STP wrote:
At my peak many years ago, I was a touch faster than the women's world records in my swim events. So roughly speaking, you could say a mid level D1 swimmer who never made an NCAA cut is as fast as that random unknown guy crossing the finish line with the women's winner of a big time marathon.That's helpful info, thanks.
So when he D1 or equivalent-ex D1 swimmers that post regularly here on ST post their swim times and give us MOPers advice about swimming regarding swim expectations, its literally akin to a 2:40ish female marathoner or 2:20ish male marathoner giving advice about expectations for running.
That really changes the equation. I don't think a 2:20 male marathoner's experiences are going to be remotely similar to a 4hour marathon runners experiences with training and racing, but that's about the scale of what were dealing with when the fish here are giving MOP triathletes swim advice regarding swim pace expectations.
For example,a 2:20 male marathoner will probably run a sub-3 marathon on totally haphazard, random run training of under 35mpw. It's just that easy for them. So when one of these D1 fish says that with no training they can swim a 1:10-1:15/100 because it's 'all technique', it might very likely be less the matter of some amazing technique but more that they are just genetically gifted - they'd probably swi close to that fast even if they used my suboptimal MOPer technique.