Hi, I just joined USMS last month. I swim for fitness, and I have been doing this for a long time. I am working on lowering my time in the 500 free because I would like to swim in meets someday. I train on my own almost exclusively, except for an occasional workout with a masters team. I have 2-3 hours a week to practice except during the summer months when I have a lot more time to train due to having summers off from my job as a teacher. My current time in the 500 free is 8:40. My goals are to bring this time down to under 8 minutes by the end of the year and to under 7 minutes by the end of next year. I am 6'1" and weigh 193 lbs. Any suggestions that will help me reach my goals are appreciated!
500 Freestyler here. I am a big advocate of you need to be able to train at your goal pace. For instance, when I was coaching the middle distance/distance group for a college team, and some of the girls had goals of breaking 5:00. That is 1:00/100 or :30/50. So Any fast stuff we did had to be at or below goal pace. 25s needed to be under 15, 50s under 30, and I went as far as up to 200s if we happened to do them off the block or on a slower sendoff. Note that I am not saying EVERY 25/50/100/200 etc. was meant to be held under pace. Just any fast stuff. I wanted the girls to "feel" what that speed was like, what that time was like.
The 500 is a controlled sprint (with the evolution of the 200, I would say it is now THE controlled sprint). You go out to slow and you will find your opponents (be that other swimmers or the clock) so far ahead that you won't have enough distance left to catch up. Go out too fast, and you will discover there is a lot of distance still to cover and not a lot of energy left to do it!
I would advocate taking your goal time for this year, divide it out into increments of 25/50/75/100 all the way up to 200 so you know what times you need to hold on each of those. Then start incorporating some fast work into your workouts where you try to hold that pace. Ideally you want to be able to hold repeats of those times at those distances with about a 1:1 work to rest ratio (so for 100s, if I wanted to hold :59 trying to go under 5:00, I would go 6, 8, 10, or maybe even 12x100 at 2:00...that's :59 seconds of work, followed by about 1:00 rest).
Hop you don't get lost in all that. I went kind of technical on you there. Definitely agree with Jeff that just swimming 5200 isn't going to accomplish much for you. No matter the event, no matter the goal time, if you want to hit the goal, you need to come up with a plan, and one more detailed than just "I will show up a few times a week at the pool and swim." (I am generalizing here, not calling you out specifically).
500 Freestyler here. I am a big advocate of you need to be able to train at your goal pace. For instance, when I was coaching the middle distance/distance group for a college team, and some of the girls had goals of breaking 5:00. That is 1:00/100 or :30/50. So Any fast stuff we did had to be at or below goal pace. 25s needed to be under 15, 50s under 30, and I went as far as up to 200s if we happened to do them off the block or on a slower sendoff. Note that I am not saying EVERY 25/50/100/200 etc. was meant to be held under pace. Just any fast stuff. I wanted the girls to "feel" what that speed was like, what that time was like.
The 500 is a controlled sprint (with the evolution of the 200, I would say it is now THE controlled sprint). You go out to slow and you will find your opponents (be that other swimmers or the clock) so far ahead that you won't have enough distance left to catch up. Go out too fast, and you will discover there is a lot of distance still to cover and not a lot of energy left to do it!
I would advocate taking your goal time for this year, divide it out into increments of 25/50/75/100 all the way up to 200 so you know what times you need to hold on each of those. Then start incorporating some fast work into your workouts where you try to hold that pace. Ideally you want to be able to hold repeats of those times at those distances with about a 1:1 work to rest ratio (so for 100s, if I wanted to hold :59 trying to go under 5:00, I would go 6, 8, 10, or maybe even 12x100 at 2:00...that's :59 seconds of work, followed by about 1:00 rest).
Hop you don't get lost in all that. I went kind of technical on you there. Definitely agree with Jeff that just swimming 5200 isn't going to accomplish much for you. No matter the event, no matter the goal time, if you want to hit the goal, you need to come up with a plan, and one more detailed than just "I will show up a few times a week at the pool and swim." (I am generalizing here, not calling you out specifically).
