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.
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.
No way; wherever did you get this idea? TdF and pro cyclists train MUCH MUCH longer than 1 hour a day and they do NOT limit their work to moderate pace. Their races aren't like that either, lots of changes in pace and they need to be able to respond accordingly. So they mix in pacing at different levels too, all the way from sprinting, hill repeats, tempo workouts, time trialing, etc.
Look, everyone: I understand and agree with the value of race-pace work. I really do, and I do it myself. But you need to acknowledge that aerobic training has value too. That kind of training has produced some very very fast swimmers over the decades. I think both types of training is valuable to most swimmers unless you really want to specialize in 50s only (or 25k races only).
(S)he: you are having success across the board and presumably enjoying yourself. I only somewhat buy Paul's comment about the value of specialization; then again, I try to do too many events too and for the same reason: I don't want to be bored.
But regardless, this is masters. As long as you keep yourself injury-free, train how you like. If you want to specialize later, go for it...even if you go back over to the dark side (ie, sprinting)!
Remember: you should have a "long haul" mentality. Hopefully you will be swimming for a long time. Variety is the spice of life. If you want to specialize at some point, maybe you can try one event or stroke for awhile, then switch to another.
Good luck!
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.
No way; wherever did you get this idea? TdF and pro cyclists train MUCH MUCH longer than 1 hour a day and they do NOT limit their work to moderate pace. Their races aren't like that either, lots of changes in pace and they need to be able to respond accordingly. So they mix in pacing at different levels too, all the way from sprinting, hill repeats, tempo workouts, time trialing, etc.
Look, everyone: I understand and agree with the value of race-pace work. I really do, and I do it myself. But you need to acknowledge that aerobic training has value too. That kind of training has produced some very very fast swimmers over the decades. I think both types of training is valuable to most swimmers unless you really want to specialize in 50s only (or 25k races only).
(S)he: you are having success across the board and presumably enjoying yourself. I only somewhat buy Paul's comment about the value of specialization; then again, I try to do too many events too and for the same reason: I don't want to be bored.
But regardless, this is masters. As long as you keep yourself injury-free, train how you like. If you want to specialize later, go for it...even if you go back over to the dark side (ie, sprinting)!
Remember: you should have a "long haul" mentality. Hopefully you will be swimming for a long time. Variety is the spice of life. If you want to specialize at some point, maybe you can try one event or stroke for awhile, then switch to another.
Good luck!
