I'm in the same boat. Division 1 swimmer back in the day. I've seen a drop in my times by switching to almost all open water swimming. I have a different cadence and style open water, which doesn't translate in the pool as well.
As evidence:
2011 IMCdA-59:00
2012 IMCA-56:30
2013IMLT-57:30
2015 IMLT 50:09( we ran at least 100 yards on each side of swim)
2015 IMAZ 54:28

I swim, at most, once a week in the pool. From April to October, I supplement that with once or twice a week lake swimming.
I also can't stress the importance of a quality wetsuit. I borrowed a buddies full Helix for both Tahoe and AZ this year. Previous swims were with a BS Reaction.
I wish I could afford the Helix, for sure.

Hope it helps.

Rick

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Only those who risk going too far can find out how far they can go...

I was also a swimmer growing up and I am also 43.


There are two things I want out of my triathlon swim:
1) To not get too tired
2) To not swim ridiculously slow


1) To avoid getting tired- I do a a reasonable volume of easy swimming. (15,000 yards/wk)
2) To avoid being slow- I do a very small volume of sprinting
Recently I have started doing butterfly strength- to build swim strength.


Note- I do not want to be a fast distance swimmer. That would take a lot of time and it would interfere with the bike and run training (which is more important).
I thus do little to no long intervals or tempo work.

Just curious - how fast do you do IM swims, if you don't mind giving a range? Just curious as to what a ex-serious swimmer who doesn't focus on swimming anymore is seeing in terms of swim times.

I'm not who you asked but I am similar. Swam in HS and some university, I'm 40 and I swim 2 - 3 times per week (steady 3 for IM training). I've done 3 IM distance swims with times of 54, 55 and 56 mins - the 54 was in a draft pack, the other two were mostly solo, all wetsuit.

Yes. One of the pros I work with in the swim, he was a former swimmer, has found about 1-2 mins for a full. Before I started working with him he swam anywhere from 20-30k a week and was typically in the front pack out of the water. The last three races he has been the first pro out of the water and we've cut the volume in half. With a former swimming background it's fairly easy to find additional speed.

If you have any questions, let me know.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Tim

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http://www.magnoliamasters.com
http://www.snappingtortuga.com
http://www.swimeasyspeed.com

Do you mean improving from where you are now, or improving from what you were back in the day?

Couple thoughts.

Stoke analysis probably won't do a lot for you. Maybe a bit.

Train faster.

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

Looking to improve from where I am at now. Not comparing to 20+ years ago.

I thought stroke analysis could possibly find a tweak here or there that may help

My gut is concentrating on the fast work is probably best.

IIRC, DM swam 52-low at 2014 IMAZ, and he went 1:40/4:35/16:00 for the 200/500/1650 when he swam at Dartmouth.

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

I usually swim between 52-54 in IMs. 22-25 in HIMs. 18-20 in Oly.

I think I could swim a lot faster if I wanted to put the effort into it
But my run and bike are what need the attention.

I have tried to improve my swimming twice.

The first time- I radically increased my volume and added hard intervals.(I went from 15,000 easy yard/wk- to 28,000 yards with hard sets). I continued to bike hard and run hard.
The result of this experiment was that my bike and run got considerably worse and my distance swimming did not improve. The only thing that got better was my swim sprinting. This approach probably caused a mild case of over-training.


The second time- I decided that it was pointless to try to get faster at distance swimming. I continued to bike hard and run hard. But I added 3 sprint workouts a week to my swim program (only 15000 yds/wk total). The initial results from this were not great either. After 8 weeks, I swam a 1:03 (100 LCM) and a 2:19 (200 LCM). I was not pleased!!
Weirdly only 4 weeks later I swam 1:00 (100 LCM), 2:11 (200 LCM) and 1:07 (100 M Fly). Better!!

I think that both of these "swim blocks" did improve my triathlon swimming 6 months later in the season. (Not immediately).
The second approach did not set me back in any way. It worked much better for me.

It's possible, but remember that your stroke is probably already pretty good. There may be a couple of things here and there, but there is also some evidence that attempting to change things that are "good enough", even to something that is technically better, can be counterproductive, especially in the short term. I think thats because you lose the relaxation of the antagonist muscle groups, so you are more tense, less fluid, and have less of a rhythm. I've actually found that this year, I've been playing around with the recovery phase of my freestyle, and at the last meet I ended up going slower in the 200 than at the same meet last year, even though I was faster in the 100 fly (where I haven't really changed anything), so I think I'm in better shape. My natural tendency is to do a fairly straight arm recovery, I was trying to go to a more classic bent elbow, hands low recovery. That feels in the water like it should be faster, but the times haven't borne that out yet. I might end up going back to my old ugly stroke.

I've on,y done one tri in the last 6 or 7 years, and only started swimming again a bit under 2 years ago, so no good data to share with you on distance swims.

I'm averaging roughly 17-18km per week, all SCM. No other training. In May, I did the 50, 100, 200, 400, and 800 free, and 100 fly at Cdn Masters Nats. I never swam the 50 or the 800 in college, so ignore those. Shaved and tapered, with a midrange tech suit now. Back in the day I was probably wearing a papersuit.

For the 100, I was 4 secs off my college PB
200 was 11 secs
400 was 19 secs
100 fly was 3 secs

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

Speaking to swim times in distances over 200 yards ... Once you are over 40, making comparisons to HS or college times is really very relevant. What is, however, is in comparison to your time last year or to the last race (under similar conditions) ... are you getting faster or slower? If you want to swim faster than you recently were, then swim 4x per week with a good coach and program and it will happen. Until age 60 or so. Then, you can only control how slow you become slower.

IN my case, I am now 61 and have been back in the pool for 6-7 years following a 25 year lay off. I am still swimming faster in 50 and 100 yard events each year. But in our timed mile, father time is closing in and I am slowing down a bit each year.

You might consider this book and/or adding dryland training into the mix

http://www.amazon.com/...Series/dp/0880119071

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Such a Bad Runner

I am in my mid 30 and retired from swimming full time 10 years ago. Back in the day I was an Olympic trial qualifier now that I have a family and work full time I have found that you just need to train smarter. My mileage is down about 60% but I am doing a lot more quality meters in terms of effort. I have got back down to a 16:20 1500m SCM still over best times but getting closer every year

So, what do your workouts look like?

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What I do: http://app.strava.com/athletes/345699

Yesterday for example was the following
Warm-up
400 pull
4x100 on 1:30 descend 1-4 #4 at 1500 race pace plus 3

Main
4x100 on 1:30 as close to race pace as possible
2 min rest
1 x 400 all out pull with paddles
1 min rest

Did the above 4 times ( 100 average was 1:05 and fastest 400 was 4:22)

Cool down 500 choice

Damn! 16:20 easily aces everyone on st. Scary to think what your best times were (but I just gotta know)!!

In the old days I was a 15:47....and swimming smarter now if I had the time I 100% know I could get back to that if not faster

I only raced oly and half but would swim about 10k a week. Almost all of it fairly hard and a lot of speed work. Could I have trained more and been faster? Sure. But I was still top 10 out of the water and had plenty of training time to focus on bike/run.

In high school and college we'd do those looong sets at "aerobic pace" but with such low volume I'd swim much, much closer to my 500 race pace on each I interval. Mix sprints in too, don't save for the end. Edit to add I've always been a sprinter so my distance race pace is not spectacular.

Example: 10x150, hard, sprint 4th length, 10-15 sec rest. Also lots of descending sets.

And i assume this workout was in scm, correct??? Also, JOOC, can you tell us your height, weight, and wingspan??? Always interesting data to have:)

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

Yes the was SCM. As for my data I am a little guy in simmering terms 5'10, weight 163 and wingspan is 73"

Thanks for the info...you are smaller than most oly trials swimmers but obv it has not held you back very much, although i'm sure you, and all swimmers, would love to have Sun Yang's 6'8" height and 6'11.5" wingspan. You should keep us posted on your times, would be very cool to go sub-16 in your mid to late 30s:)

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

Some seriously fast swimmers in here..15:47 1500...wow! :) really very cool.

I swam 59:07 at Kona in a washing machine and 52 minutes at IM Taiwan, wetsuit, out on my own. I always swim faster on my own...never lucky to find a guy to draft. (Kona I had a plethora of feet to choose from, the only issue was they were normally kicking me as others tried to climb over me!)

So...I think for me...the key to improving my times is getting out a lot harder for the first 500-700m rather than just swimming 2 seconds faster per 100m..but especially that first 100m to get a good position...I always get stuck behind guys who can go out harder and then slow down.

Anyone have any suggestions for drills to improve this angle of the swim or is it not worth burning the matches with an all-out spring during the first 5 minutes of a 9 and half hour day? Even when I can warm up in the water, I find I'm either cooled down again when the cannon fires or I feel that swimming the distance/intensity it takes me to get to where my stroke is both smooth and fast would be about 600m...wasting too much energy to warm up.

Part of me recognizes there is much lower hanging fruit in my run; but speed is speed...and a minute or two off the swim would help...for instance if I could do a 55-56 at Kona, I would have had open water and a far less stressful swim and probably one that burned less energy too. Thoughts?

This has been discussed several times before and IIRC, the general consensus has been to just practice going out pretty hard on the first 200 yd of a 1000, and then trying to settle in a good speed for the last 800 at maybe 3-4 sec/100 slower than your first 200 pace. If you can do that and not die in the 2nd 500 of that 1000, then you're prob good to go. Regarding warming up, even for iron races, I always swim around 15 min or so to warm up. I just can't stand trying to swim even semi-hard w/o a decent warm-up. In oly dist races, I usually swim the course as a warm-up, which allows me to see about how long it really is. If I'm swimming an easy warm-up pace and go 20 min, then the course is definitely a bit short:)

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

Re: warmup I treat in more like a swim meet and warmup earlier then everybody else, and then I do warmup with stretch cords for a activation much closer to th start then I could get any true warmup in the water.