That being said I am detremined to get better. I thought by bumping up to 5 days a weeka nd 15k might do it. Not really. I thought seeing a coach would help. It did some. He made some changes and I got a little bit faster. Now I am gonna swim till i drown, get cpr from hopefully the cute lifeguard, then swim some more. Instead of doing 3.5k ish type workouts I will do 4.5k ish workouts. If I have a day off from work I will swim a double. If I get hurt and cant run or bike I will swim a triple. I am working on gettign a job as a swim instructor where i dont think i can go without swimming a double everyday. I may not have the genitics but i will out work the fish of our sport.
Sounds like “Garbage Yardage”. Quality over quantity might be a better way to go. If you can not swim well slow than you probably will not swim well fast.
Just remember that if you are swimming badly, swimming a lot more yardage just means that you will just be practicing how to swim badly a lot more than you used to be. The most important thing for swimming fast is to swim well.
Hey, it just might work if you don’t have any glaring stroke flaws to begin with. My high school team always had some people swimming competitively for the first time. Coach would have them get the basics down, then throw them right in the middle of practice. After a couple months of 30K a week practices, they’d be comfortably making it through those practices, and be swimming times that would be considered fast by triathlon standards.
Good technique is pretty useless if you never learn how to hold it together and adapt it in high stress situations.
Thats kind of where I am at. My coach that i was going to said after some changes that i looked good. He said the speed would come. I am not that bad. I swim 100’s intervals at 1:45 touching at 1:25-1:30. I normally do a good warmup with some drills. Then go to intervals on hard days. Once I completly die I go back to drills and some aerobic distance which seems to help.