adal wrote:
Rich Strauss wrote:
... does the math on the time investment required to go from 1:15 to 1:10 --
All that sells very well and sounds right in theory. But when the gun goes off, your 1:15 swimmer does not loose 5 minutes, but 5 minutes on the swim, 10 on the bike and 20 on the run (due to a lack of swim fitness).
Send a seasoned triathlete, a 9hr guy, on an hour of cross country skating or rowing with 3mmol and see the cycling and run performance. It goes way down, because the athlete cannot recover from the activity he is not fit for.
You can do the test with a few clients (cycling trained but not skating or rowing trained but with enough technical proficiency to acutally be able to work at threshould in skating or rowing):
-) Bike an hour at TH (HR 165, Watts 280) - run 1/2 an hour at 150 hr
-) Skate or row an Hour at TH (HR 175 as a full body sport gives a higher heart rate) - run 1/2 an hour at 150 hr
If the second run is much slower (which it is for me), or feels much harder (which it does for me), the whole theory of "economics of swimming" goes the way of all economic model ...
Whaa? Not sure how skating and rowing got into this discussion :-)
As for the effect on the bike and run of a lack of swim fitness...in my experience a lack of race execution skills is much more responsible. That is, doode has a shitty bike and run because he doesn't know how to execute the race, but is culturally conditioned to think this is a training issue so spends the next several weeks on ST reading what he wants to hear: he needs to SBR more because that's what he likes to do anyway.
But that's a whole 'nother topic(s) for discussion.
I can only say what we do with our team:
- We strongly encourage our athletes to seek the help of a qualified, local technique coach. If they don't have one available, we encourage them to use our "swim clinic ebook" I created in 2005, revised in '08. You can download a free copy here if you want to check it out.
- Our "beginner" swimmers do about 8wks of pretty much all drill work. Intermediate about 4wks. Advanced about 2wks.
- Then all of them do about 12-14wks of legit fitness swimming. I put on my NCAA D3 swim cap when I wrote these workouts: hard, fast swimming, short rest...I kick their ass, frankly. If these folks are doing an HIM in route to an IM, then they'll do MUCH more than this 12-14wks of hard swimming in their season, but only after a dedicated period of technique focus.
What I don't do is say "your tool to becoming a faster swimmer is to go hit 10,000 golf balls/tennis balls, bang on the piano keys for hours and hours," which is essentially Paulo's advice in 140 characters :-) I'm assuming he has more detail to add somewhere.
My bottomline: we've all seen "bad swimming." Just like pjorn, we know it when we see it. Advising that person to just HTFU and swim lots is exactly the same as my 10k ball example above.
--
Rich Strauss
Endurance Nation Ironman 2013 and 2014 World Champion TriClub, Div I
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Last edited by:
Rich Strauss: Dec 30, 11 9:40