Politely and well said, Dev, espec the "If not, Phelps would be on the 100% erg plan..." I too am curious as to whether Mr. Gyde would swim in the pool more if he had one close to his home and/or office. There is also the other option of *moving* close to a good pool, but apparently for 99% of STers living close to a pool is not any sort of priority in their lives. :)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

I think moving close to a pool is a non option for most of us. In the past when I lived close to pools (when I was young), I was consistently a sub 1 hour IM swimmer. In between I moved to a place that was 10K from the closest pool (actually city plans called for a pool 3k from home a year after I moved but then that got delayed for 16 years....), so I would just stop swimming in the winter and would just XC ski and keep up my upper body conditioning and then diving into the pool for the 2x per week 30-40 min program during tri season and would typically swim 62-66 minutes. This was a good time vs performance tradeoff. I totally get Sam's angle. I think at the age group level, we have to make these optimization decisions and it's almost why every STer chooses to not swim much. The time vs performance trade off is not there.

Sam has approximately the same size engine as Patrick Lange (Patrick has a smaller body) who won Kona. They both do an IM bike leg at 260W. If Sam did like Lionel Sanders and needed to take time off his swim, he could be a 52-54 minute swimmer with that engine. Swimming is a waste of time for him because with his size engine he can be fast enough to compete as an age grouper, but if he was racing pro, everyone would be ripping into him (like we do into Lionel Sanders) for leaving 8 minutes off the table on an erg only plan.

No way is the 100% erg plan the most optimal IM swim plan, but it is waaaaaaay more optimal than the zero percent swim plan. I am certain that Brandon Marsh who chimed in on this thread dwhen he was racing pro would never dream of that plan as he needed to make the front pack at Kona with Andy Potts. If Brandon decides to race Sam in age group (I think they are in the same age group), Brandon could probably get away with the 100% erg plan too as his engine is pretty massive.

In any case, the 100% erg plan is great for guys who already know how to swim and who are time stapped. But if you don't know how to swim and you have a small engine, you're not going to end up at a 62 min swim by buying an erg sticking it in your garage.

Actually, swimming fast-ish doesn't have as much to do as 'engine size' as you put it. That's why ex-swimmers who are woefully out of shape and might have a 4-cylinder (out of shape engine) in a Mac-truck (out of shape body) can still out-swim a super-fit non-swimmer for a certain distance. That's why I said that for some athletes, no amount of swim coaching nor training is going to get them under an hour. That they need to swim enough to be able to complete the swim in relatively good shape for the rest of the race. Or, they need to do a little bit more swimming so that they can shave a few minutes due to technique and swim fitness and exit the swim in relatively good shape for the bike/run.

But you might be correct or not in the Sam vs. Lange and a 53ish IM swim. Certainly he would be faster than 62, but to say 10 minutes might be a stretch. I think that I swam 53 minutes in 2002 with much less swim consistency than in 2013 when I swam just under 51.

But yeah, if I lived in the middle of nowhere and didn't want to build a Conrad Stoltz pool or buy an endless pool, then I might consider getting an erg/vasa for my garage and swim when I get to a city or location that had a pool.

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Brandon Marsh - Website | @BrandonMarshTX | RokaSports | 1stEndurance | ATC Bikeshop |

Well, i guess i am just unusual among STers in that i actually enjoy swimming and hence have made convenience to a good pool very high on my priority list whenever moving. I miss swimming when i'm not able to do it, and am SO happy when my access is restored. :)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

Brandon - What would you say are the abilities needed to become a fast-ish swimmer??? I would say good motor skills, good swim-specific upper body strength, decent flexibility in their shoulders, and some degree of innate enjoyment of just being in the water. (If a person just innately hates getting wet, they're unlikely to ever even learn to swim. :))

Further, would you say that the same thing can be said for running, e.g. for some athletes, no amount of training is going to get them under 20 min for a 5K???

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

Re. Swimming. It's hard to say. Yes shoulder flexibility seems to be consistent with good swimmers. So does bodily awareness or whatever you might call it. I hesitate to say but a lot of times, especially with kids you can just kind of tell. Or with late starters you can just tell. I think that to a certain point it's a somewhat innate ability.

Running I would say the same thing if a 20 minute 5k is a sort of benchmark. There has to be some natural speed at every level. A good masters cyclist in Austin said the same thing when he was trying to run sub-whatever for a 10k...and it was in the 35 to 37 range so not super fast. He said he ran as hard as he could and worked on all of the nessary little things, but his coach said maybe we should adjust that goal... Hard working and reasonably talented but just didn't have it for running.

I'm not a Gladwell-ite with 10, 000 hours or anything. I haven't read The Sports Gene by Epstein. But talent has something to do with it, more than hard work at a certain level. And I don't know where that level is. That is a hard pill to swallow for very hard working athletes who typically succeed in most other facets of life. They work hard and are rewarded. It's not always the same in technique and work sports like swimming.

I've had that specific conversation with athletes who are very focused on Kona. Athletes that I've coached or just talked with. Kona is sold or was sold as anyone can make it. They can't. So you try to squeeze what juice you can out of each lemon. Talking about the process of getting better is a buzzword. Coaching to only those with talent is selling those with less short. Likewise coaching to the lower common denominator is selling the higher talent athletes short. That's the art of it.

Generally though as you can see from this thread, it takes a lot of work. The above might seem fatalistic or pessimistic, but the adage about picking your parents is very true. Add in drafting and drugs, etc and it can be a very frustrating proposition at the pointy end.

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Brandon Marsh - Website | @BrandonMarshTX | RokaSports | 1stEndurance | ATC Bikeshop |

Key difference between run and swim is one is a natural thing for a bipedal creature while the other is far from it. Hence why you don't see mac truck sized runners with 4 cylinder engines amounting to anything in the running scene (maybe on track?).

On the point of "getting it" with regard to the run i'd say the process is roughly the same as with the swim. Kienesthetic sensitivity and the ability to know how to manipulate one's body in space/time. Generally we know how to run right (watch any 4-5 year old), then we unlearn that along the way and become this plodding heel braking mess.

EM, you list a lot of good things on what makes a swimmer. I'd say shoulder mobility and effective range of motion (i.e. ability to apply force at extreme ranges of motion) are big concerns in swimming right. I'm astounded by the number of folks i've met that cannot squeeze their skull when in a streamlined position. That shoulder articulation is paramount for setting up the humerus and leveraging a strong pull.

For the record i'm in the sports gene camp and reject the 10k hours blanket application premise.

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36 kona qualifiers 2006-'23 - 3 Kona Podiums - 4 OA IM AG wins - 5 IM AG wins - 18 70.3 AG wins
I ka nana no a 'ike -- by observing, one learns | Kulia i ka nu'u -- strive for excellence
Garmin Glycogen Use App | Garmin Fat Use App

With just a few exception I think I could estimate within 10% (5 minutes either way) how fast someone is going to be for a full IM swim with one push off the wall.

I saw John Patterson swim when he was 5 and thought, hmm that kid is going to be good.

You probably held a Ponderosa record for the 7-8 age group? Pretty sure you didn't have 10,00 pool hours yet ; )

Yeah, that probably works for the vast majority of cases. I've got a collection of friends/former athletes in the seattle area that have defied all normal beliefs on AOSs. Gives rise to thoughts on environment but they'd all be great athletes no matter the discipline so maybe just a product of them finding one another.

Not 7-8, I think Brandon beat me at 8 and Andrew Livingstone when i was 7. Maybe one of the 9-10 records tho? Funny story. At Deerfield, all the pool records for the 9-10s all came from the same meet when Jaime, Brandon, and I set them. Relays too. With NWAL banning year round kids not long after I doubt those will ever fall. All olympic trials qualifiers (and olympic medalist) later on so that's going to be a steep ask.

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36 kona qualifiers 2006-'23 - 3 Kona Podiums - 4 OA IM AG wins - 5 IM AG wins - 18 70.3 AG wins
I ka nana no a 'ike -- by observing, one learns | Kulia i ka nu'u -- strive for excellence
Garmin Glycogen Use App | Garmin Fat Use App

Ya, no doubt that choosing your parents carefully is prob the single most important thing for an aspiring Olympic swimmer, runner, or whatever. And even then, having a Dad who is a three time Olympian with multiple medals is no guarantee. A few yrs ago, i had an email exchange here on ST with Amy Hall, one of Gary Hall Sr's kids. Amy said there are 5 kids altogether in their family and that they all swam, but that Gary Jr was the only 1 of the 5 to actually make it to the Oly Games. I was surprised since i'd never heard of any other Hall offspring, kinda thought maybe Gary Jr was an only child. :)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

Hey I think we are on the same page, but if you put my motor inside Sam with Sam's technique and Sam's prep, he goes a lot slower than 62 minutes because instead of getting 260W worth of energy to apply to the water, he'll only get 190W or so. This was really the point I was trying to make on this thread. You take the same rowing shell, with the same set of oars and instead of having 4 rowers in the boat, you have 3 (or actually to make the comparison the same, you take 4 rowers of the same weight with the 75% of the engine size) and the boat with less horsepower will go slower....I also realize that the boat analogy is not ideal, but close as a boat's hydrodynamics are static but a swimmer's are dynamic. I would say that every incremental watts of threshold the swimmer can apply helps more because it allows for a more powerful force application phase allowing them to get into a better streamline quicker (they spend less relative time in the high drag position) and also get back to accessing oxygen quicker. It's also whyI can't understand why swim coaches promote these overly low cadence swim strokes to AOS athletes with tiny engines.....they end up in a high drag phase forever and never get back to more oxygen.

In any case, while I agree that the size of engine has less to do with fast swimming then swimming technique, for the same size athlete with identical technique, the size of engine will play a difference. I don't THINK that a VASA erg is the best way for a small engine athlete to work both their technique and their swim specific engine.

A 260W IM pace athlete like Sam can get away with many non optimal approaches as can a lot of pros. At the age group level, we have to be careful about copying what works for pros. What we should consider are routines that allow for repeated high load training while enhancing health. That part of Sam's 100% erg program makes a ton of sense. The technical element of the erg forcing a high elbow catch is also a positive one if you don't have it already. I am guessing for Sam the erg forced him to work his catch in a way that he previous was not in the water.