There’s no way he makes progress on his swim. The signs would already be there IMO. He’s still doing a ton of racing and bike/run volume, and seemingly lacks a swim coach/squad. I think he’s a bit like Lionel in his “do it alone” attitude but would really benefit from a coach or someone to keep him on track.
Yes, you have said Sam is playing “chess, not checkers” and implied he is working a well planned, longer term strategy which will pay dividends in his swim when he gets back to long course IM racing. I don’t see any indication that is the case. The notion that by taking T100 money and finishing last out of the water is going to help his swim long term makes zero sense and considering the year is already over 1/3 done, it’s exceedingly unlikely. It’s not chess, it’s tic-tac-toe.
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The thing is because he’s so cryptic w/ his swim training, we really have no clue what steps he’s actually taking to make swim progress, other than he admitting this has been “swim focus” volume wise. Swimming you just can’t “self coach” yourself out of it, generally. I always think at that level (really at any level), you want the least amount of work for the most gains. Like pick paths with the least amount of resistance, not having more hurldes in front of you. In swimming that generally means on deck coaching and “squad” training so that you can have eyes on you for most of your swims (easy feedback).
Yes and all that was under the assumption of a well designed swim plan. Which none of us have any idea or clue on. So when I said him taking the money would allow him to go “all in” on the swim, that also meant going “all in” on the swim training.
So I’ll put my coaching theories and expertise against you any day of the week and twice on Sunday Bryan. The T100 results are meaningless, that’s the point, that has completely gone over your head. By taking the money he put himself in a position that he could “work” his weakest plan. It’s up to him to actually execute the plan, but the philosophy of why you take the money seemingly is over your head (and that’s ok). And if he did that it would have far longer implications on his swim development that would help his IM career way more than the short term T100 results.
That’s the chess not checkers that you can’t comprehend. Again how he actually executes that is another story. But the plan or “how he can improve his swim” can be there. That’s why the T100 money would be so important vs other pathways that are driven entirely by results. He can get fully paid and finish in 8th and still “support his family”.
Who is challenging your coaching credentials? I’m not. Chill out.
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Here is the way swimming works, and I understand those (most) of you that were not competitive swimmers have trouble with this concept. You train to get to a speed in your pool sets, and once achieved it is hardwired into your system. Getting back to that speed is infinitely much easier than it was getting to it.
And to get to each new faster speed it requires some solid effort and focus. Sam has said and shown us that is exactly what he did in his off season this winter, and also told us he hit new faster benchmarks in his training. So that speed is hardwired and his new normal.
Now he has to translate that to faster OW swims, and we will really not be able to judge if it worked until we have a whole season to look back on. Is he last place in the swim in T100, well of course, it was never going to be otherwise and foolish to think so. What we should see is him swimming with others that used to be ahead, and holding onto better groups in the more filled out fields. What we should also see is him being fresher onto the bike and able to hammer sooner and with a reduced HR.
Of course that is hard to measure, but athletes know if the swim takes just a bit less out of them for the following two events. He will not be able to get anymore speed as you pointed out now, but the goal is to tap into the speed he already developed, while making small gains in his top bike and runs. He has done what he can do for this year in able to have a great season and be his best triathlete. When the season is over he can once again go for the next level up in swimming, without sacrificing his huge earning potential in his best years to be a pro…
Wasn’t he 1min further behind in T100 Singapore this year as opposed to last?
Like I said, we will have to look back on his entire season to evaluate if his increased pool speed has translated to OW. But in the context of this one race, it was obviously faster at the front because of Luis taking it upon himself to really hammer the pace, putting last years pace setters on their backs in the process. It did not work out for him and a few others that tried to follow, but it did make the overall swim much faster.
So yes your one data point is correct, you just neglect to look at the entirety of the swim to give it any context.
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Here’s what we do know:
-T100 money has given him the ability to work his weakness if desired (which is my whole reason why SL would take T100 money)
-SL has admitted that his swim training was “meh” last year, compared to previous year, and this year is back to the “swim focus”.
-SL is going to race T100 that has a very high swim demands of competition, and IM has a much broader swim demands within it’s races.
What we dont know:
-how is he actually planning that “swim focus”
-this past week has admitted that he’s going with the philosophy of max B/R/S training, so how do you work your weakest event when your not really dropping volume in the others,
What is common knowledge:
-swimming has much higher requirements of detail than probaly B/R maybe even combined.
-Solo swimming (either swimming or w/o on deck coach) is the least effective way to gain swim improvments
-any “priority” training generally means the other segments have to take a backseat because well the other needs more time.
-Generally when you don’t “focus” on any 1 area and you sorta go with "max’ in all 3, your not going to find the greatest improvements.
-Generally the shorter the “focus” is for an athlete, the harder it is to stick longer term. In latest video, he’s basically going forward with max S/B/R training, so at this point, the “gains” he likely gained from the swim focus are going to sorta stop. Or at min be very very hard to keep improving scale wise.
So if your going to bust my balls because I’m giving you “how it can work” and it doens’t work, cool. If your then telling me what Sam Long is telling us and likely not doing everything ot make that plan have the best result, that likely had more to do wtih the failure than the actual plan/theory.
From SL himself:
-he sees improvement in the swim either through time splits, technique (easier to swim same time, etc).
-he was “swim focused” more than previous year.
-he’s already going back to max S/B/R training/volumes all at the same time.
Understood, it’s just all we have so far. Will be interesting to see what happens this Saturday, I’ll be swimming as well.
Good grief, I’m not busting your balls, I’m debating likely outcomes, which as you know is me forte. 
Good luck in your race, you will be giving us one more data point between your swim and Sam’s too!! (-;
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So we have to a) be patient and b) understand T100 and IM results will be very different.
Everyone saw the T100 result swim result and automatically said this is idiotic to do. Again if T100 didn’t give out salaries, there would be zero chance SL is in that race series. So I think we have to sorta give it a few races (season) to actually see how the “swim focus” improved his swim position or not. T100 guys have to smash the swim now in order to potentially put gaps to Wilde. So in that aspect every aspect of T100 works against SL. It was eye opening in a bad way to watch SL “individual” time trial that swim like he was still in a pool. Though it wasn’t too choppy, I think you still need to get a higher cadence in the ow vs a pool.
Again we don’t know what “swim focus” actually means to SL or the steps to actually attack that. As I said I think generallly you want to put in a plan with the least amount of obstacles to give you the best bang for your buck. Imo as both a professional triahtlon coach and ncaa head swim coach, that would mean at min “squad” training + on deck coaching. If either of those were not part of the plan, then your just adding unneeded hurdles to the “plan”.
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I have no doubt his swim split will solidly reflect the delta between a rock star and a 56 year old wash up! LOL!
Do you think it’s possible he is secretly drilling it with a top swim squad and getting one on one on deck coaching, and we wouldn’t know? Tucson is a pretty small community. Honest question, there’s really a limited number of pools and opportunities down there.
Also, as a coach, do you think it’s possible to make the kind of improvements he needs in the swim while maintaining such a high-volume bike and run protocol? Wouldn’t he be better off taking 6 months off entirely of bike/run and just swim? Can he do this while maintaining a race schedule with T100 obligations and the IM races he has targeted? Is it realistic?
In today’s a social media world I would think it would be hard to do group training and someone not post about it. We saw LS himself when he went AquaBears he made videos on that every few months. We still didn’t know in what context it was though. Taylor knibb went from her daily swim coached program w OB in Boulder to then Julie Dibbons. I bring that up because squad/swim coaching is just almost a given that you need in tri these days. It’s one less headache to allow you the athlete to just “swim”.
If you read what I said in Dec. imo by taking t100 money that then gives you the ability to take the results out of mattering for ‘25. Of course that’s really really hard to actually execute. But if you’re talking about demands of competition at the highest level, his swim has to improve. Full stop. So what getting t100 meant was a “free year” to focus on that without the results mattering in terms of having to win to make money. The finances are essentially taken out of the discussion by taking t100 money.
And you’ll also notice every time he mentioned he wants to “win” races, I cringed. You can’t go all in on the swim and it not affect the short term results. But again it’s both early and late for his swim development. If he only went into a 4-5 month “swim focus” cus he has to now max B/R, his swim progress is basically going to be done (or much much harder to improve scale wise).
So where I disagree with monty is. I’d have actually taken the year off as much as possible and truly gone into “swim mode” and race under 6-8 races vs he’s likely going to race 10-12. But that’s dictated by t100 paying him a salary, thus why I called this potentially a “free year” for him where results wouldn’t matter.
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OK, so you sort of agree with why I am critical of this approach as he’s not really taking the time he would need to bank the dividends from that T100 contract may afford him. Potentially. And all I have been saying is that money is fungible. By taking the T100 he gets a benefit. He also has to forgo maximizing his potential benefit from his brand partners and his brand itself by doing less in a race series he is much better suited for and where the swim is proportionally a smaller part of the race.
In theory, the T100 should give him the financial stability to go all in on his swim. St George is close enough, that maybe he figures he can train through it and get back to work.
I dunno, my feeling is the only way he’s really got a shot to hope to make progress if he actually goes all in on his swim, like building from 30km to 50km a week. To do that, as Brooks says he’s going to need to sacrifice some other things.
What I see from Sam is kind of the opposite. He seems to be trying to have his cake and eat it too – take the T100 money, do some targeted Ironman races, but still keep a lot of bike and run volume + intensity. There just doesn’t seem to be a meaningful way he’s going to make some really noticable leaps in his swim that way. I suspect he will have some races he’s 4 minutes back and others he’s 5 plus back. Maybe in St George, he’ll be 3 minutes back from the pack that matters.
Either way, he’s likely going to have a swim progress which is within the margin of error.
If he was really taking that T100 security and focusing on his swim, he would be willing to let everything else slide, trusting that he’s a beast on the bike and the run and knowing those things will come back when he wants them.
My amateur coaching credentials would have him cut the run volume way back, and do mostly z2 bike, and then double swim sessions 6 days a week.
Worst case scenario, he makes marginal gains on the swim and drops back a bit on the bike and run, but he’ll be able to pick that up again pretty quickly. Best case scenario, he starts holding on to the feet of the 2nd pack and he’s now within striking distance or forcing the front swimmers to over swim and over bike trying to stay away.
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Here’s another step where I think T100 is failing. Why the “contracts” are so secretive in professional sports makes no sense. That should be a given that we all know the contracts, etc, but they won’t release that data. Just another misstep imo of T100…
That he has only gotten to 35k (and that was a volume PR) at some point this winter (I don’t know when the specific date of the video was…it was on an reel), was a bit shocking to me. Granted I’m not necessarily saying you gotta hit X volume, but on sheer numbers 35k yards isn’t really all that much for a “swim block”.
When we (usat) worked with collegiate single sport athletes coming to the sport, the runners would easily swim 10x a week, and that included “fun” swims where you just go to the pool for 1 hour and work on flip turns or streamline. But that wsa the demands of the sport. If you can’t swim, your out of the sport essentially. Now at the LC level it’s not as drastic, but that “demand of competition” still applies. Which is why I thought getting a full T100 contract meant he got a golden parachute…if he did the training correctly.
And no I’m not implying that he was suddenly going to make the front pack. His demands of competition isn’t really that, he’s so strong B/R that he just needs a chase pack as worse swim. A FOP swim would be an very unlikely realistic goal, but chase pack for him, *should be relatively achievable, and again that’s basically the demands of competition. Don’t get there and your racing now for not the top spot any longer.
The one piece of advice I still remember to this day it was from Johnno Hall. I was at a mentor itu coaching camp with him about a decade ago. We were asking what volume do you need to hit in order to hit the run times, etc. They never answered the question, it pissed us off. Many years later, now I realize there is no magical volume number to hit to make it work. The answer more is- you work until you’ve hit the objective, if that means you do it in 3 month “swim block”…great…if that means it takes you 6 months of a “swim block”, that’s what you do. It’s in essence entirely what demands of competition means.
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Contracts are only secretive in the sports where there is very little money. So Triathlon and Rugby kinda fit. But the NWSL has a salary cap of 3 million, when it was 500k no one talked about contracts because it was slightly embarassing. Now the numbers are large enough where agents share with the media to help drive other player’s contracts higher.
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