Over the last year+ I've made some large strides with my swimming and thought it would be a good idea to write up how I did it for my own reference as well as for some other folks who sometimes ask about how I improved.
Kiddie Times
I've always liked to swim. When I was a little kids, my family spent a lot of time at the pool or the beach and I was a bit of a pool rat. I did swim team for a couple of years when I was a little kid, but probably stopped by 2nd or 3rd grade. I was at best a pretty mediocre kiddie swimmer. But I did learn how to do all the stroked and how to do a flip turn, so I wasn't hopeless. I didn't really swim any laps for fitness until post college.
NYC Swimming
After my back surgeries, I decided that I was going to swim and bike for exercise. We lived in NYC at the time, so my main initial experience swimming for fitness was at the NYU pool. That was quite the interesting experience. You quickly learned how to swim with 8+ people per lane, which makes the lane sharing issues in the burbs seem pretty comical (people seem so scared to have even three people share a lane here!). I also learned that there were college students who could with what looked like no effort do kick sets much faster than I could swim. I have no idea of what pace I swam at, but I do know that I got pretty comfortable swimming 50 or 100 laps straight as a workout. At the time I didn't have any goal other than burning a few calories and keeping in shape.
First Triathlon Swim 2005: 24:29
Fast forward quite a few years and I decided to do my first triathlon relay. I'd been off and on swimming for fitness in the years between, but I honestly don't remember what my times were for any given distance. When I signed up for the triathlon, I started trying to swim regularly and started paying a little more attention to what sort of pace I was doing. My workouts were not especially structured. As with a lot of beginner triathletes, my first concern was to be solid doing the distance. This meant that I did lots of workouts that were straight swims. I think I may have sometimes thrown in a 10x50 leaving on 1 minute. I was really happy if I could do most of these in :40ish. I followed a 12 or 16 week plan that had 3 weeks of 10% volume builds and then a "rest" week. This meant that I was swimming 30 minutes a session at the beginning and a bit over and hour a session by the end. I was actually quite happy with my 24:29 time at an Oly length. That put me somewhere like 150th in the swim out of maybe 1500.
Total Immersion
Total Immersion is a pretty controversial topic among triathletes. For me, it was my first exposure to some philosophy about how to swim and some drills to try. I found the book in the library sometime during my first season training, read it and started trying out the drills. For me, I found that it was quite informative. While I didn't model my stroke off everything in the book, the concepts about body balance in the water and efficiency were valuable. I started doing some stroke counting and tried a few of the other drills in the book. On the other hand, I didn't do anything very concrete about tracking any gains during that time.
No Progress Years: 2005-2010
I made some really good progress on my bike times as I started biking more, but I didn't make much progress with my swimming. For example, on the same Columbia triathlon course as my first triathlon, my times were 2005: 24:29, 2006: 23:51, 2010: 24:42. That 2010 time would have been >200th, so I was actually getting worse relative to the field. I tried to swim a bit more and tried a little more structure, but never really got any faster. My benchmark "in shape set" was still 10x50 on 1 minute under :40 per 50.
2011 A Year Of Changes: Part 1 Masters
For a long time I'd been meaning to try out swimming with a masters group. One day when I was at my local pool, one of the life guards mentioned that I should check out the masters group since they swam at the same time I was already swimming. A few days later (the beginning of December 2010), I asked the coach about it and she was very open to coming out to give it a try. I went to my first workout and really enjoyed getting some feedback about my stroke, getting some structure to my workouts and pushing myself with the other swimmers in my lane. My first few weeks were spent in one of the slower lanes, but I gradually saw progress and moved to a faster lane (not the fastest) with some swimmers I couldn't have kept up with at all. I'm pretty sure my improvement during this period came from three things:
- Improved fitness due to more volume. I was going three times a week for ~1:15 and was being pushed by my lane mates.
- Improved fitness due to better structure. Instead of just swimming most of my workout straight, masters included a nice mix of drills, short high intensity sets and longer sets.
- Improved form due to coach feedback. My head position was the most obvious problem. I think there were some other little things here and there.
2011 A Year of Changes: Part 2 Finding Freestyle
I still wasn't happy with my swim technique. One problem that I always had was that I didn't really kick. I was one of the guys who is notably faster with a pull buoy. It was also pretty clear on any kick set that we did at masters that I was in a different (worse) league than my swim buddies. I read about this online program called Finding Freestyle (http://findingfreestyle.com/) that was supposed to help guys like me. It is an inexpensive 12-week online course where you follow a set of drills each week and can submit video online and get feedback from some coaches. I was extremely happy with this course. Toward the middle of the course, something started to click about how the kick was supposed to work with the rest of the stroke and suddenly I found that I could actually kick. I was still going to masters practices with a decent frequency while I did the course, so I could see that learning to kick was improving my results by comparing to my lane mates. I did this course over the summer in 2011 and got to test myself out at a triathlon in the fall. I was extremely happy with the result. As you can read in my race report, I was 4 minutes faster than the previous year and came in 10th out of 300. This race is a bit more relaxed than the other race I've been talking about, but this still seemed like a very good result.
2011 (-2012) A Year of Changes: Upping the Volume
During the fall of 2011, I found myself swimming in the "fast" lane at masters. This was partially due to my improvements, but was also a bit due to low turnout of other fast swimmers. So I found myself swimming some sets with a much faster swimmer. This raised the question in my mind as to what it would take to get that fast. I asked this question to an online triathlon forum called slowtwitch. The feedback was pretty clear. You need to swim more. At that time, I was doing three masters practices a week for something like 10-12K yards a week. The suggestion was to try 15K-20K per week. Late November of 2011, I started going to masters five times a week and logged ~60K for the month (including over a week off) of December. January of 2012, I'm currently at 73K for the month and expect to easily pass 80K for the month. So am I faster? Yes. How much? I'm not quite sure yet. My splits for sets has gone considerably down and I definitely feel like I belong in the "fast" lane now (even though I'm still not nearly as fast as some lane mates). My best recent benchmark was doing a 400 (scy) in under 5 minutes. This wasn't as a "swim for time", this was two 400s of a main set both under 5 minutes (the third 400 was 5:05, which sucked). It wasn't too long ago that I would have been pretty happy to do that 1:15 per 100 pace for a single 100 much less four in a row. On the other hand, while I'm not as worn down as I was the first couple of weeks doing 20K/week, I am still not quite used to doing that much volume. I suspect that when I actually rest and taper a bit I may see even more of an improvement.
FOP?
I guess it depends what you consider front of pack. At the Columbia Triathlon, last year, the 100th best swim time was ~21:50. I expect that is well within my reach currently. Top 50 was ~20:30. That seems possible, but I'm much less sure. Top 30 was 19:40. One of the women I occasionally see at masters swam that fast last year. But I haven't swum with her in quite a while, so I don't know where I stand. It would be pretty cool to break 20:00, so I'll go with that as a goal.
