Looking at one-hour results, and just finishing New England Masters SCY Championships at Harvard, how is it that older swimmers are getting faster and faster, and pretty much everyone is getting faster and faster compared to a few years ago when there seemed to be more mortal swimmers?
What are older (45+ women; at this point 65+ men) swimmers doing that keeps them at such elite levels? Weights? Extensive training? How much of both? How do they have jobs and families and train? The field of fast swimmers is getting deeper and deeper. Anyone have idea as to why?
I want to know the secrets. Are the people who race now self-selecting more and more as elite swimmers? Has everyone swum all their lives? I know to swim hard you have to train hard, but I am baffled by sudden increase in amazing fast times and so many records getting broken.
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Seriously though - I take it from the comments posted (by you uber fast people) that doubles would be a mistake. Would the 2 hours a day be too much? Seems reasonable for the 800/ 1500 and open water - but like I said, I don't want to overdo it!! I really do value your opinions.
In my opinion, each distance requires specific preparation in terms of pace and total time. I once tried to train for a 500 in something like three weeks, and I did fairly well, but my pacing in the race was terrible because I had not gotten used to finding the correct pace over an entire season.
If you want to do a 25k, that's a crazy long event, and it's going to require crazy long workouts to match. How can you be prepared to swim for several hours in one stretch in a race if you never do it in practice?
I wasn't joking when I said that you're training for the Tour de France. Maybe I'm wrong, but 1:09 for nearly an hour sounds like a wall-touch set to me, which is to say that it's pretty much a continuous swim. Very similar to what professional road cyclists do, if I'm not mistaken. They have to be on the road for several hours at a moderate pace in a race, so they train accordingly.
A mile is a much shorter event than the 25k, and the pace is a lot faster. That means less yardage and more speed in training. If you want to be a sprinter (and of course you do!), you should cut waayyy back, more along the lines of what the Smiths are talking about.
Seriously though - I take it from the comments posted (by you uber fast people) that doubles would be a mistake. Would the 2 hours a day be too much? Seems reasonable for the 800/ 1500 and open water - but like I said, I don't want to overdo it!! I really do value your opinions.
In my opinion, each distance requires specific preparation in terms of pace and total time. I once tried to train for a 500 in something like three weeks, and I did fairly well, but my pacing in the race was terrible because I had not gotten used to finding the correct pace over an entire season.
If you want to do a 25k, that's a crazy long event, and it's going to require crazy long workouts to match. How can you be prepared to swim for several hours in one stretch in a race if you never do it in practice?
I wasn't joking when I said that you're training for the Tour de France. Maybe I'm wrong, but 1:09 for nearly an hour sounds like a wall-touch set to me, which is to say that it's pretty much a continuous swim. Very similar to what professional road cyclists do, if I'm not mistaken. They have to be on the road for several hours at a moderate pace in a race, so they train accordingly.
A mile is a much shorter event than the 25k, and the pace is a lot faster. That means less yardage and more speed in training. If you want to be a sprinter (and of course you do!), you should cut waayyy back, more along the lines of what the Smiths are talking about.
