How to Structure Marathon Swim Training?

Triathlon Forum
1

I’m looking to swim a local strait that’s 40K (in a straight line, which it won’t be) in November 2012.

Currently I’m at 25K/week and and increasing, working on roughly a 35-week plan (that I got from a woman who trained for Manhattan) that averages 45K/week and peaks at 60K, over 6 workouts/week. After that comes another increased phase that gets me to next November. But for now …

6 swims a week:

  • 1 long swim is about 10K and 3+ hours
  • 1 moderate pool or ocean recovery swim the day after, unstructured
  • 2 pool interval-based swims (masters or swim team type workouts)
  • 1 ocean interval-based swim (effort level by minutes and/or strokes per minute)
  • 1 steady medium length/time ocean swim

Questions:

  1. Does that look like a reasonable weekly breakdown of swim workouts? Any suggestions?
  2. How might I structure the long swim?

I don’t have a regulation pool I can go to here often. I’m doing the long swim at a hotel on the beach that has a 30m pool, and do about a third in the pool, a third in the ocean, a third back in the pool. Mostly it’s moderate-effort freestyle sets of pyramids / inverted pyramids, a freestyle block with every so often a length of stroke, a short (meaning up to 10min) IM set, sets like 800/2x400/4x200/8x100, etc. Usually some kick and pull as well. Anything to get the distance in.

Any thoughts for structuring the long swim, or is it really just about getting the distance in however I can?

Any other ideas or suggestions are welcome as well. Thanks!

2

Every 2nd or 3rd long swim, work on your nutrition. I use maltodextrin mixed with gatorade, I can’t remember what the stuff is that they use in in the UK< but it’s maltodextrin as well.

The other ones, do them intentionally underfed, you’ll be out of your mind miserable sometimes. But you might get to that state in your long swim anyway.

For right now, on your long swims. Whatever you need to do to get through it. Marcia Cleveland has some long workouts on her doversolo website. Also there are some decent long ones in the book championship swim training.

As you get closer then the swims need to look more like what you will be doing on race day.

There is a channel swimmer list on google groups. Join that and every now and then there are some good topics that come up.
Open water swimming by Penny Lee Dean is a pretty good resource as well with specifics on workouts and so forth.

usms.org has an open water forum that has several long dstance open water people who comment there.

Oh, and after 6 hours or so, it’s all mental.

3

Great stuff, Kevin. Thank you.

  • needed the reminder to work on nutrition … duh … will have to work out my own formulation since not too much is consistently available here
  • Dean book is on my ‘to get’ list (meaning a friend can bring them from the U.S.) and will add Championship Swim Training as well
  • have checked out many of the distance swimmers’ blogs but not Cleveland’s, good tip
  • had no idea about the channel swimmers group, great!
  • have been lurking on usms forums for a while–they’re not very active but hopefully will get more info

6 hours–arrrrrrgh :wink: I do have the good fortune to be able to train IN the strait I’ll be swimming (takes some planning but can do several boat runs and probably a couple dozen good long swims in there before the first planned attempt)

Thanks again!