Oh, but there are plenty of kids even out there who are easily outswimming LS - with a lot less yardage than even he does, and probably less total life experience swimming due to their young age. It's not taking them anywhere as much work to swim as fast or faster than he is.

I do suspect for LS in particular, it may take a doubling of his swim volume to see a subtantive gain in his swim race performances, just based on the diminshing gains I'm see when I double my swim volume. I got faster, but you'd barely notice the improvement in my results they were so small

I'm not even joking when I say LS should definitely be testing literally every swim skin or wetsuit if legal for his races, out there for a better fitting one as well. I recently sized down from what used to fit me well med-small Roka to a small Roka which was def harder to put on, but also definitely faster both in pool and OW - to the order of an improvement gain that I'd have to swim 20k/wk in training vs 10k/wk just to equal through training alone.

@ Greatzaa - I also think you probably have a skewed sense of talent as well regarding swimming, just because you were getting beaten by similarly-gifted people in competitive HS swimming. The fact you lasted long enough to make it to HS competitive swimming shows that you survived numerous rounds of swim selection as the training and competition went up, so you clearly had a lot of natural ability for it - just maybe not compared to other really, really gifted swimmers. But I'd guarantee if we took 100 random triathletes and somehow was able to accurately measure their 'genetic swim potential' and compare yours to them, you'd almost certainly be like top 1-2 just because you lasted to HS comp swimming.