vonschnapps wrote:
My apologies, I thought I was on slow twitch, and not on letās run.
OK, stepping back for a day, I concede that I was somewhat "letsrun-ish" and did not need to take that angle. So let me rewind.
Buoyancy is a by product of protecting us from cold. Buoyancy comes with neoprene which is used to keep us warm. When we don't need the warmth, the buoyance goes with it. The proof that the sport is not trying to give us "free buoyancy" is when they banned wetsuits more than 5mm of thickness. It was felt that excessively thick wetsuits were not needed for warmth and were just diminishing the swim. In the purest sense, when its warm enough, the neoprene/warmth clothing goes. If you look at the rules, other than your neoprene of 5mm thickness, all buoyancy aids are expressly banned.
And I'll admit even when I was actively racing triathlon I hated wetsuit swims because I just felt people did not want to actually learn how to do one of the sports. And was not a particularly good swimmer, but not bad either. I generally worked really hard to get a good body position so I could deal with no wetsuit swims because they are part of the sport.
Now that I race masters swimming as my primary sport, I guess I get even more "over reactive" when I see the general trend to not want to learn to swim. I get that the payback in time is invested in swimming is not great relative to bike-run, generally non technical sports.
However, what I will share is the single year I put in swimming 15-20K per week in 1993 had a permanent effect. I went from a 36 min 1.9K swimmer to more like 29-32min permanently for the rest of my tri life, and thats when I dialed back down to barely 200km of swimming per year (do the math, that's barely 4000m per week). With bike and run, you can't just invest a year doing 6 hrs per week of the sport and keep your gains forever.....in swimming you can.
All those ex fat collegiate swimmers that we all hate who are 60 lbs overweight and kick our ass who we hate....guess what....they did their 50,000m per week for 8 years so they did their time. Most of us have not.
So I urge you to just put in a year of swimming and you'll have the gains forever...you won't need floaty pants.