lightheir wrote:
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.
The part you mentioned in bold is bang on.
As adult triathletes, on the swim leg, we end up comparing ourselves with the ex youth swimmers. By definition these are the best of the youth swim crowd.
If we also compare ourselves in running with the high school cross country runners, most triathletes will suck IF the high school cross country runners can just lace on running shoes and still run fast. Water allows an ex swimmer to roll out of bed (literally) and swim fast. You can't do that with running with a big layoff, so many adult onset triathletes will beat the ex high school runner (I fall into the latter group....most people who have been running since they were 14 are broken by 35, lucky to be running at 50, probably swear off running by 60 even if we want to....the lifetime of injuries still catch up). So adult onset triathlete runners inherently don't end up in a comparison with high school runners, but AOS triathlete swimmers are in a comparison with high school swimmers all the time.
Oh, and running DOES require technique (at least running fast). Its just naturally wired into us from when we are babies and learning to walk, we just don't realize we have been evolving our running technique....some of it is natural, some of it is learned (learned in the sense our brains adapt to run with our changing bodies as we grow, and then at some point, we have roughly evolved our technique when we stop growing and our bodies have taken their final form....the fat version of us, will still try to run with the gait as the skinny 15 year old version of us, just do it badly)