Janet Evans comeback?

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. I'm curious as to how you view high yardage vs lower, targeted yardage? I can tell you I was doing higher volume, 5 days a week as a kid but now I'm doing lower volume 4 days a week in my 40's but I'm beating my HS times. It can be done. When I was in my teens, training was more like 110% effort the whole time. Now, it is 120% effort but it's less overall yardage and more rest in between. And I train with a very successful coach and age group team.

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. I'm curious as to how you view high yardage vs lower, targeted yardage? I can tell you I was doing higher volume, 5 days a week as a kid but now I'm doing lower volume 4 days a week in my 40's but I'm beating my HS times. It can be done. When I was in my teens, training was more like 110% effort the whole time. Now, it is 120% effort but it's less overall yardage and more rest in between. And I train with a very successful coach and age group team.