Slowman wrote:
i watched this video, and got the same sense as if i was church and the pastor was saying amorphous things that did not help me make any substantive move forward in my life, but that took away, temporarily, a sense of guilt over not being able to live up to what it was i thought i was supposed to do.
swim with rhythm? fine. if that advice moves you forward 5sec per 100 yards, when nothing else would, there's a takeaway there that i did not see.
to carry the religious analogy forward, i'll give you the best advice i ever got from a minister, i got this advice 40 years ago and it's stood me in good stead as i have applied it to many areas of my life, and i believe i've shared it here before. that minister asked me did i know how to be a sinner no longer? no, i said, what is the secret? he then told me: stop sinning.
if you don't want to be an alcoholic any longer, stop drinking. if you don't want to be a smoker, stop smoking. if you don't want to cheat on your wife any longer, stop cheating. or get a divorce. just figure out what behavior you want to stop, and stop it.
or start it. the same works, i think, in reverse. if you want to start eating better, stop eating crap, start eating good food. if you want to swim better, start swimming.
and this is what you are saying. one 6-month swim focus does it. just one. do that once, and it changes your entire approach to triathlon, because you are not only swimming faster, you get out of the water with a better class of people, and that brings you forward on the bike and the run. you actually see how good the athletes are (newsflash: faster swimmers bike and run faster too). you spend this 6 months focusing on swimming the vestiges of it last every season, every year, for the rest of your triathlon life.
too many people here complain about TI, or defend it. we just finished 10 weeks of a set of swim workouts and, yes, we talked quite a bit about balance (and if you're going to pick one amorphous word and harp on it, i would choose "balance" over "rhythm"). but here's the overwhelming truth. the people who fairly religiously followed these workouts for these 10 weeks did something not many people reading this did: they swam more than 10,000 yards per week, week in, week out. they swam somewhere between 100,000 and 140,000 yards over 10 weeks.
do you want to know how to be a faster swimmer? start swimming. go look over your training logs. add up the yardage. this is the meat of the season, so, no real excuse here, unless you live in the southern hemisphere. don't deduct for vacations or sickness or travel. go and add up your yardage for the last 10 weeks. for most of you we're talking 40,000 yards, maybe 50,000.
maybe. and that's why you are where you are instead of where you want to be. you need a 10-week total of 120,000 yards. even then, that's just barely over 2 months of a 6-month swim focus.
note that the very first thing brett said, before the three Rs, was, "don't listen to what i'm telling someone else." that means he's giving specific stroke advice to specific people, who are doing specific things badly. do not take this 6-minute sermon to mean you can jettison stroke advice. he's just being brett in that sermon. which is why people cling to him. same reason people cling to rick warren. but in there somewhere brett does get into specific stroke fixing. go hang out in a brett sutton enclave and see if you aren't swimming 160,000 or 200,000 yards over 10 weeks. he's going to make you swim a lot, and he's going to fix your stroke. no magic here. he's going to do what any other good coach would do.
last year i asked gerry rodrigues if i might come down and swim in his session, and he can tell me if he sees something obviously wrong (because i wasn't making the progress i thought i should be making). "how many yards are you swimming?" he asks me. i went back and calculated. i shut up.
so here's my three Rs:
swim 12,000 ya
Rds a week for 3 months, then let's talk.
fix your st
Roke.
study and emulate good swimme
Rs.
Very nice:) I think possibly one thing many tri people don't understand is that people who look like "natural born swimmers" did not just roll out of bed and start swimming that way their first day in the pool, but rather they put many, many, many hours in the water, and many millions of yards, to get those strokes that "make it look so easy". Also, for a swimmer 12,000 yd/wk is like "an end of the taper before the big meet" week. Of course, they're not doing the B and R but that is why the 6-month swim focus is needed, with maybe just a little running, maybe 20-25 mi/wk, but no biking since increasing bike mileage is much faster than increasing run mileage. I think if a person did a 6-month focus and they could start at 10,000 yd/wk, by the end of 26 wks they could be swimming 30,000 yd/wk for the last 6 wks, e.g. increase by 1000 per wk, and 30K/wk for 6 wks would drastically and forever change their perceptions of swimming and their feel for the water.
Hopefully, since you are a "man of influence" on here, your sermonizing and your guppy/tarpon programs will help the masses up their swim game:)
"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."