I'm back in the water training for the first time since college -- 20+ years ago. It took a little while but I'm up to 3k/work-out, but predictably a lot slower than when I was a kid. I'm trying to get some sense of what intervals to set/keep during sets. Right now it's pretty much a survival thing: 50's on a minute, 100's on 1:45 and 200's on 3:30. That's as fast as I can go and still do 5-10 to a set. What kind of intervals are we "more mature" swimmers doing?
Former Member
Matt,
As always, thanks for your kind remarks and for shilling for my book - I must buy you a beer sometime!
ejj,
As Matt indicated, my book (which Matt forgot to mention can be purchased at my web site www.h2oustonswims.org :) ) does include a fairly complete package for organizing swimming training, from individual practices up to entire seasons. What it DOESN'T do is go into any of the metabolic detail. The idea was to make the technical or scientific aspect of training as transparent as possible. Kinda like you not really knowing what's going on inside your TV set but being able to point the remote and watch Seinfeld reruns nonetheless.
For those who WANT the nitty-gritty of metabolism and precisely how it relates to set, practice, microcycle, mesocycle and macrocycle training, then I'd recommend Ernie Maglischo's "Swimming Even Faster".
Now Ernie owes me a beer... or maybe two, cuz his book is a lot thicker than mine.
Ernie,
Since the webmaster frowns on shilling your own products in the discussions, let me shill for Emmett. Buy his book, Fitness Swimming. He has several chapters that provide sample workouts, explain the primary objective of the workout (skills, aerobic endurance, lactate endurance, or lactate tolerance), AND tell you how to fit together a workout plan for a given season. There is so much in such a small package! I bought the book over a year ago, and I am still working on getting my head around all of the good stuff, and using it in my own training, and for the training of our summer youth league team.
PS: if you'd like to correspond on this subject, I coached a summer league team for the first time last year and I'm doing it again this summer. Having to respond to your email would probably stimulate me to (get off my duff &) write down some of my random thoughts. Please make contact using the personal message feature of this discussion board.
Emmett: thanks for providing such a lucid 2-page summary of the cell chemistry aspect. (You should consider submitting it as an article to Swim or some other swimmers' magazine.) I'd love to link this up with your previous contribution to a discussion of pacing 100's; I think your post there and this one would compliment each other.
Matt
