Swim as much as a 10-12yo girl.

If you REALLY want to get better (and you're not just saying it) and you REALLY want to invest the time, then it just takes swimming a f***ton. Go to masters classes, swim 6-8x/week (not for a paltry 2k each time either, averaging 3.5-4k per swim is key), make sure your stroke doesn't have any huge, overarching problems.

Then, swim more. And do it for months on end.

Yup. Swim as much as your shoulders will tolerate and join a masters program (one that has swimmers who whomp you). Swim so much that your hair is utterly destroyed, and then you will be faster.

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Hillary Trout
San Luis Obispo, CA

Your trip is short. Make the most of it.
https://www.slogoing.net/

F***ton. I’ve always enjoyed that word. I rarely ever get a chance to use it in a sentence.

Well...swim as much as you can without getting injured. Swimming is one of the sports that responds best to frequency. In college, even though we were swimming 6 days a week/20 hours, I used to schlep to the pool on Sunday afternoons to get in a super easy 2k to keep my feel for the water.

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"The person on top of the mountain didn't fall there." - unkown

also rule 5

I'm going to be the contrarian, here. To swim long distances faster, you first have to just be faster. If you don't come from a swim background, you probably never trained for short races. In HS, a "distance swimmer" was the guy/gal who swam the 200 and 500 free; races that are ~2 and ~5 minutes, respectively! Rather than slogging away with more volume, I would suggest 6 months working on your speed base. 4-5 one-hour workouts a week with a couple very deliberate, quality- and speed-focused sets can help you build your speed base. I like USRPT. There are other similar approaches. What you stand to gain that can transfer to long distance racing is more swim-specific strength/power, acclimation to swimming at higher stroke rates, and another "gear" you can go to when the tactical situation calls for it. Having a good burst of speed can help you stay on the feet of a faster pack at the start, or bridge a gap you see developing in front of you.

You'll have plenty of time to circle back and consolidate some of that speed gained into your distance swimming pace. Given two swimmers who can do a 1:01 3800 test swim, one who can do an all-out 100 in ~1:15, and the other who can do it in 1:05, I like my chances of making that second swimmer faster in the 3800.

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"They're made of latex, not nitroglycerin"

To swim long distances faster, you first have to just be faster. If you don't come from a swim background, you probably never trained for short races. In HS, a "distance swimmer" was the guy/gal who swam the 200 and 500 free; races that are ~2 and ~5 minutes, respectively!
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And how do you think they got to that spot? By swimming a crap ton of yards! It's not like they walked on to the team their freshman year and were swimming sub-1's pace. They were on their club team 5-6 days per week, year round. When they got to their HS swim teams, they already had that ridiculously big base to start adding in the speed stuffs. And the speed stuffs was, maybe, 2 sessions per week. The rest of the time was slogging a crap ton of yards.

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Take a short break from ST and read my blog:
http://tri-banter.blogspot.com/

Thanks a lot for your answers. So volume will be the response. I will try to figure out how since with all those corona measures I will need to switch pools:-)

I've been thinking about doing a big, long swim block as well. You mention 1-2 speed/sprint focused workouts a week. What's the basic structure of the rest of the week? Sets at CSS/threshold? Long and slow? Doesn't matter, just swim?

My recollection is that we all started as "sprinters." As 10-and-unders, we raced almost exclusively 50's and 100's. We did some distance training (I dreaded the monthly "1650 day"), but we weren't doing massive, base-building yardage workouts. Mostly we did lots of 25's and 50's with emphasis on quality. By Jr high age, we started sorting into "sprinters" and "distance swimmers." I was a helluva 50 free swimmer as a 10 year old. Ended up a "distance" swimmer by HS, and did the crap ton of slogging yardage. But that was on top of a sprint base. And we still kept the sprint stuff touched up, if not perfected.

My point is, most distance swimmers have some sprint base in their background in addition to the yardage base. Triathlon-focused AOS often only seem to think only the latter is important. I think some focus on the former can be quite beneficial.

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"They're made of latex, not nitroglycerin"

I resemble the hair utterly destroyed part...I did 4 years of 1200km per year (100km per month). Barely any hair left where I want it. I spent the time learning the other three strokes that I am a lot better at. My free is not much better than when I used to exclusively be a triathlete, but when I got back to triathlon last year, my bike rides were surprisingly awesome off super low volume.

I agree with Gary P though that you have to get faster at shorter distances to swim fast for long. I did a few 4km races plus a 7km and a 12km swim race last year. I can pretty well guarantee that every person who beat me is faster than me at 50 meters too. I may have beaten a few people who are faster at 50m only because I know how to pace long races and many swimmers have no idea how to pace a 3+ hrs race and fuel for it, which I know from marathon running and tris, but anything 4km and below, you need zero fueling so its a matter of sustainable pace.

At my swim club everyone who beats me at 100m is faster than me at 1500m pool swim races too. It does not matter how much endurance I have, their speed trumps my superior endurance (because frankly a 1500m race is 17-18 minutes for the fast swimmers who are lengths ahead of me).

I actually advocated a block of 1-2 speed-focused sets per workout, 4-5 workouts per week. I'm talking mostly about speeds quite a bit faster than CSS. Hard 25's on a 1:1 work/rest ratio. Longish sets (16-30) of steady, strong (well under CSS) 50's on 15-20 seconds rest. Similar sets of 75's at a slightly faster than CSS pace. Extra rest when your pace falls off. Occasionally max-effort 25's on long rest. If you're able, some similar stuff (25's and 50's) in other strokes.

I promise, it won't make you a slower distance swimmer. If you circle back to distance-focused training for +/- 10 weeks, you'll be at least as fast as you were. You very well might be faster.

If you don't want to go all-in on a sprint block, there's still value, IMHO, in doing some sprint work once or twice a week.

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"They're made of latex, not nitroglycerin"

I obviously missed the sets per workout bit. Thanks for the clarification.

I did something like this for quite awhile. 4-5 workouts per week, averaged about 40-45 mins per workout due to time constraints but did ONLY intervals, mainly 100s-200s but including 400s & 600s occasionally, and the vast majority faster than threshold pace, closer to VO2 pace. I worked quite hard on those intervals. Regularly threw in max all-outs here and there and at the end of sets.

Honestly, it was no magic bullet. I do see the value in doing intervals, but I think it's way oversold as a magic bullet to swim speed here. I worked really hard when I was in the pool, but def wasn't the volume I needed to take it to the next level(s) and it showed. Was totally, utterly stuck in the 50%ish range of swim split results, dead MOP

I actually made real progress that I never was able to achieve on that limited swim volume, but adding a lot more volume. In my case, most of the extra volume was on a Vasa erg, and I didn't work close to as hard in the pool on my erg, but I did add enough volume in blocks to really fatigue those arms/shoulders and I even got globally tired. After all that volume, my swim went from dead/below MOP to front of MOP, and now I don't even need that type of volume to maintain my typical race splits in the top 20% and above.

Again, not saying that all volume is totally better than all intervals - obviously you need both, and I never neglected to do both. But at least for me, as a clearly non-talented AOS swimmer (took me 2 years just to get out of the BBOP despite hard work) the volume component cannot be compensated for just by swimming more hard intervals on lowish volume (and likely vice versa.)

I know for sure there are folks on this forum who can just do 100s and swim like 55:xx IM swims on low volume, and I think klehner around here went sub 1:00 for the 100 after less than 1 year of swim training. I see those folks as outliers, much the same as the folks here who post that they run 2:50 marathons on averaging 15 mpw.