Marathon Swim Training

In response to the "mere mortals mileage" question, I think that the first thing to ask is do you intend to race the distance or just try to finish it. If racing, quit your job, get divorced and sell the kids and then just train, train, train. For just finishing, you should assess your life and how much time you can fit in for training and then GRADUALLY increase your mileage until it fits that time or your shoulders start to get grumpy or your brain starts to melt. Furthermore, you also want to consider not just the quantity of training, but the quality also. Quality as in speed and in technique, too. Get "comfotable" with strong efforts over 2 - 3 hours in the pool as well. The point being that you should not try to match anyone's else training, but use what you have to the fullest and then hope for the best. Terry Laughlin, of Total Immersion fame, had a series of pieces about his training for the Manhattan Island Marathon race this past June that may give you a decent idea of a fairly practial approach to getting ready for something like this. Not surprisingly, it has a strong TI slant. Not sure of the URL, but you could poke around at www.totalimmersion.net and see if they still are there somewhere. Also, the MIMS website, www.swimnyc.org, may have some links to same. Back when I was a racewalker, I asked my coach how fast I should walk a certain National Championship based on xxx mileage, yyy intervals, zzz intensity, etc, etc. His reply was "As fast as you can." I try to keep that in mind for training/racing in swimming: Namely, that the bottom line is don't get hung up on endless details and just do what you can. (Same coach in response to the question "What tactic should I use in this race, given that walkers A, B, & C are in the race?", said "Go like Hell.") -LBJ

In response to the "mere mortals mileage" question, I think that the first thing to ask is do you intend to race the distance or just try to finish it. If racing, quit your job, get divorced and sell the kids and then just train, train, train. For just finishing, you should assess your life and how much time you can fit in for training and then GRADUALLY increase your mileage until it fits that time or your shoulders start to get grumpy or your brain starts to melt. Furthermore, you also want to consider not just the quantity of training, but the quality also. Quality as in speed and in technique, too. Get "comfotable" with strong efforts over 2 - 3 hours in the pool as well. The point being that you should not try to match anyone's else training, but use what you have to the fullest and then hope for the best. Terry Laughlin, of Total Immersion fame, had a series of pieces about his training for the Manhattan Island Marathon race this past June that may give you a decent idea of a fairly practial approach to getting ready for something like this. Not surprisingly, it has a strong TI slant. Not sure of the URL, but you could poke around at www.totalimmersion.net and see if they still are there somewhere. Also, the MIMS website, www.swimnyc.org, may have some links to same. Back when I was a racewalker, I asked my coach how fast I should walk a certain National Championship based on xxx mileage, yyy intervals, zzz intensity, etc, etc. His reply was "As fast as you can." I try to keep that in mind for training/racing in swimming: Namely, that the bottom line is don't get hung up on endless details and just do what you can. (Same coach in response to the question "What tactic should I use in this race, given that walkers A, B, & C are in the race?", said "Go like Hell.") -LBJ