It was a joke.

Actually ~54, 863.9999 meters

Don't forget that last 863.9999 meters ... makes a big difference.

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Checkout http://www.iotexpert.com

I think that these numbers that you are throwing out need to be qualified. #1) Qualified by real data - where do your yardage stats come from? #2) also what level of performance is resulting from the yardage levels that you are giving?

From my own experiences, and my relationships with elite level age group and senior level coaches, there are a ton of 15-18 year olds going speeds of around 5:00 to 5:30 for 500 yards on 20-30k per week. A good portion of that is also spent doing non-freestyle. Some of the other strokes may be credited with a cross-training effect, but the same performance goals can be met with less total yardage if freestyle is the sole focus.


I think this is a strawman argument. Just because you can't become elite with less than 1 hour per week of practice doesn't mean that the only path to greatness is 15 hours per week. Similarly, dismissing drills as "nonsense" is to make a caricature of the kind of intelligent, progressive, and successful approaches to developing form that age-group coaches all over the country employ.

There is a ton of area between 1 and 15 workouts per week, and that area between is, as johnnyo noted, steps in the progression. Thus, it's NOT really 6 months. It's a hell of a lot more.

Regards,
r.b.

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Bringing you Tweets @ http://twitter.com/findfreestyle and Not just a bunch of drills - A Process.

X1,000,000

Fishes are some of the most proficient drinkers/partiers on campus. Swimming twice per day at 2hrs per practice leaves another 20 hours per day to drink.

You can't drink all day if you don't start in the morning!!

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Blogging

863.9 (repeating) meters is huge. That will make or break your season!

We had this bright idea one year to do a 24 swim-a-thon to raise money.

We also thought it was a great idea to have a 24 hour party to coincide with said 24 swim-a-thon.

Bouncing on the 3m board while loaded to the gills is something I wish I would have blacked out - it is actually pretty frightening.

That's my season total. :)

Thing is, I've seen it work well. I went to a D3 college that was open roster for most sports. Our swim team talen level went from All Americans (A friend of mine was a 16:00 flat 1650 guy, which while not elite, is pretty respectable in that realm) to people who had literally never swum a competitive stroke in their lives.

At the beginning of the season, coach would have the utter and total newbies doing widths in the diving well and working on very basic technique. By the end of the first season, he'd have them able to break 1:10 for a 100 yard freestyle on race day, and swimming a two hour practice in the slow lane with only minor modifications. Come back for season two, and they'd be doing freestyle sets on a 1:30/100 yards sendoff pace by the middle of that.

So we're talking 10-20 hours a week from October through February,depending on whether you did all the optional morning workouts, and that probably gets you in the top 20% of triathlon swimmers if you end up in the sport later on based on those two swim seasons of hard work.

But this is still a far cry from just hammering 40k per week for 6 months -- which was my point. 1) you had a coach, and clearly someone who knew what they were doing. 2) your sample group is still limited -- it contains the people who actually survived it.

And as I have stated earlier in this thread (only bout 200 posts ago) I don't claim that pounding can't get you there, it surely can -- or some folks that is. there are risks, and there are no guarantees, and there are a lot of people who will fail thinking that you just hop in and start going 40k. there is no "all you have to do" that applies across the board, and well, it is a bit impractical for most AG'ers.

regards,
r.b.

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Bringing you Tweets @ http://twitter.com/findfreestyle and Not just a bunch of drills - A Process.

Chris McCormack told me ''15 years ago, swim 40km/week for 6 months and you will be front pack for the rest of your life''

I just want to follow up on Johnny's post - it was a good one - and propose a little experiment. The goal race is an Olympic Distance Triathlon at the 2 year mark.

Take two non-triathletes with very limited endurance fitness. Triathlete A starts in on a total balanced swim/bike/run training program from the get-go and sticks to it. Triathlete B starts off with total immersion in each of the 3 sports for 6 month blocks of time - so 6 months of swimming, 6 months of cycling and then 6 months or running, or what ever order you like. Their focus for each of those 6 months is that sport.They can do a limited amount of the other 2 if they have time/energy. Then for 6 months shifts back to a balanced training program.

Who wins the Olympic Triathlon at 2 years?

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

Triathlete A wins because he is not injured or so bored that he moved on to another hobby.

the first one across the finish line!

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ST: all your answers to age group swimming requirements found here:

http://joelfilliol.blogspot.com/...-is-is.html?spref=tw

Yes, that simple.

Now just swim.

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@rhyspencer

One wonders if the Paulo haters will come back on and start slagging Joel as well....because you know, he has no credentials and athletes that have done well either.

Triathlete A wins because he is not injured or so bored that he moved on to another hobby.

I can't help with the motivation - that always has to come from within. It's actually a key part that many seem to not really understand. To do this well, to do anything really well, you have to really want to do it.

There is this oft stated notion that to focus on one sport automatically leads to injury - is that what you are saying?

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

Thanks for posting that link!

Looking forward to reading thru other entries on his blog.

That's sort of what I did through high school and first two years of college. Bike race in the summer, run xc in fall, swim in winter, run track in spring. The limitation was that I wasn't able to handle much volume in any of the sports to be more than a 50-100 guy in the pool, a 400-800 guy on the track, and a crit guy while riding. Not sure if I would been very good at anything if I wasn't born with predominantly fastwitch muscles. Last two years of college I just focused on running, and the gradual increase in mileage I was able to handle (30mpw to average 50mpw for 18 months) lead to massive increases in running ability (18 seconds in the mile, 1:20 in the 5k, and 2 minutes in the 8k). My 400 and 800 stayed the same.

In the hypothetical you proposed, I guess I would change the rotating 6 month option to 18 months of just swimming and running, with almost daily doubles. 6-8 runs and 5-6 swims per week, with gradually increased volume and intensity. Swimming would be done with a masters team. Then six to eight months out from the race, do a bike intensive block and back off the other two a bit. Send them out on lots of group rides and teach them to suffer. Bike fitness seems to be acquired the quickest since there's very little efficiency/form to be taught. Almost every ounce of effort applied translates to forward momentum. Just my two cents.

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Twitter | Kancman | Blog

"Chris McCormack told me ''15 years ago, swim 40km/week for 6 months and you will be front pack for the rest of your life''

Well the truth is Macca proved himself wrong on this one . He was a third pack swimmer this year.
But I also think if he is doing his 6 month he will be at least a 2nd pack swimmer 2012

Some of us yes but oh dear lord certainly not all of us.

Making an obvious point here but it's taken me a while to get it. Coming from a running background, the amount of over-distance training for swimming has astounded me. To use the quote above, if I swim 40K per week to race an oly 1.5K, then I'd be running 267K per week to race a 10K. Of course that's nuts, and training times & distances don't scale across sports like that. But since I only started swimming a year ago I fell for similar logic. As in, "I'm only swimming ~2100yd in a 70.3 so swimming 2500yd three times per week is more than enough..."

then I'd be running 267K per week to race a 10K. Of course that's nuts, and training times & distances don't scale across sports like that. But since I only started swimming a year ago I fell for similar logic
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Training Volume (Hours): Swimmer > Cyclist > Runner.

Dude I used to swim 50 to 60k a week for a race that lasted about 20 seconds.

That's what I'm just wrapping my head around. Of course the scaling for sprints is different from distance races - nobody would suggest a 100m track sprinter only run 1000m per week. Still even for distance races, the (training volume)/(racing volume) ratio for swimming is much greater than I'd realized & also greater than what's in most of the IM training plans I've seen (which are something like 3-4 hrs per week). So since I really need to improve in swimming, I'm hitting the pool a lot more this winter.

First off, swimmers swim that much because they can. Its a low impact activity so you really can go for 4 hours a day, every day and live to tell the tale, if you have the time. There are about a 100,000+ kids in the US doing some approximation of that as we speak. If runners could physically do that, I'm certain that 30+ mile days would be the norm for distance runners so you can not compare one sport to the other to come up with an appropriate training volume.

Second, and really to my point, one of the basic problems with triathlon swimmers who want to get faster is that instead of looking at what real swimmers do as a guide (modified of course to fit time, talent and the particular nature of triathlon) they rationalize why they should be training for swimming in a completely different way than those who do it for a living, so to speak.

That, in my opinion, is at the heart of the tweet that started this. If you want to swim faster, train like a swimmer, because much of what makes for good techinque is made, not learned. Or, more realistically, aim generally in that direction given your other constraints. That, at its core, means swim more and swim harder.

To:....because much of what makes for good techinque is made, not learned.
Nice quote......I like