Swimming 500 Free SCY in 5:50 or less.

Shamboola, The 500 is one of the world's most beautiful events, second only, IMHO, to the 400 IM. It's a tricky beast and it gets trickier as you get faster and the race morphs from feeling like a distance event (e.g., 1000) to feeling more like a mid-distance race (e.g., 200). There are also multiple ways to go about swimming this -- watch Floswimming races from college dual meets and you can see multiple strategies. In general, I think that Ande's advice is solid, but, like Blackbeard, I disagree on a few points: #2 BREATHE every stroke: I think this is individual. Like Blackbeard, I like bilateral breathing in a 2-2-3 pattern. #5 SDKs off the wall: I don't think this is necessary to under 5:50. I'm also not yet sure about the oxygen tradeoff over this distance. This is something I will be adding into my 500 this year, but can't comment on its benefits over this distance. Frame of reference: I'm trying to get under 4:40. Here's what I had posted to another thread (forums.usms.org/showthread.php on the 500 (someone looking to go under 5 minutes, so adjust the training ideas appropriately): 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.

Shamboola, The 500 is one of the world's most beautiful events, second only, IMHO, to the 400 IM. It's a tricky beast and it gets trickier as you get faster and the race morphs from feeling like a distance event (e.g., 1000) to feeling more like a mid-distance race (e.g., 200). There are also multiple ways to go about swimming this -- watch Floswimming races from college dual meets and you can see multiple strategies. In general, I think that Ande's advice is solid, but, like Blackbeard, I disagree on a few points: #2 BREATHE every stroke: I think this is individual. Like Blackbeard, I like bilateral breathing in a 2-2-3 pattern. #5 SDKs off the wall: I don't think this is necessary to under 5:50. I'm also not yet sure about the oxygen tradeoff over this distance. This is something I will be adding into my 500 this year, but can't comment on its benefits over this distance. Frame of reference: I'm trying to get under 4:40. Here's what I had posted to another thread (forums.usms.org/showthread.php on the 500 (someone looking to go under 5 minutes, so adjust the training ideas appropriately): 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.