Much has been discussed on this topic but i wanted to revisit it after watching the track & field championships and remembering debates about how much pool training time swimmers put in relative to a runner competing in the equivalent event (a 400m runner to 100m swimmer).
What got my attention on this again was a recent article in Men's Fitness about Jeremy Wariner, specifically his training week during mid-season:
M= 200's: 8 x 200's two minutes followed by 40 yd sprints w/20 seconds rest
T= 350m: 2 x 350's followed by 1 x 300, one minute rest then a 100m to simulate the end of the race
W= 450m: 2 x 450's each under 1:00 with 9 minutes rest between each
Th= 90m: Recovery day each run in an "X" pattern
F= 100m: last run of the week is multiple 100m sprints
That's an insanely lower amount of training time than even i put in....Ande & Jazz come to mind.
More of this in an excellent article:
"Elite coaching special - Clyde Hart coach to Michael Johnson and Jeremy Wariner"
Here's are a couple of excerpt:
Clyde believes the principles of training are the same for many events: "I trained Michael Johnson like I trained a four minute miler. A four minute miler was doing a lot of the same things Michael Johnson was - a lot of the same things in training but more of them.
"The longest workout we have ever done - not counting warm up and warm down - would be under 20min, I think we have never worked more than 20min. That's not counting the Fall phase.”
So here's my challenge...I'm going to pick one of the next seasons (either SCM this fall or SCY in the spring) and try and adapt to this regime...anyone else game?
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Former Member
One of the issues I have with comparing running to swimming is that we are not swimming all day all the time. If you think about runners when they are not running in workouts they are walking around. I would argue that they have a harder time losing a "feel" since they emulate somewhat their activity all day long. Unless you are a fish, you don't get to swim all day long therefore I think more difficult to keep a feel. I am not sure on this, just a hunch. I just know that when I take 3 or 4 days off from swimming it takes a little time to get that feel back. I wonder if runners have the same issue.
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Former Member
One of the issues I have with comparing running to swimming is that we are not swimming all day all the time. If you think about runners when they are not running in workouts they are walking around. I would argue that they have a harder time losing a "feel" since they emulate somewhat their activity all day long. Unless you are a fish, you don't get to swim all day long therefore I think more difficult to keep a feel. I am not sure on this, just a hunch. I just know that when I take 3 or 4 days off from swimming it takes a little time to get that feel back. I wonder if runners have the same issue.
