DarkSpeedWorks wrote:
missinglink wrote:
So you're telling me that you spent more time in the pool and your swim times got slower?
Nope, never said anything remotely similar to that.
I just said that, lots more swimming piled on top of bad technique will make for a very fit swimmer who won't be able to stay up with or beat swimmers with excellent technique who have worse fitness.
Even lance armstrong can't win a bike race (no matter how fit he is) with a big parachute hanging off the back of his bike. And that's what bad technique does to you in the water.
Your logic is correct, but I think it's overstating reality quite a bit.
I've seen a lot of bad swimmers, but NONE of them are cranking out like 20k per week with lots of quality as would a good or serious swimmer. To think someone would do such a thing isn't realistic - anyone who's willing to train that hard on the swim is going to automatically pick up advice either on their own or through others to make significant stroke improvements so that they're not going to have god-awful form.
If anything, the bad swimmers I see don't push themselves hard enough, or ever. Lots of folks doing the easy 30-60 minute slow easy swim, only a few times per week. For these folks, a good kick in teh behind with hard painful intervals would wake them up quick to improving their form more than a coach would - when you're dying on every workout, the first think you look for is an easy way to go faster with less pain, which is technique.
I don't think it's really possible to NOT seek out technique improvement when faced with the daunting challenge of suffering day in day out with 4-5k workouts with intensity. I know after I tried that just for a few weeks, I was looking up every video and book and forum post to make life easier from the suffering I was taking.