Yardage

I do about 20-25K yards a week. I was able to get in over 30K during the last few weeks of 2008 due to limited hours on the work front. But, I am a distance swimmer. I am having good results from this amount of training. I hear that there is a guy in Southern California does 80K a week. Apparently sold his car dealership(when he could make a good profit on it) to devote all his time to swimming in his 50s. He must do alot of doubles.

Averaged 6 days a week during 2008, totaled 1,089,100 yards = ~21,000/week.

I started back Masters in 2000/2001 (age 33/34) and through 2007, my weekly average was about 6,500 yards per week. That was pretty pathetic and brought down by some periods each of year of very minimal swimming. Still, even when training "hard" during those years, I would rarely go above 10K per week. In 2008, I averaged about 11K during the SCY season and then 16K during the SCM season. However, in the eight weeks preceeding my big taper meet for SCM (where I had significant time drops), I averaged 20K per week. For this SCY season, I'll spend Jan & Feb averaging about 12K and then aim for the low 20K range for March and April. I don't think most Masters' swimmers need to do heavy yardage. I'd recommend spending proportionally more brainpower focusing on technique and training fast than just cranking out the yards. Now, with all that said, long ago in my "real" swimming career, I trained pretty much a mega, mega yardage program, particularly during my high school years where >100K weeks were not uncommon. I don't know how much impact twenty plus years later that has today.

I shoot for 20K per week. Last year for GTD I did 517 miles, so if you average it out it comes to a little more than 17K per week. Most of my practices are 1.5 hours and I'll typically do 5-6,000 yards in those. The others are one hour and 3,500 is typical for those. You might be surprised how fast some people are swimming without doing a ton of yardage. Jeff Erwin said he's swimming only 3-4,000 per workout, for example, and he's one of the best distance swimmers in USMS.

I was/still am interested in this topic, too, and posted a poll a while back that might give you some data about the norms. Check it out at: forums.usms.org/showthread.php The vast bulk of respondents did between 5,000 to 20,000 yards a week, with the bell shaped curve peaking in the 10-15 k range (5.69-8,52 miles). If you keep this up for the whole year, it translates to 295-443 miles. I am a wee bit suspicious of this total, though. I think lots of us tend to estimate how much we swim per week based on an "average" week. But if we get sick, or have to travel, or the pool is closed for holidays, or whatever, we tend to gloss over that. Bottom line here is that there is a difference between an estimated average and an actual, written down, charted total. Which is why I so heartily recommend GTD, otherwise known as Go the Distance. The swimmers who participate in Mary Sweat's wonderful Go the Distance program (free USMS perk--see www.usms.org/.../gothedistance ) provide another gauge for the yearly "norms". As Mary wrote in November: "In fact, our 2008 GTD participants have now swum a grand total of 151,457.84 miles with an average of 250.76 miles. Yep – you read that right – as a group we have now crossed the “250 miles” GTD distance milestone together!" (I am not sure if this includes the month of December; if not, add another 20 or so miles, which is fairly close to the poll results.) I personally did 406.7 miles in 2008, the most I have done in several years. It does seem to decrease times a wee bit (or at least slow the the effect of aging on performance) when you increase your yards. If you haven't tried the GTD stuff, I really recommend it for keeping you on track and free of self delusions about just how much you really are swimming!

I limped my way to 174 miles last year, over 92 swims so that's only an average of about 3300 yards per session. I prefer shorter (2000 yard) sessions at a higher average effort (90+%) than long endurance sets.

Last year I averaged 14,000-18,000yds a week, split into 3 days of 4,000yds and 3 days of 2,000yds. Some of this is intense and some is just focused on stroke work. I hope to average 20,000yds a week for 2009. So far the swimming is still fun. :banana::bliss::bouncing::banana::bliss::bouncing:

2000-3000 yds per day. IM and sprints might be 2000, free around 3000. One hour a day, 5 days a week. Sometimes Saturday for 1 1/2 hours and that would be maybe 4000 yds.

My team only has 3 practices a week, so I only miss one if I am injured or dying. 4,500 is typical with 500-1000 being kick and 500-1000 being stroke or IM. Low end is 4,000 and high end in 5,000 for a little over an hour of practice. I would swim more if there were more practices offered, since it is the only aerobic workout I am doing. I lift 3 times a week as well. Last time I checked, I was only like a 100 spots from the top 10 :) My wife swims the same workouts, misses more practices, doesn't lift, and ranks better than me. My excuse is she has been swimming longer.

A year ago I was really pushing my limits spending 5-6 days a week at the pool while trying to increase my yardage.I got sick of it very quickly. Since I pretty much am stuck with swimming I want to continue enjoying it so I tried reducing the number of days and aiming for longer sets with more drills and upping the yards.12 month later I have found that this still works best for me-4Xper week -3500Y =14.000. At least that is my goal each day/week. Our pool manager keeps a lap club chart on the wall so we can record our daily total and she posts monthly results. It is very satisfying to see how much those laps add up to.