I always thought it would be cool to be able to break 5:00 in the 500. While it would be a bit of a stretch I feel like it's potentially within reach and given enough of the right kind of training I could do it. That said I also feel like every second between me and the 5 minute mark is going to get harder and harder to knock off.
I've always been, and continue to be, more of a breaststroker than a freestyler. I have no ankle flexibility so I pretty much always need to deal with dragging two brakes through the water. I've never really trained seriously for free events even though I do try hard and consider the longer frees to be my secondary events.
To give you an idea I swim about 3000-4000 a day, probably realistically average 4-5 times a week. I can and will increase that over the winter as we head into the meets starting in January. Intervals average in the 1:15-1:20 range, sometimes dipping to 1:10. I can pretty comfortably hold 1:10-1:15 pace depending on the set. Doing a 1:00 100 from a push is hard but not impossible.
So far my fastest masters times in the 200 are 1:55 and the 500 a 5:18. I know I can go much faster in both, in that 200 I took water instead of air on the turn at the 100 and was choking and coughing for the last 100 and still somehow managed a best time. The 500 was the last event of a long weekend of swimming and I was exhausted. I bet I could have done a 1:53 and a 5:14 given better circumstances.
Anyway, any training tips or things to work on? Ideal way to split it? Is the 5:00 500 going to be ridiculously difficult or given enough training reachable?
Thanks guys. That and the :50 100 (I'll save that one for later) are two swimming marks I always wanted to check off my list.
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Justin, it is a cool goal and you should be able to do it from where you are. I'm sure you'll get inundated with better advice, but here are some initial thoughts:
Splitting: Take a look at results of recent nationals as you'll see a number of people under 5 minutes, but also a number of ways to get there. In my experience, you always want to feel like you are negative splitting the race. In reality, you often don't, but gunning it too hard on the 1st 150 to 200 can be a real killer to keeping up the pace. It's always a very conscious effort on my part to feel like I'm cruising through the 250 mark. The 'moment of truth,' though where you need to learn to swim through the pain is from 300 to 450 yards. I find I can always get excited about picking up the pace after the halfway point and I generally have something left in the tank in the last 50, but if I don't really bear down -- and really train to do this -- during the 300 to 450 mark, I fall off the pace very quickly.
Technique: If you look at the elite swimmers, they are motoring the 500 with a 6 beat kick the whole way. You probably don't need that to get under 5 minutes if you can have an efficient, powerful 2 beat that is well-connected with your pull & core rotation. However, if you can build a stronger kick, that will come in real handy during the last half of the race.
Training: Do a search on 500 free under the workouts and see if Ande Rasmussen or some of the other prolific posters there have offered up ideas. I'd certainly recommend you work on on getting your "normal" 100 intervals down to 1:10s where you're comfortably going sub-1:05 and be able to do test sets on 1:05, ideally doing more than 5 at a time. At a very macro level, if you're really targeting the 500, I'd train the predominance of your early season training geared towards the 1000 to build endurance and then, as you add in quality, build more speed by training towards a 200 while keeping sufficient distance sets on your aerobic days at low rest, but a pretty good clip.
Absolutely, in my opinion, an excellent post! Almost verbatum with regard to what I would say/suggest. I would also try to find a good pacing swimmer that has that 5:00.00 barrier broken that has the workout time available to help out. I have one or two in my pool (at sparatic times) that like to do this sort of thing, and I would hope that there are more people like that willing to help. I would most likely train on their hip (literally) where you are either splitting the lane or in lanes next to eachother and you stay on the hip; that way you can learn how to draft as well.
Justin, it is a cool goal and you should be able to do it from where you are. I'm sure you'll get inundated with better advice, but here are some initial thoughts:
Splitting: Take a look at results of recent nationals as you'll see a number of people under 5 minutes, but also a number of ways to get there. In my experience, you always want to feel like you are negative splitting the race. In reality, you often don't, but gunning it too hard on the 1st 150 to 200 can be a real killer to keeping up the pace. It's always a very conscious effort on my part to feel like I'm cruising through the 250 mark. The 'moment of truth,' though where you need to learn to swim through the pain is from 300 to 450 yards. I find I can always get excited about picking up the pace after the halfway point and I generally have something left in the tank in the last 50, but if I don't really bear down -- and really train to do this -- during the 300 to 450 mark, I fall off the pace very quickly.
Technique: If you look at the elite swimmers, they are motoring the 500 with a 6 beat kick the whole way. You probably don't need that to get under 5 minutes if you can have an efficient, powerful 2 beat that is well-connected with your pull & core rotation. However, if you can build a stronger kick, that will come in real handy during the last half of the race.
Training: Do a search on 500 free under the workouts and see if Ande Rasmussen or some of the other prolific posters there have offered up ideas. I'd certainly recommend you work on on getting your "normal" 100 intervals down to 1:10s where you're comfortably going sub-1:05 and be able to do test sets on 1:05, ideally doing more than 5 at a time. At a very macro level, if you're really targeting the 500, I'd train the predominance of your early season training geared towards the 1000 to build endurance and then, as you add in quality, build more speed by training towards a 200 while keeping sufficient distance sets on your aerobic days at low rest, but a pretty good clip.
Absolutely, in my opinion, an excellent post! Almost verbatum with regard to what I would say/suggest. I would also try to find a good pacing swimmer that has that 5:00.00 barrier broken that has the workout time available to help out. I have one or two in my pool (at sparatic times) that like to do this sort of thing, and I would hope that there are more people like that willing to help. I would most likely train on their hip (literally) where you are either splitting the lane or in lanes next to eachother and you stay on the hip; that way you can learn how to draft as well.
