not aerobic capacity. I know in my college program (a very modest Div III program 25 years or so ago), we experimented with group runs as supplementary training. However, we abandoned this experiment when it appear that developing the leg muscles for running was antagonistic to developing a strong kick. I would be interested in knowing what dry land, aerobic regime they are using. They certainly produced results in 2004. Matt

I was taught that aerobic conditioning involved three things: 1) volume of blood circulated (heart) 2) ability to add oxygen and remove CO2 (lungs) 3) ability to metabolize O2 in the muscles and remove metabolic byproducts (muscles) With this model cross training would develop the first two but might not develop the third if it didn't work the specific muscles used in swimming. That said, it's unclear to me how relevant aerobic conditioning is to a 50. It might be interesting to examine the times for the 50 and the two splits in the 100 for swimmers with different training approaches to see if there is a correlation. When discussing Thorpe's move from the middle distances into the sprints it was asserted that distance training killed sprinting speed. Is there any controversy about that? My personal experience is that I have never been able to add muscle mass during periods where I was doing heavy aerobic training, so I can imagine that such training would be detrimental to building the strength needed for sprinting.

Matt, I used to be a runner who also swam. I would run to swim practice even into my early 30s. I think that running definitely helped my lungs but I don't know about leg muscles. At Knox there was a better cross country program then swimming. Now I swim & row. I really think that rowing has helped a lot, especially with my back & shoulders. Though personally, I think that cross-training is very individualistic and dependent on what the reason the person is doing the cross training.