Skip,
I loved your post ... extremely insightful and I get your points. What puzzles me about training loads, though, is why / how you see "older" people in events like the marathon succeed on a world-class level and yet, as you rightly point out, we see a greater divergence in swimming distance events as age progresses. As someone who trained high volumes in the 80s, I know it's hard mentally to keep that level up and I choose not to do that today in my Masters career. But, is the reason mental or physical? For me, I think it's mental: I just don't want to train like that ... but I'm not close to contemplating making a trials cut. My hypothesis is that, were I willing to train like I did in the 80s, I could approach my old 400 to 1500M times.
If Janet's got the mental fortitude and time to train and if we see other older athletes in other endurance events, why can't she re-approach her peak performance in swimming?
Skip,
I loved your post ... extremely insightful and I get your points. What puzzles me about training loads, though, is why / how you see "older" people in events like the marathon succeed on a world-class level and yet, as you rightly point out, we see a greater divergence in swimming distance events as age progresses. As someone who trained high volumes in the 80s, I know it's hard mentally to keep that level up and I choose not to do that today in my Masters career. But, is the reason mental or physical? For me, I think it's mental: I just don't want to train like that ... but I'm not close to contemplating making a trials cut. My hypothesis is that, were I willing to train like I did in the 80s, I could approach my old 400 to 1500M times.
If Janet's got the mental fortitude and time to train and if we see other older athletes in other endurance events, why can't she re-approach her peak performance in swimming?
