How do you determine whether you would be better off training and racing sprints or distance events?
I'm back into competitive training this winter after ~2 decades since high school. I used to coach age group, and I've been hitting some master's practices, so I'm not without direction for what I should be doing to get back in shape. I am, however, clueless about distance swimming.
I have no exposure to distance racing or training so I am starting to read up on it (Maglischo). In high school, with the longest event being the 500 free, everyone was a "sprinter" whether they were suited to it or not.
Since I'm basically rebuilding myself from the ground up, I am wondering whether I might give distance a try? What sorts of physiology, technique or psychology lend themselves to doing distance as opposed to sprinting? Or does this not really matter for a nearly 40-year-old masters swimmer that's been out of the pool for nearly forever?
Well, since the vast majority of my workouts are with a USMS team, they are closer to that than to the USAS group I occasionally work out with.
But you did make me curious, so I used my FLOG entries to calculate that in the 108 days since I started swimming after summer nationals, I have averaged a shade under 3800y per workout, and swam an average of 5.25 days per week. Yardage/volume doesn't tell the whole story, but I don't think those numbers are very far outside the norm for masters swimmers.
Fair enough, if you want to discount the fact that your workouts are predominately fly/back at a sub 1:20/100 pace and Mark probably isn't your typical USMS coach.
I admit I was wrong, and Chris Stevenson trains more like a master than an age grouper. Your yardage is closer to the typical USMS practice than it is to the typical USAS practice and you don't swim doubles.
12.5 I wish, more like 13.5 seconds for a 25 m push. Thanks for the suggestion to do 500's, I just have to not go out so hard at first.
Some people actually like to negative split 500s, aka get faster each 100. It is not my preference, but it might be a good strategy for you until you are more comfortable with the distance and develop a more personalized one.
If my 25M push speed is almost twice that for my 500M (barely over 1 meter/sec), does that mean I might be better at sprinting events?
My form still seems to fall apart after about 300M.
Steve,
You lack the endurance to really say. When you are comfortable swimming 2-3k workouts, it will be a better time to compare. You need to pace yourself so your stroke doesn't fall apart during the 500M.
Tracking your 500M times is a great way to gauge your improvements. It is short enough that you can regularly include it in a workout, but long enough that it will reflect endurance and stroke improvements.
If you are already comfortable swimming 3k workouts, and your 25 time is a 12.5 and your 500 time is an 8:20, then yes, that would indicate you are probably more of a sprinter than a distance person. But the comparison is not as straight forward as 1m/s
The next step is to realize that breaststroke is the greatest test of a swimmers mettle. So if you can sprint a fast 50/100 ***, welcome to the ranks of swimmings elite. Ignore your teammates who say otherwise; it's just jealousy.
Ah, what a nice way to start the day...
The problem with that is that the points are based on all USA-S swimming so the ratings top out at 18 years of age. So 18 or 40 is the same rating.
So? I am using the points to compare one event to another. Entering an age of 8 works just as well as 32, what matters is that I use the same age for all my comparisons. The number by itself is rather meaningless to me.
