Started swimming 7 years ago at the age of 30. Must have been 2:15 per 100m at the time.

Thought I was "All that" until i saw the masters swimmers. Decided to join them. Started with the old ladies lane. Determined to get to that "fast" lane.

Fast forward to now, 7 years later, sub 1-hr ironman swimmer, leading that fast lane (we're not THAT fast, lol)

It's come down to this for me:

- Swim hard
- Swim lots
- You must get comfortable being uncomfortable.
- Having feet to chase is incredibly valuable. There is no way i would get to where I am on my own. Those guys pushed me.

Well, i guess whether one has more or less time as an adult depends on one's job situation. For me personally, i've been fortunate in that i've always been able to finish my work in well under 40 hrs, and hence could take a long lunch if i wanted to swim, run, or bike at lunch. At times, i've swum in the morning before work, run at lunch, and then rode and run again after work. I'm not married but i was for a few yrs and my spouse did not object to my training, since at least she knew where she could find me, and she knew i wasn't "fooling around" with another girl:)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

The main difference between kids and adults learning to swim is the same as adults and kids trying to learn a foreign language. Mental plasticity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0[/quote]
Well, that's a good point:)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

Swimmer: 11 yrs vs 55 yrs

Good Posture: Yes / no
Bad Habits: no / yes
Stamina: ok / yes
Listening: no / yes

Flexible :Yes / marginal
Strength: no / yes
Injuries: no / yes

Pool Time : 6hrs / 4-6hrs
Speed : Yes / sort of (ability to spin quickly)
Recovery : Yes / takes longer
Excess Girth : No / a bit
Racing: Yes / No
Technique: good / good
Diet : Good/ Good

Start Date Sept vs Jan

My son and I were about equal times last summer. I was hurt big time through the fall to January and he's vaulted ahead - is doing around 5:20 on 400M, 1:15 100M. The differences I see are the having to deal with previous injuries, posture correction (which is not easy to do), flexibility and putting in a block of pool time. Technique is good enough.

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Training Tweets: https://twitter.com/Jagersport_com
FM Sports: http://fluidmotionsports.com

Not me, but a friend. When she first raced elite at the AUS national tri champs (aged early 20's, didn't start swimming till age 21), she was a 25+ 1500m swimmer whilst swimming ~25k per week (solo). Within a year of switching to a very good coach (who worked pretty hard on her technique), her time dropped about 5 mins to sub 21, along with a 5.19 400SCM, with no extra distance.

When I first swam with her, she was all over the place, her timing was off, her elbows were dropping - her 25 minute 1500 was achieved with raw fitness. She looked like a different swimmer a year later.

Is this the thread where people brag how they swam a 55 just to end up running a 4 hour marathon? Cool cool.

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Next races on the schedule: none at the moment

Yeah, so give us our space, man!

I personally did this and have coached a couple who have done it as well. First of all, it's legitimately rare, and the further from 20, the more rare it is.

But like Ken, and Dave and you alluded to; the one common thing I find is that the people who can make those huge jumps in swim speed can make stroke technique changes and have them stick. Some also have the innate feel for what will work, but all of them are able to make permanent stroke changes. Plasticity as Dave mentioned.

I know a few ways to help folks without good plasticity, but it's playing on the edges. Mostly it seems like you either have good plasticity or you don't.

Started "swimming" when I was 20 for fitness. It actually had nothing to do with triathlon. I think I swam a 1500 in 28 minutes and thought I was smoking fast. I did my first sprint tri when I was 23. Then I got into swimming more seriously. My wife - who had no competitive swimming experience - became my "coach" because she's a good study. She researched how to coach, and then she came to watch me swim for a lot of my swims.... and she kicked my butt. Workouts like 3x1500 for time. (She'd found some collegiate swim coach's blog... to my demise.) She and I watched a ton of videos on technique. We went through Total Immersion, which helped with my hip balance issues.

So after all our/her hard work, I swam a 23:XX when I was 24. We thought "I'd arrived."

Then I moved to Ohio with work and joined a really solid masters swim team. Multiple former D1 swimmer and a couple masters world title holders (one of them won the 200 fly).

We didn't have an on-deck coach, they would usually stand on-deck during the warmup and help people with technique during a prescribed warmup sequence. Then they'd jump in and swim the main sets with us. But that alone was enough to open my eyes to the things that my wife and I hadn't fixed (or I'd resisted changing even though she'd called me out on it... yeah I'm stubborn).

So after a few months swimming in the 2nd lane, the coaches told me I was "ready" to move to the fast lane and swim with the super fast guys.

That's when everything changed. That's when I was exposed to a level of discomfort that I'd never before pictured while swimming. Descending sets. Intervals that were theoretically impossible to keep... but I did it anyways because I wanted to keep up. 30 minute TT's, followed by 10x 50 all out. That kind of thing. After two years of suffering through all of that, I finally clocked a 19:XX swim time in an Olympic at age 27.

So for me it was technique first. But then I had to put the hard work in. And a LOT of it.

I've known about 8-10 guys who took up swimming after age 20 and became very good swimmers. About half took up the sport to do triathlons, but the other half simply thought swimming looked like something fun to do. Their 100 free times range from around 53 to 1:00, but a couple also became excellent stroke swimmers, e.g. one guy who was a classic "Arnie" in the Swim Smooth terminology, swam a 58 100 fly and 54.6 100 free. Another guy got down to 1:08 for 100 breast in his early 50s, and a third guy swam 2:25 for 200 back which is pretty quick IMO.

I think you're spot on about the "plasticity", which i've always thought of simply as coordination, really, as if a person is well coordinated, then they can make changes as needed. Do you think coordination is a decent term for the ability to learn to change your form in swimming???

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

I really like Dave's term of plasticity.

A person with good plasticity can become coordinated, but they may not be there now. The coach can identify these people before they are fast or before their technique is particularly good, or before their motions are well coordinated. I have the opposite side of the coin, a lady who is decently well coordinated, not super or anything but a 1:08 scy freesyle lady, pretty solid in the tri world, slow for a swimmer. At any rate, she has what she has, she can't make changes to her stroke at all. So while her coordination is OK, her plasticity is bad.

But it sounds like you understand what I mean and we are discussing semantics.

Hmmm, I see what you mean, i guess i've always thought any 1:08 freestyler could change their stroke if needed but apparently not. So, "plasticity" it is then:)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

This is really an awesome post and really resonates with me. At age 62 started doing master's workouts for the last 5 months and have made as much progress in that time as the previous couple of years. Got a new coach three weeks ago and made a quick breakthrough based on her feedback on my stroke. Until age 57 I had never swum more than a few hundred yards in the pool and was not comfortable with freestyle, mostly did breaststroke. After a few months of swimming had progressed to 1500 y workouts and a sustained pace of a bit over 2:00 /100 y. But worked hard and made continuous progress. Spent a couple of years stuck at doing my 100 repeats in 1:30-35 and a sustained pace of 1:40-45 or so. Now I'm seeing repeats in the 1:23-4 range and yesterday did a timed 20 minute time trial and held 1:30 pace (that's with open turns, can do flip turns but still not that comfortable with them).

I still only consider myself an intermediate swimmer, looked up some results at master's swim meets and I'd be one of the odd BOP outliers but hoping to some day to reach the level where I can show up for a master's meet and maybe get close to MOP, but if I can do that I'll be killing the tri swim splits.

So many triathletes are stuck in their "the swim isn't that important" mindset and not willing to challenge themselves with master's workouts or a real swim coach. Just wish I'd done it sooner and will say it's really fun to learn a new skill at my age!

I have been swimming with a masters group for 10 months (~3 swims per week), and before that i swam with a triathlon club that had organized swims 2x per week (would throw in solo swim when i could). I go back and forth on if masters has helped me, here are the pros and cons as i see it, curious as to if anyone has similar experiences. I am a 31-35 HIM swimmer

Masters Pros:
Increased focus on technique: we do 700-1000 of drills/warm up, vs ~300 combined when i used to swim with a tri club
More feedback: The coaching is better and I get more feedback than when i swam with the tri club, because their coaches gave a lot of attention to beginners
More opportunities to swim: there are options to swim every day but sunday, which is great
Longer workouts: 90 minutes vs 60 minutes means you have more time for warm up, drills, main set, etc. It is easier to get close to 4K in this setting, usually 2800-3000 with my old group

Masters Cons:
Some of the drill work and warm up feels like junk yards. Last night for example we did 1250 of drill/warm up, that took up a lot of time and I feel only half of it was of real value
Too much feedback: I feel like i get too many different types of feedback, despite it all coming from the same coach. I come from golf, so i know that you can only have 1-2 swing thoughts at once. I feel like they bounce around with what they want me to work on at times
Lack of triathlon focus: they have to cater to a number of types of swimmers, and sometimes i think the workouts are not as aligned with my goals as maybe the triathlon club workouts were.. I sometimes wonder if I maximized my 90 minutes

overall i enjoy the group training, the coaching, and the program, but after a less than stellar swim at Oceanside, if I don't show some progress through the end of the year, I will have some decisions to make.

But I'm only 40 and if I make those improvements now what will I have left to look forward to?
My plan is to gradually improve my training volume and format, my technique, and my race strategy as I age to compensate for any drop in natural physiological ability so that my times never dip. this seems more feasible and sustainable if I set the bar low to begin with.

I think this is where a lot of swimmers are hesitant in the group setting. Have a dialogue with your coach - tell them what you were focusing on, ask them to watch for improvement in specific areas, before moving on to other. Also, with swimming, so many things are interrelated that while it may seem like overload, often a different perspective changes the mindset, and the fix comes. Ex - a guy in my group was having trouble keeping his elbow up on his entry, often slapping with a flat arm, or elbow before fingertips. The coach kept telling him to keep his elbow up for weeks - then he suggested to the swimmer to stay on his side longer to keep his shoulder up, and voila! Fixed entry.

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I wrote this, you should read it:
https://www.slowtwitch.com/...n_Swimming_6700.html

I'm not sure that for a lot of people the pink font would be appropriate for these sentiments...

I got quite a bit of value out of my first master's coach but a lot of it wasn't very specific to my tri swimming, made big improvements to my breast & back but not as much to my freestyle. And like you, sometimes I felt she gave me too many tips and hard to work all that at once. And my workouts were held back by some other less experienced swimmers that dragged our yardage down. The new coach is more tri focused but in a good way with still plenty of intensity, yardage for each person varies widely, and she seems more strategic in her stroke advice. So unfortunately I think the specific coach makes a lot of difference.

Maybe you should reduce the number of times per week you swim with master's and swim some workouts on your own where you work on the stuff that seems to get slighted in master's, cut out the drills when on your own, etc. Try to get the best of both worlds?

Honestly, although those points are all super valid, I think you're overestimating how special one is to do the bolded above.

I'd say that the majority of AG triathletes, of which pretty much the vast majority are actively trying to improve their swim despite limited pool time, do all of the bolded above if they've been doing triathlon for more than a year.

There's nothing special about watching a lot of youtube videos and articles and forums for the best tips, or focusing on every stroke in practice (what else are you going to focus on??) - it's what most AGers do, even the slow ones who are trying to improve.

I would actually argue pretty forcefully that most BOP-BOMOP AG swimmers who have been trying to improve their swim for years, do both of the above wayyyy more than the fast guys here. Many of these BOPers are with masters programs for years, and have paid for coaching and videos in far in excess of the good AOS swimmers here, and often have a lot more experience in pools and OWS given how long they've been at it.

Of course, studying and focusing on swimming does not in itself translate to speed. That's why clueless elementary school and junior high school kids who literally have no stroke instruction and just hammer it every time they're in the pool, can often crush these over-analyzing AOS swimmers who don't put in the hammerfest hard work.


Technique is important, but the reality is that it's a lot easier for someone born with good swim ability (?klehner?!) to attribute their success to technique. I think it's pretty fair to ask - if you can beat a fellow swimmer in the pool very clearly while you have to pop your head clear out of the water on EVERY stroke, or even beat them readily while swimming with only one arm stroking, whereas they can swim normally, your fitness difference is so big that almost no technical fix that they can do to beat/match you without a big jump in their fitness.

I started triathlon and swim training at 22. The last structured pool work I had before that was swim lessons when I was 6. My first several years, I was just doing workouts from magazines and online coaching workouts. I was doing the drills prescribed, but not under any supervision. Swam 4-5 days/week training for 1/2 and full IMs, ranging from 3000-5000 yds. My best swim was a 1:02 for IM, 33:XX for 1/2. Started at 1:04 and 36:xx.

Joined a small master's group, got some good coaching and attention. Swam 2-3 day's/week at 2000-3000yds per (most) workouts, a few longer in IM build, dropped to a 57 IM CDA and 29 1/2.

The coach at the time was heavy Total Immersion. I think it was perfect for where I was at at the time. The three things that we constantly worked on were: 1) Body position (pressed the buoy, especially when breathing), 2) Wider hand entry (no crossover), 3) Better catch (catch-up drills, swim gloves, visualizing over the barrel).

That's what worked...for me.

Carbon goggles. End of thread.

I'd love to do that!

My last IM was swim close to 60min then blow out to over 5 hour marathon! LOL. OK to be fair, I fried my legs on the bike when my seat broke at 90km and I rode all weird (lots of standing up, swearing to myself)

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TriDork

"Happiness is a myth. All you can hope for is to get laid once in a while, drunk once in a while and to eat chocolate every day"