wilp wrote:
Is there any competitive swimmer who swims less than 15hours/week...? Most adult who want to improve their swimming abilities forget that they try to compare themselves with other adults who've got way more swimming mileage under their belt than them....funny enough, they wouldn't dare compare themselves with basketball or football varsity players (let alone pros), so why make the comparison with former competitive swimmers...??
Get 10 000 hours in the pool, and then we talk about if you're made for swimming or not...
I actually think the bigger limiter is that people forget or ignore the fact that ex-competitive swimmers who swam from youth are literally the most talented of the kids for swimming. You don't stick with swimming going every morning for years, dragging your parents, when you're not naturally good, if not exceptionally good, at it.
Adult triathletes are typically the rest of that less-talented pack. There are definitely some who would have been in that fast kid group, and guess what - they improve very quickly as an adult. But most of us are not in that group.
You also don't need 10000 hours or close to that to realize you're not that talented. You can tell pretty quickly by how much you improve compared ot the typical AG triathlete doing similar volume training, even if it's low. If you're swimming like 4 hrs a week for 2 years and still dead MOP for a triathlete swim split, you're unlikely going to be beating the ex-competitive (fast) swimmers even at 8 hrs a week or even 10 hrs a week of training, unless that ex-comp swimmer literally stops swimming completely for years.
This is the real dirty secret behind swimming 'fast', like as fast as true competitive swimmers, even youth swimmers. And all triathlon coaches, even the elite ones know this - it's well known to them that swim improvement is the hardest thing for their pro-elites to get unless they came with it already.
Luckily for us non pro-elites though, FOP swimming (let's just say top 15%) at the AG level isn't a particularly high bar, and probably within the reach of a very hardworking typical AG talent triathlete who just does a ton of training. But that 'FOP' AGer will get beaten by a huge margin by the 'real' swimmers, even of those guys/gals are swimming a mere 7k per week. My n=1 analogy for running, as that you can bust your tail and get down to an 19:00 5k but the naturally fast guy will be running 15:00 with similar training, or 17:00 with low-level training. And yes, I know swimming requires technique and running doesn't blah blah blah - I'm assuming you can swim decently well for the analogy, not a raw beginner with giant stroke errors who will improve quickly once those are fixed.