This I totally disagree with for CURRENT pro triathlon. Sure, in the early 2000s and before, you could probably low-talent your way with enough grit into a decent pro tri career, but not with the boys racing at the to p today.
JP was probably the reason McElroy went to PS in the first place, as I think they both ran at NAU near same time (or Mattt arrived just after Jason graduated, canât remember exact ages. One thing about PS coached athletes- you never questioned if they were âall inâ or not. Didnât mean it automatically translated to success, but it did mean athletes were doing the absolutely most to meet demands of competition. Which is why I said whether or not itâs worth it shouldnât even be the question. If your goal is to win world champ events, then itâs a no brainer Long has to improve his swim. If he can do that on less than âall inâ then thatâs the winning ticket cus you can keep a strong as hell B/R, but itâs looking like thatâs just not going to be the case. The past 2 years of his self coached he âdidnât focusâ on the swim in '24 and then spent an offseason in '25 âswim focusedâ while not dropping the S/B volume (heâs self admitted this in social media videos).
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I heard Peter Reid (Kona 3x Champ) give a talk once where he said he overcame this particular issue by getting thrown in the lane with 12 yr old girls (IIRC) until he worked his way up.
Sorry, but you are way out to lunch on any of your arguments itâs not even funny anymore. Playing in a march band has little to do with club swimming as a kid.
I swam as a kid. Competitive mediocre swimmer on lane 7-8 (my club had 3 guys that made the Olympics on lane 1). I had no issues swimming front pack in juniors triathlon. Simply explained: the speeds required to swim in triathlon are nowhere near the speeds required to swim at the highest level.
What many here are arguing (sort of), is that to be able to swim the speeds that Sam needs to swim, given the genetically gifted aerobic engine he has, he should be able to make some improvements. Swimming 1:30/100 m race speed is achievable by plenty of AGs, so something seems to be missing here.
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Have said it before, Sam isnât swimming 1:30/100m. Way faster than that.
And you have typical myopia with how naturally good you were if you think you were in a âtypicalâ swim club, yet 3 guys made the Olympics. Just statistically alone, how many swim clubs in the entire world have 3 guys from lane 1 making Olympics? While I agree with you even top tri swimmers donât swim anywhere near the speeds of pure competitive swimmers, your club must have been one of the best in the world if youâre sending 3 guys to Olympics, and you are obviously a wayyyyy better talent than the norm if you can even hang in the lower lanes of a club this fast.
This the kind of stuff that drives me nuts - folks saying 'man, I"m so average, I was only average in my club that sent 3 guys to the Olympics (not even Olympics qualifiers, which is already nuts, but the freaking Olympics!) so Sam should be a lot better than me in swimming!"
The aerobic engine in bike-run doesnât necessarily translate to equal levels in swimming and vice versa. This has been repeatedly proven. If it were so easy, every ex-collegiate swimmer would finish their college career and go and dominate pro triathlon.
At the end he recaps the T100 race.
Theoretically heâs going to get better at the swim but only marginally for t100 now and in the future. Assume heâll get offered some type of contract (wonât get auto contract if outside top 10?)? So does he just keep taking the t100 money and racing for 8th-13th every year or will he finally sorta move on? I theorized in t100 thread if itâs only 5 race min and you can make $150k with no podiums any FOP athlete should just almost do add it by default- Laidlow / knibb / KM/ BluâŚ*with the understanding that itâs a money grab not trying to win every race and series. Long is obviously not in that fop category so how much anguish is t to constantly only able to finish MOP at best, but âprovide for your familyâ. Like is there an actual chance he keeps doing this, if the money offer is good enough to do?
By Sam own admission, heâs not sure he will be offered a contract next year.
I wouldnât be surprised for the T100 to offer him a Wildcard contract- with Samâs following he gets them much needed eyeballs, especially in North America where thereâs very few other marketable athletes. I remember Pat on PTN alluding to Lionel, Gustav, and even Trevor Foley being offered wildcard contracts in the past (Trevor may have been a ranking rolldown last year).
Whether it makes sense for him to take the contract is a different story, seeing too as wildcards PTO contracts typically arenât worth as much as the guaranteed ranking contracts. As weâve said here his brand is worth a lot more doing north american 70.3s and fulls. If he can have a solid race (not even great, just consistent without a blowup) in Nice, my guess is that he will go in for the IM pro series next year even with a T100 wildcard.
I think only the top 10 get guranteed contracts, and then potentially other avenues per athlete (IE Long would qualify as a social media numbers?)
But yeah if he wanted to use the now not being top 10 and getting guranteed contract, that would probaly suffice and be your answer.
Sanders, Iden and Foley were all offered a 2025 T100 contract.
Long is likely to be offered a 2026 contract on roll down: a good race in either Dubai or Marbella will assure that. Ten contracts to the top 10, five to the top 5 contenders and five to hotshots.
Wrt the IM Pro Series, Long has shown zero capability to string more than two full distances together, in fact normally one good oneâs a success. So the idea Long can achieve a top 5 position in the 2026 IM Pro Series (#8 gets an athlete $20k) to âsupport his familyâ is pie in the sky, Iâm afraid. Heâd have to race two Pro Series IMs (you know, the ones with international competition) well. And then go on a finish
To put this in perspective, an athlete who manages to finish within 15 minute of the winner at two IMs. 5 mins at two 70.3s and within 20 at the IMWC would score 17,400. I expect that score to make #8 this year. Good luck to him both this year and next.
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Will try putting the point a different way
For kids that come up and do three sports and who eventually go pro, they come up most likely as good runners with a frame suitable for running, medium bikers (this is easy, just requires riding enough) and average (by swim team) standard. Eg they can swim, they have technique, but languish compared to proper talent.
Lucy is an example of someone who prob came up as good swimmer, medium runner no biker? I donât have enough info about her.
Apart from someone knocking on the door to make their senior team (aka Lucy) the âswim talentâ needed as a prime professional 20 something etc is very low
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Put another way, itâs just a function of fitness built over years and average talent. Pete Jacobâs regularly gets beaten in open water swims around here by people older than him and also office workers. Pete still tries to keep fit and is lean as a rake
The people beating him donât have talent but they just have kept up at their noodling for years and been more consistent
When youâre coming late like SL you need to do some different stuff to make the adjustment
Disagree with almost all of your points. But I see why you have them - you are talented enough that without heroic training, you need not only competitive swimmers but fast ones, to keep you on your toes. Hence your 3 olympians in lane 1 of your swim club, yeah, thatâs normal NOT.
Lucy Charles wasnât âsomeone who prob came up as good swimmer, medium runner no biker?â - she was an AMAZING swimmer. Literally amongst the best of the best swimmers in Britain at her prime in her category.
And your quote âPut another way, itâs just a function of fitness built over years and average talentâ only works for people like you who take for granted that you have the talent, so you automatically assume everyone else wasnât too different from you and that all your winning results came from your hard, hard work. Sorry, it doesnât work that way.
Iâll bet that you could right now swim once every 3 weeks and beat me in swimming at every distance, even at me training 20+k/wk. And Iâve been swimming in triathlon for 10+ years now. Most kids in a swim club can easily beat me after <1 year of club swimming. Thatâs a talent issue, not a training issue. For sure, I have better form than most of these fast kid swimmers in freestyle but they still kill me (I have video proof of myself to compare them, Iâm not just imaging it.) And Iâm farrrrr more representative of AGers than you are.
The gap between Sam Long and the people he wants to compete against is immense - 3-5 minutes, not seconds. Despite him trying his hardest to improve in swimming. Thatâs a talent gap, not a training gap.
Yeah, no. If you can beat Pete Jacobs in a OWS and Pete isnât totally out of shape, youâve got some talent. Sure, itâs not like youâre going to be able to compete for the Olympics qualifiers, but you likely have enough intrinsic talent that with <6k of week of swimming you can be amongst the top age-group swimmers out of the water in a half-ironman or ironman, and with 20k/wk of swimming you will almost certainly probably beat Sam Long out of the water, possibly by a pretty large margin (youâd be training similar volume to SL at 20k/wk) and be contending against the pro triathlon swimmers.
Thatâs light-years above average for age-groupers. The only way you can remotely say thatâs average is if youâre considering a field of pro triathletes, then sure, theyâll be comparable. But thatâs not at all what you were talking about.
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A more accurate description is less talent difference and more a development difference. Which simply means if your development time is behind others, you canât afford to miss on the âtrainingâ aspect of it to improve the time gap as much as possible. Again weâll just agree to disagree on the idea that heâs tried his hardest his entire pro tri career in his swim development.
3 years ago he was less than 3 mins behind the fastest T100 swimmers who are also the fastest IM swimmers in the world (where he was 4:30 down and right beside someone who finished 4th at IMWC with the same swim time). Heâs got âtalentâ in the water, to suggest he doesnât is just plain stupid. The sport also greatly improved itâs FOP depth all at the same time Long was doing his âself coachingâ pathway; which was always going to likely impact his swim training that will always have such a high technique demands.
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I still think itâ s mostly a talent difference, wayyy more than just âstarting early.â
There ARE pro triathletes who are adult-onset swimmers who now swim front-pack. And while they train hard and sure they had to spend a few years playing catchup, they didnât need any heroic outsized training compared to the pros they are competing against. And these lucky folks werenât doomed because of their adult-onset swim training.
No doubt starting early as a kid in swimming helps, but I think the effect is over-stated since people neglect self-selection in progressively competitive youth swim squads. In swimming, all the slow kids quickly find out that theyâre not fast enough and they (and their poor parents driving them to daily practices) start weeding themselves out once it starts getting competitive - and pretty quickly. Iâd say the self-selection occurs faster than most other sports in pure youth competitive swimming, as thereâs not much fun to be had coming in near-last over and over again, in practices and meets. (Contrast with boys basketball, where plenty of boys who are totally unathletic, uncoordinated, and really short, still might devote huge amounts of their life to it because they enjoy it so much despite their underperformance.)
If it were mostly about starting young to be good at swimming, weâd have tons of fast AGers putting the smackdown on adult-onset pro triathlete swimmers just because they started swimming 2 decades earlier. Alas, this is not the case. Even SL can beat pretty much all the AGers regularly.
If itâs a talent issue then I donât think you can only swim 20k a week with an avg of 5k yards per swim 4x a week (thatâs not even 2 hours per swim). I just read a goole article from this year, he âaveragesâ 5k yard a swim; so thatâs 4 swims a week to get to 20k; 1 more swim a week gets that to 25k-27k etc, and 1 extra swim a week is 20k more per month. Itâs my guess Harper is going to likely have a good impact for Long, they seem to vibe well, so there is âtrustâ between the 2, which is hugely important.
I was lucky enough to get invited to mentor with top coaches in the sport a decade ago. We all had questions of âhow much volume do you have to do in order to make FOPââŚthey would keep saying âit dependsâ. We were like WTF does that mean (we were wondering if they were just being prickish cus they were hiding some âsecretâ volume number). I finally understood what that meant. Demands of competition should drive your training decisions. So if you can make significant gains at 20k swim yards or 50mi per week on on the run, then there you have it. But if you arenât making gains at those volumes, then you need to keep adding (in a safe manner mind you). So for one âtalent lessâ athlete they may pick it up on 18k yards per week while another athlete with the same talent less profile may need 30k, but itâ's all driven by demands of competition and what your actual goals are. Saying you want to beat the worldâs best, means you have a very high demands of competition bar to meet then. So thatâs why I said your background is almost irrelevant to the end goal, itâs more using that factor to then determine just how much talent and/or vs training you simply need to build into the plan. And I mean itâs irrelevant because you donât get checked at the start list on who trained the least because they have the most talent, or who on the start list is the âhardest workerâ, thereâs no checklist procedure to pre-determine the results.
Donât lump me with that person who had 3 Olympians in their squad LOL
I did reflect on what I said as I was riding today and to be fair the guys who beat Pete are either former Australian circuit surf Ironmans (the surf mix thing) not top of the spear. But then they wouldnât call themselves talented. Youâre hard to argue with. Why arenât you an attorney for trump
Maybe you are!!!