Seems inevitable, no? Even though my practice times seem to be pretty consistent with intervals I was able to hold 5 to 7 years ago (mid to early
30's), now that I am 40, my races just seem to get slower. Its an odd scenario to be in. As an age grouper and into college, the older you got, the more you trained, the faster you swam. Now, it seems, mother nature is kicking things in reverse. While I still love to train, I'm finding less incentive to compete.
Anyone else come to this conclusion?
Part of the solution is to do race pace sets in workout to keep up your competitive fire. If you don't push your body to do more swimming at insanely fast speeds, your body won't know what to do at a swim meet because you've only been training aerobically.
Dara Torres aside, one reason I have found that people can get faster in races as they get older is because they continually work on race pace swimming (such as broken 200s), or if you're a sprinter, doing a good deal of sprinting to keep the muscles firing.
Now, I'm only entering my third year of competing, but I seem to get faster every year and I'm now 46. But I did more sprinting than aerobic work in the past year, which I think helped. And this last six months, I've been doing much more race pace work as Jeff suggests. I think it definitely paid off for me at my last meet. It hurts like hell, and it's less yardage, but it's worth it. But I can see there might be a limit on improvement at some point without expanding into other events and such. Try not to let that stop you competing, if you enjoy it.
Just in general, it seems like changing your training in some significant way might yield better results. More race pace swimming, cross training, weights, core drylands? Improving SDKs? Or are you already doing all these things? Maybe changing focus events or really focusing on just a couple events in training?
I also think that are bodies just do age; we are, to some degree, fighting the aging process with training. So, it's probably a good idea to keep a set of PBs in each masters age group. I certainly plan on doing that. Although, George, 40 is NOT elderly!!! That's a terrible mentality. :thhbbb:
Part of the solution is to do race pace sets in workout to keep up your competitive fire. If you don't push your body to do more swimming at insanely fast speeds, your body won't know what to do at a swim meet because you've only been training aerobically.
Dara Torres aside, one reason I have found that people can get faster in races as they get older is because they continually work on race pace swimming (such as broken 200s), or if you're a sprinter, doing a good deal of sprinting to keep the muscles firing.
Now, I'm only entering my third year of competing, but I seem to get faster every year and I'm now 46. But I did more sprinting than aerobic work in the past year, which I think helped. And this last six months, I've been doing much more race pace work as Jeff suggests. I think it definitely paid off for me at my last meet. It hurts like hell, and it's less yardage, but it's worth it. But I can see there might be a limit on improvement at some point without expanding into other events and such. Try not to let that stop you competing, if you enjoy it.
Just in general, it seems like changing your training in some significant way might yield better results. More race pace swimming, cross training, weights, core drylands? Improving SDKs? Or are you already doing all these things? Maybe changing focus events or really focusing on just a couple events in training?
I also think that are bodies just do age; we are, to some degree, fighting the aging process with training. So, it's probably a good idea to keep a set of PBs in each masters age group. I certainly plan on doing that. Although, George, 40 is NOT elderly!!! That's a terrible mentality. :thhbbb:
