Anybody hit any best times in practice coming back from quarantine?
I'm reading all these SwimSwam articles about already fast kids and pros hitting lifetime best times after a month or a few weeks back in the water. I know the club team my Masters group is attached to is doing some good things in practice - they're thinking about having an intrasquad meet in a bit.
I'm not even close right now, still trying to get my feel back!
Have no idea. Would have to compare to my 2016 spring season (Goldsboro) - last time I competed without being affected by post-operative recovery. Just waiting for a meet to happen now, but before this happens thereâ€s still catching up to do in 2 areas: 1) a few technical areas with stroke, starts, breakouts, and perhaps transitions. 2) my training needs greater structure and discipline.
Thanks for bringing this topic up to help me confront reality.
Anybody hit any best times in practice coming back from quarantine?:joker:
You're funny!
But, in seriousness, no and hell no. I was fully out of the water from mid-March through about Memorial Day, and then started getting in lake swims in June. By July, I did the same volume of monthly yardage/meterage as I used to do (e.g., ~55,000 meters / ~60K yards), but lake swimming is very different than pool swimming and, at least for me, I can never match the intensity in the lake with what I can do in the pool.
Our pools where I live just opened up in the past couple of weeks and this Monday I did a 'base pace' test set that I've used throughout my masters career (3 x 300 best average). Here are my stats:
3.2% slower than I was in February, a time when I felt like I was in pretty good, but not yet peak shape
8.4% slower than my best performance on this in the last 5 years (December 2016)
Now, I'm 53, so I realize that with each passing year, there's likely to be some degradation so I might not ever hit those times from 2016 again, but I should be able to be about 5% faster than where I am today. Based upon prior experience with breaks or gaps in training, I imagine it will take me another 2-3 months to get back to that level. My general rule is that it takes me at least twice as long to 'return to form' as the gap in training was.
I'm reading all these SwimSwam articles about already fast kids and pros hitting lifetime best times after a month or a few weeks back in the water. Kids and pros are different beasts. For the kids, especially the young boys/men, they're growing and growing muscle even when they're not training. For the pros, I imagine that most of them kept up a very rigorous training regimen (moreso than most of us mere mortals) that kept them close to top physical form even when they couldn't be in the water.
:joker:
Kids and pros are different beasts. For the kids, especially the young boys/men, they're growing and growing muscle even when they're not training. For the pros, I imagine that most of them kept up a very rigorous training regimen (moreso than most of us mere mortals) that kept them close to top physical form even when they couldn't be in the water.
Ha! I know this full well... I stayed in pretty good shape over the break since I have a pretty well stocked home gym, but between working from home and parenting a now 8 month old I probably only got about half an hour to 45 minutes workout a day. I thought I saw that Great Britain Swimming bought some of their national team people Endless Pools to train in.
It's still amazing to me to see already really fast people going best times, especially in long course that takes a bit more water-specific fitness.
I went 3rd fastest 200M FR of my life off the blocks two weeks ago during a lactate set. And it was the fastest 200M FR I have done since I "returned" to swimming after a 2 year hiatus when my children were born.