You would think he should be able to top 10 even with the swim deficit if he doesn’t blow himself on the bike. If he can ride steady he should bring back a lot of guys at the top of the climb and on the plateau/descent. Then if he can run low 2:40s in the marathon (which he’s been 2:40-2:45 in his last few IM marathons), there will be a lot of fried legs and huge gaps. Not the same course obviously but that would’ve gotten him a top 10 in Kona last year.
I don’t know if his using them now, but he has definitely had a video where he said and showed that he was training with a squad at AB for a period of time. I’m guessing it didn’t have the big gains he and LS were hoping for.
I didnt look hard, but just a quick google search pulled up this video from 4 years ago, where he’s swimming with a coached squad. Yes, I know it’s from 4 years ago and sure, I do think it’s Aquabears, so not recent, but he’s done it and some other ones. I’d pretty pretty surprised if he’s NEVER used AB’s coaching in the past when he was swimming there a lot (although it does seem like he’s not using them now.)
It’s still going over your head. If your only using on deck or squad swims for certain key workouts a week (which my intel is saying has been the norm), your missing a ton of actual “help” that a on deck coach can provide in the other structured workouts. If you can’t understand, that’s a you problem. So again I don’t think for any real time he’s actually gone all in on the on deck swim (most/all of his weekly swims) coaching angle to training that you are suggested he’s done. Again if they are using the AB’s for the quality swims, that’s awesome, as that is going to be a great quality workout. That intensity type of workout isn’t going to be hwere the coach is then going to pull Long to the side and spend 15 mins alone with him; he’s got to “coach” the actual session. Other “technique” type of days is where the real value from an on deck coach can come in and where you’d get the biggest gains from eyes on deck from a coach.
Why he wouldn’t swim all his swims with an on deck coach within AB’s, I have no clue. Maybe 530am every day just doesn’t work for him. Could be a number of reasons why.
I think it’s you who are delusional as to how much coaching will improve SL.
He even recently spent an entire week (or more?) doing one-on-one highly detailed swim coaching with a really good swimmer. Video and everything.
He’s swum with a squad. Even though he’s not doing it now, it’s almost certain he swam a fair amount with the squad and realized it wasn’t giving him the needed gains he was looking for. SL isn’t stupid and he’s gotten input from others - if the squad was the key to unlocking a next level of swimming, he’d be doing it all day, every day, right now.
Your take is that he simply isn’t working hard enough on his swimming, when he’s on tape about pouring his heart and soul into it, as everyone including him knows it’s his key missing piece.
I’ll bet almost all the either top ITU swimmers aren’t requiring heroic swim coaching like SL. They were fast to begin with and got world-class fast without a ton more effort.
SL’s got years of results now to show that he’s pushing the limits of his swim performance. I’m pretty darned impressed with it - to be able to handily beat all the AGers, including recent ex-D1 swimmers, on a regular basis is no small feat for someone who had zero selection process for swimming.
I’d bet real money that if he spend 6 months with a top tri coach squad that has some top swim performers in the world, he’d only get marginally better, meaning the gap to the front pack is still minutes, not seconds. This is a talent, not coaching issue.
He was literally on tape THIS year saying he slacked off on his swim progression in 2024. He’s also on tape THIS year saying his “swim block” included high levels of B/R volume during that “swim block” build.
Yes it’s a talent issue, but that’s the point. He’s gotta to do more than the others. that’s what demands of competition are. Competition doesn’t care if your a fish, not a fish, have to out work others, don’t have to out work others. All that matters is meeting the demands of the sport (it’s clear you have no understanding of that concept). So when you talk about wanting to be a world champion, then your bar is damn high for youself. I just hope you then can say “i’m doing everything I can”. If you can, great. If you think he’s done all he can, great from your fan prospective. From my coaching prospective, I would question some of the “investment” decisions he’s made. Again Long self admitted he slacked off on his swim training just last year, for any professional with that swim ability, that makes ZERO SENSE. So just don’t come on here and say he’s been all in on his swimming and he just doesn’t have it. That’s bullshit. Again I’d be with you if he’s actually maxed out his swim ability, but when the athlete themselves tells you they slacked off on it, then I’m sorry I can’t believe he’s done everything to max out his swim ability (yet in his career). If he’d done years upon years of daily coached sessions and squad practices and he sorta hit the limit, then I’d agree with you. But his “new” swim coach identified already some body position work that should translate to him being faster in the water. That is going to take time to actually show up in races, even more so in world class fields.
Seconds/100 improvement would be all the marginal improvement he really needs to be in a much better place to actually achieve the WC results he wants to on a more consistent basis (again T100 swim is beyond achievable, his long term race plans will always be 70.3/IM focused). No one is suggesting he’s going to need to work to a front pack swim; but “marginal” improvements for him would put in a GREAT position to then be successful in the water.
I look less at overall swim times when talking splits, and more look at splits to different athletes race to race, so it’s not an exact science, but it’s atleast somewhat comparable. Comparing his times from T100 races he raced against this year, he’s already gained about ~45s to more if you compare the athletes who raced events he’s done. Which basic math is “only” a 4s improvement per 100 pace, which probaly equates to your “marginal” definition. This is all since he’s gone to his “new” swim coach.
Put him now in a 70.3/IM environment where there are more filler athletes (T100 has too few of BOP athletes and only 20 race rosters, there’s basically no chance for Long to ever get into a “pack”, at IM events he will have that chance), and he’s now got a chance to come out in the better groups that can put himself in a better position to be successful. So I’m sorry, Long is far from “maxed out” his swim ability imo. My whole point from this winter was to do THAT starting in Dec instead of July when for whatever reason he finally “focused” on the swim.
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Sorry, not buying it. Swimming seconds faster will just give him marginal gains, and won’t substantively change his performance against any of the big guns (Kristian, Sam Laidlow, Hayden Wilde, etc.) that he’s trying to compete against for the big prize. He’s said he can’t win at T100 anymore as everyone’s game has upped so much, but you’re fooling yourself if you think those top guys aren’t just going to move on over to the big races like Kona, etc. and throw down the same smackdown.
Sam certainly isn’t going to swim like 60 seconds faster, and then magically latch on to the next pack and come out 2 minutes down instead of 4. It’ll be like 3:45 minutes down instead of 4:00 down. That next pack is not dragging him minutes ahead if he drafts them.
For sure, just focusing on 70.3/IM where his strengths are, still doesn’t negate the real problem that the top guys who will be there will be crushing him on the swim AND biking/running as fast as he does. 5 years ago or more, sure, marginal gains may have let him contend for the biggest wins, but not today with the current crop of athletes who are strong at all 3.
Are there ANY competitive pro triathletes who managed to consistently improve 2 minutes or more in their swim after several years of serious racing? If there are, I can’t think of one.
It doesn’t matter if you are or aren’t buying it. Your just some random fanboy that generally talks out of their ass on subjects like this.
You know who is buying it? Long- he’s already “gained” time on his T100 competitors by near 1 min now in the short time he’s worked with his new swim coach. That’s only going to put him in a better position to be successful in the 70.3/IM events which are his true love of the sport.
So who gives a shit if your buying it or not, it’s Long’s behavior is what matters. He’s more “all in” now on the swim imo than he was 10 months ago (or this off season). And that matters very little as well, but what does matter is that he’s made the decision that he needs to get his swim faster.
We’re all fanboys. But you can’t argue with RACE RESULTS. And SL’s results are quite consistent with him lagging on the swim, no matter what he has done. And he’s working on it and has thrown at lot at it. You might think he’s on the route to swim excellence, and I sincerely hope he gets there and will gladly admit I was wrong if he gets good enough that we can’t really hammer on his swim weakness.
5 years of race results thus far, fanboy or not, though, are strongly statistically on my side that he won’t. All you’ve got on your side for is hope he has the potential to improve - which I’ll argue is farrrrr more unlikely than the expectations I have based on his multiyear race results. I think the large majority of folks here would agree with me on this one based on REAL DATA - if he could have made that big swim jump, it should have happened already.
So now your changing your tune. You orginally have said he’s “maxed out” his swim ability. I countered that assessment with Long’s self admittance, that he hasn’t always focused on his swim. I’ve never said going all in will automatically work. I’ve said he’s never actually done it beyond periodical times in his career, and in the times where the sport has only improved he self admitted he slacked off (countering your own assessment).
So what I’ve said is if that’s the case, then the chances of him having swim improvements by “investing” in his swim are much better than just throwing his hands up with “well Lightheir agrees that I’ve maxed out my ability, so I can’t get better”.
He’s already improved in RACE RESULTS in the small time he’s worked with his coach. He’s going to have some good swims, he’s going ot have some not so good swims in the next few years of his pro career. But to suggest he can’t get better cus he’s maxed out, I just find complete not/applicable to Long and thus bullshit.
two claims made by lh
It’s very impressive he is beating AG guys including ex d1
The guys at the front of these swims are talented
Claim 1 - yeah beating a few banking bros and most rest of the splasher AG field is AMAZING. I mean it’s a really BIG achievement to be proud of for SL
Claim 2 - relative to other triathletes only (and discount times as involved wetsuits). mostly only bare average swimmers and the kids that love it go to triathlon from swimming… the actually good swimmers go to oly trials.
Take a decent junior swim squad. If you were in the slowest lane at the back of the lane and absolutely sucked, if you kept swimming through with that group until you were 20 you’d be able to sit on the back of a front pack of one of these races. If you were in the decent lanes you’d be going to Oly trials, go to college and get a corporate job out of it
Didn’t see the interview yet but did Sam say his goal is top 10 overall.
Wouldn’t that be his highest finish in an Ironman ( full course) and it would be at worlds??? Seems a tough goal .
Matt McElroy is probaly the “biggest improvement” I’ve ever seen in a professional triathlete with the swim. He literally came to the USAT College Recruitment Program I think he swam a near 2:00 100 with the most god awful stroke you’ll ever see. Dude grinded for years and years to get success in the sport (just missing the olympics twice), and guess what he was only ever 2nd chase pack swim ability, he never got FOP swim ability.
Funny story, he made the ncaa track 10k championship finals, which was like a 8pm finals start. He swam 6k yards that morning cus he was that invested in his triathlete career at that point. I think he got 2 podiums in WTCS events, several World Cup wins (equivalent to B level N.American IM 70.3 races that Long wins).
He has a great video of his yearly progression from 2014-2023 (not updated it in last 2 years), it’s one of the most “hard working” progressions I’ve ever seen in the sport. Of course he was doing daily swim coached sessions with various squads for years and years (like 9 years), and at times upwards of 10-12 sessions a week (some stupidly basic like just go do flip turns for 30 mins), but that was the “demands of competition” that he had to meet in order to be successful at itu.
There’s a few LC pro’s that went from “no swim background” to objectlvely strong swimmers, it’s obviously rare. But again your background is almost irrelevant to the demands of your sport. It just means you have to work doubly harder at it than potentially others.
What do you think SL could achieve in terms of his swimming? I agree that he could improve but tend to think @lightheir is correct in that he’s probably only making marginal gains. I don’t think it would get him on the podium or even top 5 in a WC.
Out of curiosity, I took a look at Kona results last year. Setting aside a few stragglers, there were four swim packs. Seven of the top ten overall finishers came from the first two swim groups. Chevalier was in the 3rd swim pack about 3.5 minutes back and worked his way to fourth overall. Hanson was with him and snagged 10th. Wurf was in the 4th group (5:22 back) and got to 7th.
It’s only one race, but it indicates the chances of a top finish are long if you’re not in about ninety seconds of the lead coming out of the water, something I think we already knew. Wurf showed you can be up to five minutes down and get a top ten. Could Sam get the gap down to that level? Could he get to a Chevalier-type swim and only give up 3:35 in the water?
Maybe. In the 70.3 WCs he did from 21-23 he was typically a little over 2 minutes down. He was less than 5 minutes back at the IM WC in 2022 (and with LS who finished 2nd).
But today either he has regressed or the field has gotten faster and it seems to me that the gap he needs to fill between him and the front of the race is so great that, even if he followed all the ST advice about getting a coach and committing to swimming, he would still be unlikely to feature at a WC or any race that draws a high number of top guys.
Given that reality, I can understand why it might be hard for him mentally to back off biking and running for significant amount of time so that he can fully invest in swimming, which is what he’d have to do if he really wanted to get better.
Kona 24 Swim results:
Group 1, 1st-19th 0-26 secs back
Group 2, 20th-25th, 1:13-1:25 back
Group 3, 27th-36th, 3:32-3:45 back
Group 4, 37th-41st, 5:12-5:26 back
Overall finish w/ swim group in parentheses:
- Lange (1)
- Ditlev (2)
- RVB (1)
- Chevalier (3)
- Koolhaas (1)
- Barnaby (1)
- Wurf (4)
- Lindars (1)
- Hogenhaug (2)
- Hanson (3)
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The obvious stat is that the last guy who didn’t make the front swim pack to win in Kona was Kienle back in 2014. The last guy to threaten the win was Sanders in 2017.
Yeah, technically Blu didn’t make the 2021 St. George front pack (he was between groups 1-2) but he’s usually front pack and now that it’s Kona again, we can say it doesn’t count.
Out of the list above, the only guy IMO who’s a legit A grade contender who wasn’t front pack is Ditlev, and be never looked like he was threatening for the win last year. Maybe you could argue Hogenhaug based on Frankfurt, but at that point he’s improved his swim enough to be front pack
Which goes back to my question…who’s in his support group to mentor/advise/ not be an “yes man”. If he doesn’t want a coach, cool, but who’s going to say “hey man that may not be the wisest choices”…relatives/significant others are generally not great for that role.
As far as actual improvements. I think that’s almost impossible to say to a specific time improvement. As I said upthread, he’s already gotten what 45s+ improvement to the T100 group in what less than 2 months of working with his “new” swim coach. With anything he’s going to probaly have some good swim times, and probaly some “bad” swim times (IE likely in Nice against world’s best), but I’m kinda like Nice is irrelevant at this point. He’s sorta taken the most backasswards approach to putting himself in the best position by only in July sorta having the line in the sand to finally improve his swim by getting a new swim coach. As I sad, I would have advised him in his ear…“Hey Sam your going to make $150k and be a MOP at best finisher in T100, let’s take the pressure of having to win to “provide for your family” this year”…while still knowing he was going to race the B level N.A. race circuit and beast mode it (and make sponsors happy). Let’s go all in this whole year on the swim block, and then see where it puts you. He therotically “wasted” 8 months of swim training, what would it look like if he started with Harper in Dec vs July? And I’m not saying that “all in” is going to mean automatic success. I’m simply saying I dont think he’s maxed out his swim ability, so I’d rather do that and then assess where it puts him then this theory of he’s already there. I just dont buy that assessment, *yet. Give him a few years with Harper and then I’d be more willing to agree with that theory that he’s done improving in the swim and wherever that is, it is.
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The KEY missing point in your conjecture -
To even hang on the back of a ‘decent junior swim squad’, you have to be pretty freaking talented at swimming. I’ll bet SL at his very swim best would barely be able to hang on to the back lanes of such a squad.
The squad helps, but the real magic is how talented at swimming they were before even making that squad, which you can’t teach.
If it were a running analogy, it would be like starting with a bunch of kids haven’t really even been running seriously or consistently but whom all can run low 17s in their first field test. With hard training, a select few might even get to 15s or possibly lower. But let’s not misrepresent this - the squad isn’t taking Joe Average 21 minute 5k runner to 15-16s, it’s taking a nearly untrained 17:00 baseline talent and getting them to 15-16s.
Not saying Sam Long is the swim equivalent of a 21 min 5k runner, but for sure he’s less naturally good at swimming at the (few) guys who are beating him pretty badly out there. And, yes, I think it’s legit pretty amazing that he can beat pretty much all the AGers consistently given his lack of swim background.
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The thing about Sam is when you give yourself the tag of “Strongest legs in Triathlon”,you really should be backing it up.
Again,September 14th is going to be very interesting.
Sorry, but this is total BS for pros like SL.
At the pro level, and ESPECIALLY at SL’s world-class competitive pro level, it’s talent, talent, talent, then training, training, training. EVERYONE works super hard, everyone is busting their tails for near-optimal training.
At the AGE-GROUPER level, I would agree with you, because we leave so much on the table, even at the AG champion level. AGers just gotta train more, they’ll get better, sometimes a lot better.
But definitely NOT true for the pro level. Maybe you could bust tail and grind your less-talented self to a win in the early 2000-2010s, but not in today’s field.
Your missing the point. What talent you bring to the table then will transcribe what you have to do to then meet the demands of competition. That’s the entire point of what demands of competition means (which I think goes over your head). And thus “demands of competition” is individualistic to how each person then “works” towards that.
So I said it’s irrelevant more in that it simply will dictate what you have to do or don’t have to do in order to be successful in our sport. They don’t go down the start line and ask who started swimming at 8 years old, and if you didn’t your out of the running. There are still athletes who can be really really successful from a non-1st pack swim ability, we just have stats that 50% of the top 10 is from non-fop swim. (1/3rd of the podium fits that description from the stat above).