So, I was reading the latest issue of Swimming World magazine (July 2020) and came upon an article entitled "Aerobic Overload: Volume Revisited, Part 2", wherein 5 or 6 top swimmers discussed how high volume swimming had helped them become fast swimmers. Among these was Nathan Adrian who trained 100,000 yds/wk in his teen years despite being mainly a 50/100 swimmer. The most incredible part of Adrian's story though was not his training but rather his coach's training. In his teens Adrian was coached by Jay Benner who was a national class distance swimmer back in the 80s. In prep for the 1988 Oly Trials, Benner swam 180,000 LONG COURSE METERS PER WEEK FOR 8 MONTHS STRAIGHT. Let's think about that for a minute: if we assume 4000 meters/hr on average, then that is 45 hours per week of pure swimming. That's an average of about 6.5 hrs/day, 7 days/wk, for about 35 wks straight. Benner was 23 at the time and figured this was his last shot at making the Oly team so he was totally determined to do all he could possibly do to achieve this goal. He finished 9th in the prelims of the 1500 in 15:31, just missing making the final by about 3 sec, and hence of course not making the team. No one could say though that he didn't try as hard as he possibly could.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this story is of extremely limited value to your average "time crunched" triathlete w/ wife, kids, and full-time job, but I thought that this might be of some interest to the swimmers out there. Possibly someone in the ST universe might even know Benner.

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