I hope this post rings true with many of the swimmers out there, and I hope one of you has a solution for this issue.
Just as an introduction:
I am a 47 year old man who came back to swimming as a sport five years ago after a twenty year hiatus from the pool. At one time, in my late teens and early twenties I was pretty decent swimmer: placed in the top twelve at Canadian Nationals in both backstroke events, but realistically that was about as far as I was going to go. I was never going to be an Olympic contender and I was Ok with that.
I left swimming to get a life and here I am nearly thirty years later with a wife, daughter, carreer and all the debt that comes with those responsibilities. My mid-life diversion is now swimming, or more specifically, trying to regain some of my youth from the wreckage that mid-life seems to leave us.
I am now training as well as I ever did really. I seem to go from one work-out to the next with brief rest stops in-between for my carreer and my family. I do dedicated resistance training three to four times each week in my private weight lifting gym in my basement (actually a pretty nice set up, and this is coming from a man who dabbled in body-building for ten years). I teach and train karate a minimum of three times a week right now (just competed, for the hell of it, in the ITKF Nationals last weekend). I do five ninety minute pool sessions each week, logging between twenty to twenty five thousand meters per week.
Today was a typical session:
Warm-up 5 X 100 on 1:40 concentrating on my stroke. Descended down to 1:20 on the final 100.
Pull: 5 X 200 on 2:45, maintaining 2:35 or faster for each rep. No sweat to complete.
Kick: 6 X 100
Swim: 16 X25 on 25 pacing to get at least 7 seconds rest
8X 50 on 45 pacing to stay below 37 seconds per 50
Kick: 6 x 100
Swim: 5 x 100 on 1:30 maintaining at 1:15 to 1:16 on each rep.
Pull: 8X100 Backstroke on 1:40 half with PB, half without. (trying to get my legs more involved.
The point of all this is that, despite training at pace times that should deliver my fairly moderate goals of breaking a 5 minute 400 and a 2:20 for the 200 and maybe pulling my 100 back under 1:10, I am just not getting anywhere near that. In fact, I am getting slower each time I race. Lately my 400 time has gone from 5:02 (felt freaking great) to 5:04 (racing teen agers; I thought I was going to throw up) to 5:05 (felt easy and strong). I am pretty sure, given the right day and rested properly, I could go sub 4:50, which I could really be proud of.
Meanwhile my training has done nothing but intensify. More speed sets, more short interval sets, more stroke correction, more meters. I have lost ten pounds this year and am now UNDER my teen-age racing weight. This is from being a 250 lb blob just over ten years ago. The failure to succeed in what, by any measure, are very moderate goals is just spirit crushing.
This last weekend I had the great indignity of racing a 39 year old who managed to clock a 1:57:06 on the 200 free. I nick-named him "Bubbles" because, throughout the race that is all I got to see of him. He turned around an hour later and logged a 58:10 on a 100 back. He was disappointed because his best time in sub 57. Spririt crushing.
Any suggestions?
A lot of masters swimmers think that a lot of aerobic work on short rest intervals is what is going to get them faster. Wrong! Some of that is great. But a steady diet of that forces you to always swim in survival, slightly uncomfortable mode.
BINGO! A lot of people I practice with like to work out this way, but this normally grinds me down. My body becomes acclimated to swimming tired and uncomfortable, instead of in control.
OK
1. Quit Overtraining before your peak meets.
Taper. Rest.
Make a plan and stick with it, no matter what.
2. Rest prior to important Meets. If the meet isn't that important, train through it.
3.Kicking:
kick (without flippers.
How come I now get absolutely no propulsion from my feet?
ankle/ foot flexibility, technique, conditioning, attitude
Does a person actually lose that much ankle flexibility as they age?
probably
begin the "Help My Flutter Kick is Horrible!" plan
4. Speed Training.
The 400 is a relatively short race, it will take you less that 5 minutes
Work on your speed, speed endurance, endurance and pacing.
5. 5 10 / 181 pounds is pretty good
6. begin a blog
Remember "Anything you do and measure improves."
Start doing the right stuff, measure it and strive to do better.
If you continually train on the upper edge of your ability, you improve.
Swim Faster Faster!
Ande
I'm 46 and did my first racing as a Masters swimmer this year. I was very disappointed with my race times compared to what I was doing in practice. I felt very tired when racing, even during Nationals. I talked a lot about it with people my age & older. Two answers came back consistently:
1) We need more rest at 45+
2) It takes a while to figure out how much rest you now need to race at the level your training has prepared you for.
Great advice & Wow Mike, what an honor!
Thanks for mentioning and linking swim faster faster.
Build a Better Boat kinda sums it all up,
though for you it should be:
Build a Better Boat (and submarine)
Swim Faster Faster!
Ande
Ande, I have read enough of your posts to recognize you as a man of reason and intelligence. Your posts have been very helpful to many masters swimmers, including me.
A couple of years ago I thought some of my physical performance issues were just vestiges of being overweight & out of shape so long that I wouldn't be able to recover despite working out hard and losing weight and making other lifestyle improvements. And from turning 50.
Turned out that I had an unavoidable life-threatening health crisis brewing that required immediate & major surgery to fix. I was chronically short on sleep and had work-related stress from poor job performance and possible layoffs which compounded the fatigue. Fortunately I had a great outcome from the surgery and the docs persevered to figure out what was causing my fatigue despite vague symptoms.
Swimming has changed a lot since you were a kid in technique and training.
Most Masters take longer to recover than when we were kids.
You have a lot more responsibilities than you had as a kid.
You sound overtrained
Cycle your training to include hard/easy days, different mix of short rest and long rest sets.
See what you can do to enjoy your training and enjoy the process. You ARE being rewarded from your training just not the way you want.
Make sure the rest of your lifestyle doesn't work against you.
Schedule at least 2 weeks recovery at the end of the summer season if not sooner
Make sure you've seen the doc and get a total physical checkup if you're not current to rule out illness.
I will be the first to say that competition and the pursuit of goal times has kept me in the pool for the last three years, following a return to the sport twenty-some years later. I am 48. My youthful times and accomplishments were okay, but not on the order of yours. Today, I am still working to break a minute in the 100 yd free, having gone 50.9 in high school. I am stuck on a plateau, and have been working hard to get off it. (I've spent the past two years working on my freestyle form and timing. Haven't seen the time benefits yet, but my efficiency has improved, I am certain.)
All that said, I have gotten a huge amount out of my return to the pool that times simply cannot capture. Admittedly, this may have something to do with the fact that my return to competition followed a health crisis. But since coming back I've improved my fly to the point that I have swum the 100 (previously unimaginable) and have had a ball swimming the 500 free and the 200 IM a few times, which I'd never swum before. I'm learning the whip kick in breaststroke, and expect to see improvement there. I've made new friends at the pool. I'm meeting up with my old high school swimming buddy in ten days to compete together thirty years after we last swam together in high school!
Not to seem flip, but gaze at your subject heading for a moment. Pretend that your mobility had been compromised by an accident, or some other misfortune. Imagine that you were undergoing treatment for a nasty illness. Try to get a momentary glimpse of how blessed you'd feel to glide through the water under your own power. If your training is truly unrewarded, it seems to me that you might be calculating reward in a strange currency. Be thankful.
By all means, strive to improve. Bust your gut. But pause to recognize your own good fortune, too.
Good luck with your training.
Hi Bryce, welcome to the new world of what can you do now!1 Do what you can do & do not get depressed by others that might go faster than you. Many , many others do not leave the house!!
Wow: so many fantastic replies. So much to think about.
Points of reply:
1. Overtraining. This is very likely. I tend to be OCD in nature. I do everything (and I mean everything) too much. Most people that know me compare me to a lightbulb that burns really bright just before it burns out.
2. Rest prior to a Meet: not so much. Again likely due to my OCD tendencies. I plan a 2500 meter speed work-out and somehow it turns into a 4000 meter work-out with tons of speed mixed with short rest sets.
3.Kicking: I have feet and legs, no doubt, but actually using them while swimming was a challenge when I was a teenager. They now might as well be lead weights. That is definetly one of my goals this year: to work into my training sessions more kicking (without flippers. I love my flippers, they love me, but they really are just a crutch) Hey, what's with the kicking? How come I now get absolutely no propulsion from my feet? Does a person actually lose that much ankle flexibility as they age? I can't say that I remember ever being concerned about my ankle flexibility and propulsion when I was a kid. (Holy smoke do the young kids today get speed off the streamline at the start and turns. That is something new too.)
4. Speed training. Absolutely I do need to start bringing my 100 splits down into the 1:10 to 1:12 range for reps if I want to go a 4:50 400 meter. That is one of my goal sets this year. I started just lately doing short sets (5 x 100 meters on 1:30 to 1:40) with the goal of pulling all the reps down under certain set goal times. Up till now, my goal sets have all been about making the pace time and then setting a new, more demanding pace time. Old school training really.
5. I am 5 foot 10 inches and about 181 pounds. There was a time I clocked in at 250 lbs. I had a practically unlimitted bench press and a great squat, but my life expectancy was practically zero. The swimming is the final step in a very long path to sensible living.
While there is no doubt that I am being a bit hard on myself, the frustration comes mostly from knowing the feel of my body and what I just know it is capable of and then comparing it to what I am actually doing. If I could just hit that groove in competition just once.
...
Today was a typical session:
Warm-up 5 X 100 on 1:40 concentrating on my stroke. Descended down to 1:20 on the final 100.
Pull: 5 X 200 on 2:45, maintaining 2:35 or faster for each rep. No sweat to complete.
Kick: 6 X 100
Swim: 16 X25 on 25 pacing to get at least 7 seconds rest
8X 50 on 45 pacing to stay below 37 seconds per 50
Kick: 6 x 100
Swim: 5 x 100 on 1:30 maintaining at 1:15 to 1:16 on each rep.
Pull: 8X100 Backstroke on 1:40 half with PB, half without. (trying to get my legs more involved.
...
I'm going to second a few notions from other posters:
You're kicking butt to do all of this,
Getting tired/run down happens more easily now than as a teenager/twenty-something
You're likely training too much
You haven't mentioned tapering for these meets; I have found that I need to taper A LOT longer than I did in my teens/twenties (am 42 now).
Regarding the workout above, the one point that stuck out to me was your set of pace 100s. If you want to get under 5:00 in the 400, you need to push a set of 5 x 100 like that at under the pace -- aim for 1:12s to 1:14s and get to the point where you can do that consistently and know what it feels like.
Do you train in the pool solo or with a team? Grabbing some training partners might help, as well; while it doesn't seem like you need help in motivation, training partners can push you in different ways, offer technique advice, etc.
And, finally, unfortunately, we all have to realize at some point that we're going to get slower. Be happy with your in-shape body and stick with it. My Dad continues to swim competitively at 66 and I imagine he'll be in the pool for a long time to come. Is he swimmming as fast as he was when he was 40? No, but he's having fun, staying healthy and remains a motivating force for me!
Physiology changes with aging.
Training methods change.
Technique changes were introduced in the years you were out of the pool.
Some ppl are just faster.
There are some excellent workout blogs, both in the blogs proper and in the Workouts forum, that might help, WRT both planning the swim and goal setting (or resetting). There are also threads on how to train for and race 100, 200, 500. (The 200, for instance, is often trained for with broken 200s.)
I left swimming to get a life and here I am nearly thirty years later with a wife, daughter, career ... I seem to go from one workout to the next with brief rest stops in between for my career and my family.
This is of more than trifling concern.
