How often do you swim more than 1500m NON-STOP?

I used to do an hour swim once per week. I got over that. I'm going to do a few 1,500's before nats mostly since I have never raced in a long course pool. I just want to get used to the flow of the race. I really like to swim an hour or more all free without stopping; it can almost be trance-like. The problem is that it doesn't help you improve your speed, stroke, or conditioning much. I'd call it more a mind exercise. :2cents: This posting sounds like doing these long distances doesn't do much for "speed, stroke, or conditioning." My team does quite a few 20 and 30 minute swims in December-January in preparation for the hour swim. Many of those are close to or in excess of 1500 meters. We don't train that way otherwise during the year. It's not fun, but we work hard at maintaining our intended hour swim pace, and that can help pass the time. This posting sounds like distance swimming is not a way of training except for the one-hour swim. I went through a phase were I just wanted to get through my yards and get out of the pool-and swimming 1500-2000 at a time got me done faster. But I found that my technique went to utter cr.. after about 1000, so I switched to shorter sets with more focus on form. It was also really boring!Sets of 500-1000 allow me to switch from kick to stroke work more frequently and I can include sprints without loosing form. The thing that baffles me is that I used to swim only breaststroke and since I added back stroke a year ago I have not been able to complete a 2000 ***. This posting seems to say that distance swimming causes your stroke to fall apart. Thus I am wondering why there are these humongous 10K postal swims in USMS? It's not meaningless to me, because I am curious about how it will feel during and after, and how long it will take me. But mostly it seems like doing megadistance, based on this thread, doesn't help with much for the regular pool race events. I may be reading into these posts to suit my own ambivalence about committing to a 10K pool swim, just for the experience of it. So are these longer postal swims mostly done by triathletes who are members of USMS and like to do distance as well as less distance?

I used to do an hour swim once per week. I got over that. I'm going to do a few 1,500's before nats mostly since I have never raced in a long course pool. I just want to get used to the flow of the race. I really like to swim an hour or more all free without stopping; it can almost be trance-like. The problem is that it doesn't help you improve your speed, stroke, or conditioning much. I'd call it more a mind exercise. :2cents: This posting sounds like doing these long distances doesn't do much for "speed, stroke, or conditioning." My team does quite a few 20 and 30 minute swims in December-January in preparation for the hour swim. Many of those are close to or in excess of 1500 meters. We don't train that way otherwise during the year. It's not fun, but we work hard at maintaining our intended hour swim pace, and that can help pass the time. This posting sounds like distance swimming is not a way of training except for the one-hour swim. I went through a phase were I just wanted to get through my yards and get out of the pool-and swimming 1500-2000 at a time got me done faster. But I found that my technique went to utter cr.. after about 1000, so I switched to shorter sets with more focus on form. It was also really boring!Sets of 500-1000 allow me to switch from kick to stroke work more frequently and I can include sprints without loosing form. The thing that baffles me is that I used to swim only breaststroke and since I added back stroke a year ago I have not been able to complete a 2000 ***. This posting seems to say that distance swimming causes your stroke to fall apart. Thus I am wondering why there are these humongous 10K postal swims in USMS? It's not meaningless to me, because I am curious about how it will feel during and after, and how long it will take me. But mostly it seems like doing megadistance, based on this thread, doesn't help with much for the regular pool race events. I may be reading into these posts to suit my own ambivalence about committing to a 10K pool swim, just for the experience of it. So are these longer postal swims mostly done by triathletes who are members of USMS and like to do distance as well as less distance?