Nothing like getting smoked by someone doing kickboard sets

Triathlon Forum
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I’ve been trying to recover from a massive ear infection from swimming, and have been easing my way back into swimming this last week. My ENT had to literally remove stuck silicone pieces from my ear drum, which came from those silicone ear plugs. (FYI, if you use those plugs and you see a tiny silicone fray, don’t stuff it back into the silicone, throw them away immediately). Also, after each swim, soak them in rubbing alcohol everytime to kill bacteria and what not.

So, I started swimming again, on Tuesday, and I get my main sets back up to about 7-10, 100 meters. I’m going off on 1:45 and holding about 1:30ish. Anyway, I’m toodling along this morning, and, in the next left lane, some guy is going by me at a pretty good clip. I turn to breath on the other side when this happens so I dont’ get bothered by it. Where I swim, however, if you are going 1:20-1:30, you’ll be passing 80 percent of people. So, I had to look…

Turns out this guy was doing the same sets, going off on 1:30. WITH A FREAKING KICKBOARD! 50 meter pool. He was about 15 and on one of our national junior swim team. I think he made every one of the intervals. Hell, that’s just simply insane. No arms: 1:30. How fast would he go if he was using his arms? 45 seconds?

His mom was out there coaching him, nice kid. I whipped out some Zoomers to do a few final 200s. I actually think he was still doing those sets and I was barely keeping up with him with my zoomers on.

His mom said that she had ordered 2 pair of Zoomers for her son to improve his kick. And I’m thinking, “WHAT THE HELL FOR?” How much faster does she want him to go?

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Cool story. A local swim coach I know told me he visited an Australian national team training camp a couple years ago, where he witnessed Ian Thorpe doing 200-meter kick sets. I forget the rest interval, but he covered the 200 meters at 2:07 each!

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Cool story. A local swim coach I know told me he visited an Australian national team training camp a couple years ago, where he witnessed Ian Thorpe doing 200-meter kick sets. I forget the rest interval, but he covered the 200 meters at 2:07 each!

His WR at the 200m FS was 1:44, so his best performance at the olympics with arms is only :23 seconds faster than repeat training kick sets? That sounds a little off

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Yes, that’s WAY too quick. Craig Walton does 200m repeats on like 2:07, and Ian Thorpe is not faster than Walto with just his legs… I know Larsen Jensen can bang out a single 400m LC kick under 5 minutes, and he is a very strong kicker. I’d say Thorpe was probably doing them like 2:27 or something like that and it just got skewed. 2:27 is still VERY, VERY, VERY fast… The other possibility is that it was SCM, in which case his push off the wall might drop it down substantially, but still 2:07 is not reasonable…