Category Archives: Pool

Swimming through it – the value of long swims – addendum

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Something was niggling at the back of my mind last week when I wrote the article on  the utility of doing longs swims, and what I’ve learned from them. I felt I’d forgotten something but couldn’t place it.

A question this week prompted me exactly what it was. Amongst the reasons for doing long swims is to get used to knowing how you feel after said long swims, and to understand and improve your recovery process.

After I wrote the article I happened to be checking something else in my swim diary/log, (which now has about five years of detail) and I noticed that almost exactly two years previously on the same weekend, 30th April, 2010, the Magnificent Seven did our toughest ever training session. It was to be a 30k in the pool followed by a trip to the sea for a swim. We completed about 28 kilometres in nine hours (including breaks) before The Boss left us off the hook, finishing strongly with 400 I.M. and at least as I recall, Liam, Eddie and myself ending with butterfly. My training dairy notes show I felt “strong and good”. And then we all decamped to Liam’s House at Ballycroneen for a sea swim taking about an hour to get dressed and get there.

Ballycroneen

For the Aspirants complaining of the cold this year … the water that day in 2010 was 7.5°  Celsius with onshore wind and overhead waves, and we’d come from the warm pool in Source. We changed in Liam’s garage and walked down wearing coats and I was quickly in the water, no point hanging around, having looked carefully at the breakers and headed straight for a Wave Channel I could see at the west end of the short beach. Eilís was watching on the beach, unusual for her to go near the coast.

I swam through the inside channel gap and duck-dived the outside waves and very quickly I was out back, beyond the breaking waves. By this stage I realised no-one had followed me. I played around body-surfing in the waves for a few minutes and headed back in. A couple of the guys were in shallow water, the rest were out, and everyone was shouting or giving out to me, all having thought I’d been lost at sea!

Ever since, Eilís has been suffering a type of cognitive dissonance, on the one hand knowing I understand waves and tides very well and  on the other, thinking I can’t be trusted around the water. Attempts to explain were ignored; that this was completely normal for my usual training since after all I had no-one to train with, that I made a point of understanding what I doing, and that getting through waves is easy if you understand the principles and that I had been a surfer for years, all were wasted. And the fact that there were six other extremely strong and experienced swimmers present that day was also lost on her. Ever since it’s been the day Donal could have drowned. :-)

But I digress, as usual.

The cold swim that day helped to loosen tight muscles but recovery from the long swim was slow over the next week. I wrote sometime back in 2010 that local Sandycove English Channel Soloist Danny Coholane had identified that every hour training over eight hours added another week to recovery, and we were all agreed on this (having previously swum six, seven and eight-hour training swims).

Swims of five to seven hours took about five days to a week to fully recover. The two training swims of eight hours that year took almost two weeks to recover.

So what do I mean by recovery? As I described in an email during the period there’s a feeling of having little energy or ooomph when you are swimming. Times drop away, swims become much more physically and mentally challenging, you feel like you have nothing in the tank. It varies of course for everyone, but I generally feel okay for a couple of days afterwards and the slump comes for or five days after the swim.

One thing I noticed this year is that extending the time above six hours to eight hours was no longer accompanied by an extra week increase in recovery, the slump lasted about the same time.

So feeling this slump is not the direct value of the long swims, but a side effect. The actual value is in knowing that this feeling is normal, and that you are also Training To Recover.  Too many people don’t seem to consider this aspect. Why go so far into your reserves for a Channel or other swim that you are done with swimming for months or up to a year afterwards?

Related articles

Swimming through it – the value of long pool sessions (loneswimmer.com)

24 miles in 24 hours (loneswimmer.com)

Achievement unlocked: 100 x 100 x 100

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100 x 100 is probably the most famous of all distance swimming sessions. Metres of course, for my measurementally-challenged American friends. Systéme Internationale anyone?Ten fingers, ten toes, ten …. :-)

Anyway the elegant variation is 100 x 100 x 100, that is, one hundred metres, one hundred times, each time on one hundred seconds, i.e. starting each one hundred every one minute and forty seconds. So you finish before the one hundred seconds to get a quick rest.

100 x 100 x 100

Looks beautiful, doesn’t it? And intriguing if you haven’t done it. Elegant, like a great mathematical formula:

f=ma

Recently Mark Robson, Evan Morrison and Steve Munatones have all discussed it.

I’d never done it. (Sharp intake of breath). Solo, that is, without someone to share the workload with. I have done it with others. I’d done 100 x 100 by myself (though not in two years). I’ve done 10 x 1500. It was in fact a bit of a bugbear for me. It’s not that big a deal doing it with others who are around the same pace as me, (Rob, Danny, Ciaran, Jen, Lisa etc).

No, it was that final 100 that bothered me, the one minute forty, repeating and repeating. The first time I read about it was my second year swimming, about five years ago. (Remember, I’m not at this swimming lark a long time). It seemed immense and, for me, impossible. Now, it wasn’t that I thought about it much. I moved on.

Over the past few years, when I start back pool training from the sea every autumn, I discover all the long sea swims have taken what speed I have away. I’m swimming repeat 100s usually on 1:45. Within a few weeks, as I feel the fitness return, I’ll start doing mixed 100s: 4 x100 on 1:45, 4 x100 on 1:40, 4 x 100 on 1:35, that type of thing.

Swim training 14

Then I’ll start doing 10x on 1:40 maybe once a week as part of a main set. The first few of times are a good personal speed and fitness test. It takes six to eight week before repeat 20x 100s on 1:40 feel ok. After that I look for the point where I might feel like cracking, where I am not making the interval. Last week I did 50 x 100s one day as main-set and it was grand. And some of you were talking about it. So I took it back out of its box and decided I’d do it on Week Three of my four-week training cycle, Week Three being the most difficult or longest week.

The whole thing was grand though if you were to use only one word to describe it would of course have to be relentless (I might use “relentless” next time I change the site tag line). Not without difficulties of course. After a very short 400m warmup, I easily cruised through the first thirty, without about eight or nine seconds interval. Then I noticed in the fourth set that my interval dropped slightly. I hit 50x though still holding a five second rest. At that point I had a four-minute toilet and drink stop and half a 650 ml bottle of Maxim. I didn’t want to run out of energy half way through hour three. I was drinking half a bottle of water every 10x also. The sixth 10x weren’t great, a bit too variable. I was aiming for 70x. If I could get to there, it would be downhill and beyond the maximum number of 100s on 100 previously done.

By 70x the intervals were down to three seconds. That is not a sustainable interval if you have to work very hard to make it, but I was okay and not having to kill it to make the interval.

Some of the time loss was losing concentration, when you start to make more stroke errors, in my case these tend to be dropping my elbows, and dropping my left hand instead of holding the extension prior to the catch, and moving my head too much out of breakout.

The eight set was a bit of mix, I made everything but the times wobbled up and down a bit in the first half, but came good before the end.The ninth set brought the worry of cramps at the bottom of my calves from all the tumble-turn push-offs with not a lot of rest. I swam one hundred with toes clenched, slowing me down, to offset incipient cramp, and stopped for a quick drink on another for the same reason. At 90x I knew there’s be no trouble, I could keep powering on, intervals had returned to 5 seconds. Then on the ninety sixth, I started to feel again that I was going to cramp, but made it with one second to spare as a consequence. On 97, someone stepped into the end of the lane, I had to swerve, and when I tumble-turned he was still there and I had to go deep and wobbly. One second left again. Of course I blasted hard through the final 100. 200 metres of backstroke and all done.

Felt absolutely fine. Quick way to a 10k. Not one you want to do a lot though. Good fitness test also. I did however feel more tired the day after.

Now it should be very clear to swimmers that at I am not fast. The top world FINA swimmers are doing 10k in just over two hours, not in three hours. But I was delighted, it was a goal I hadn’t previously reached, though in fairness, I also hadn’t seriously attempted it, and it was less than I imagined it to be, the challenge being as always, mental, keeping the concentration to hold the stroke.

Amazing for me to think that for Jen Schumacher, Evan and others, this is probably an easy interval for them as it is for Ned, Owen, etc. Those guys are amazing. A 1:20 repeat is an aerobic set for Chloe Sutton …

Edit: I forgot to mention again, my primary purpose in writing up something like this, is to demystify them and take the ego out of it.

Related articles

Review: Biofreeze Gel

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Hurley and sliotar

I’ve mentioned before that regular icing is a great way to address the knots and aches that build up in a swimmer’s body when they are doing regular hard training. For myself these start to occur once I start to regularly go to 25,000 metres a week and over.

I’ve also mentioned the tennis ball and tights method, which I occasionally find invaluable for working on inaccessible knots in my back. Someone me told a lacrosse ball works even better, but lacrosse isn’t played Ireland and an Irish hurling ball (sliotar) with its raised ridges is hardly useful. :-)

As swimmers also know the third and most essential step of massage is essential for ongoing maintenance of muscles and to avoid injury. When I started regular massages some years back, my masseuse, Vinny Power, occasionally applied Biofreeze gel at the end of a massage, usually where a particular difficulty arose in my deltoids or neck and I was still sore.

In Ireland you grew up with Deep Heat wintergreen lotion, applied for every ache and the lingering and overpowering smell of it was a giveaway for field athletes and seemingly beloved of older folks.

But we now know that cold is far better for muscular aches by reducing inflammation and may help reduce lactic acid.

Biofreeze is a mix of volatiles that when applied evaporate quickly and the area gets cold.

It works very well for aching arms after a long swim.

It need to be used with a small amount of care. If used for more than about five or six days continuously you might develop a rash, but the products warns against continued use. It is also useful if you don’t want to be applying direct ice late at night in mid-winter! I find the cold sensation lasts for about twenty minutes from a small amount.

I’ve also found that if applied directly after a pool swim, the residual chlorine on the skin, even after a shower, makes the cold sensation even more intense and possibly very unpleasant for some people. Eddie Irwin, Sandycove swimmer and English Channel and Manhattan soloist, and also a pharmacist, said it shouldn’t be used DURING a swim, because it will cause the muscles to tighten too much.

It’s not cheap in Ireland if you buy from a Pharmacy or Supermarket, where it is an off-the-shelf product and the containers are very small.

However I have found the larger 16oz pump container, about half a litre, for better value in eBay, and the last time I ran out, I bought directly from Vinny since he gets it at trade prices so I recommend pursuing this idea with your physio/masseuse. A 16 oz container will probably last years.

 

Related Articles:

Magic Cups

Asthma and marathon swimming – Part 1

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This post and the subsequent Part Two post should not be construed as medical advice.

This is another example of how I deal with something related to swimming, in which I have made mistakes and learned and adapted and which may be instructive or useful as advice or warning. Throughout the two articles I will reference my G.P. (M.D.) who has a key part in the discussion.

You know the disclaimer of “seek medical advice” and how it can be annoying? It’s still valid, but at least you have some context here. It is also probable that what I write here, relating to my current stable situation is possible or even likely to change in the future, and that I will have to adapt again.

I have asthma. Like quite a lot of swimmers.

In my case the two are not causally linked, because I developed it as Adult-Onset asthma, during my competitive cycling years. There is a feeling amongst cyclists, at least in Ireland, that those two sports are also linked, possibly due to what seems to be a high rate of chest infections developed by cyclists, which we, regardless of any scientific evidence put down to constant exposure to cold and damp conditions, along with crud and literally crap thrown up off the roads. It’s completely common for cyclists here to cycle wet roads with cow dung spraying up from cars and trucks.

Asthma tends to divide into childhood and adult-onset. Childhood asthma often clears in the late teenage years whereas adult-onset asthma rarely clears. Asthma is a shut-down of the bronchials in the lungs, usually due to mucus, stopping your ability to inhale sufficient oxygen.

It actually took a couple of years to diagnose as asthma, during which time I suffered some really bad asthma attacks. Some attacks early on were so severe I was unable to climb a simple flight of stairs.  I discovered personal triggers in smoking, house dust, some chemicals. Nothing unusual. Other people react to animal hairs (I don’t, luckily given the three doglets and cat), pollen

(And as you can imagine, smoker’s claims they are now being discriminated against hold little validity for me).

Once I was diagnosed, I made a few decisions. I would try to control it via exercise. I would not take the daily steroid Preventer, due to a dislike of the idea of taking daily medication.

I had by them stopped competitive cycling and without racing I lost my interest in the long training hours. Within a year I was no longing cycling, so I took up running, which I also needed to address the damage done to my knees during my cycling years.

I would get a few bad asthma attacks a year, using my reliever and get through them. I would get a chest infection of two, which would clear and an asthma attack would follow.
Asthma attacks are pretty nasty. You never have enough air, you feel like you are slowly drowning, (and as swimmers that is a sensation we all think about, and is not an ideal description), and you would give anything for one clear lungful of air. I used to have to try to sleep sitting up a few nights a year.

As I figured out triggers and reacted more quickly, things improved very gradually. Attacks became more rare and less severe.

By then I was swimming regularly. This whole process was over ten years since the first symptoms, through diagnosis. I didn’t think about a link between swimming and asthma. I was in the sea for months during the summer, mainly the pool during the winter.

In 2009 winter Channel training, I started to get more asthma attacks. They would manifest by a gradual feeling of wanting to clear my throat by coughing. This would usually not occur until a few thousand metres into a session and gradually get worse, until I could no longer swim. The Ventolin reliever had no effect and I used 100 to 200μg. The next day I might be fine or I might get another attack. This continued for about a month on and off and I was really getting worried, I couldn’t predict attacks and they continued to occur.

One thing I realised, about which I could do nothing, was that the previous summer I had swam much more in the pool and less in the sea, not taking my usual extended break from the pool.

I had finally started using the daily steroid Preventer (Becotide, 250μg of beclometasone dipropionate), for the first time ever. There was a slight but not sufficient improvement. By February, I was looking at not being able to train at all or attempt the Channel.

I was visiting my GP regularly.

I was worried about having developed Exercise Induced Asthma, from the constant pool and chlorine exposure, but my GP said this was highly unlikely as Exercise Induced Asthma usually occurred within the first 10 to 15 minutes of exercise. (My GP was very interested and supportive of my swimming by the way).

A typical inhaler, of Serevent (salmeterol)

Image via Wikipedia

After three or four visits, antibiotics and decongestants, we changed the Daily Preventer to Serevent, 25μg salmeterol, which is a beta-agonist like beclometasone, but as I understood it, combined a stronger steroid with a bronchial vaso-dilator, and the salmeterol lasting longer than beclometasone, and used for more chronic asthma.  It took about two weeks to take effect but it worked. At the same time I started using two puffs standard Ventolin (100μg salbutamol) about an hour before training.

The combined result was a success and normal training resumed. I was still on my training target, because any day that I could train, I made every effort to make up for the missing hours or metres, but it was a very, very tough six-week or so period.

Now that I’m back pool training, I find myself remembering this and trying (and so far regularly failing) to remember to take my reliever (now Salamol, still 100μg of salbutamol but CFC-free) before pool training.  In the next part I’ll write a bit more about the practical effects and control in my training and life.

Part Two.

HOWTO make your swimming togs / swimsuit last longer

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Courtesy of another question. Though as Julie Galloway pointed out in her interview yesterday on Daily news of Open Water Source, we (Irish) call them togs not costume or swimsuit. And we never knew we were different!

This applies mainly to chlorine, which eats the nylon/lycra mix.

We’ve all been there. One day you are going to put on your togs when you realise the back of it has gone almost transparent, and you wonder just how long your arse has been practically hanging out.

I usually buy Speedo Endurance togs or any togs which are chlorine resistant. In a sale in Dover last spring, I picked up a couple of Slazenger togs really cheap. I didn’t realise they were very narrow on the waist and not comfortable to tie, but well, they were cheap. I’ve only wore each pair maybe 20 times, before they went that transparent way that you have to be careful not to wear. So, false economy I guess. (They didn’t say they were chlorine resistant either).

The simple ways to make togs last longer:

  • Purchase chlorine resistant ones.
  • Shower while still wearing them afterwards. This will get them well rinsed, and the soap will help.
  • Don’t wring them out, just squeeze them.

They won’t last forever but you should extend their lifetime by maybe a third to a half. Maximum lifetime for a pair for me is 18 months, usually a bit less.

Of course, togs for the sea last much long.

Fantastic swimming/diving photograph

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In a picture taken with an underwater camera Takuro Fujii of Japan competes in the men’s 100m butterfly final in the swimming event of the 16th Asian Games in Guangzhou on November 14, 2010. Fujii won silver. AFP PHOTO – Photgrapher Francois Xavier Marit. Source.

Lane swimming etiquette

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Following last week’s rant, here’s a quick round up of lane swimming etiquette:

Lane direction signs

Rule 1: Never get in an occupied lane if another is empty.

Rule 2: Never get into an occupied land without letting the person/people already swimming know you are entering.Do this by dangling your legs into the water or standing to the side at the end of the lane when they are turning.

Rule 3: If there is only one other person in the lane, the lane can be split with each person taking half the lane. But you *must* explicitly agree this. Otherwise assume lane/circle swimming.

Rule 4: Once a third person joins, circle swimming must start. Make sure both people know you are joining.

Rule 5: Circle swimming is dictated by the fastest person present, not the slowest, biggest, or first in. Take note of the swimmer’s speeds before you enter. Direction is often pool specific. Check for direction signs or ask.

Rule 6: Tap feet to pass. The person whose feet are being tapped moves out of the way to the corner at the lane end. Do NOT speed up if you are being passed.

Rule 7: Move to the side to allow faster people to pass. Allow them to turn at the centre of the lane wall. if there are more than one, allow all faster swimmers behind you to pass.

Rule 8: Do NOT turn or push off in front of faster swimmers. Faster swimmers should allow slower swimmers as much time as possible before starting.

Rule 9: Do NOT start swimming immediately behind another swimmer. They will not know you are there when they are turning. Injuries will result.

Rule 10: Swimmers resting at lane end should stay as far to the side of the lane as possible.

Rule 11: If the lane has a few swimmers doing long-axis strokes (front crawl, back stroke) do NOT do short axis strokes (Breastroke, fly)

Rule 12: Be polite. Communicate. Do your best to explain the etiquette. Remember most lifeguards don’t seem to know these. Most pools don’t have them posted.

Lane rage

Edit: given a renewed interest in this post (again), I realise this is a long list though, and impractical therefore.

Giving it some thought, I wondered what would be an effective but much shorter list of three essential rules? How about these three?

One: Never get into an occupied land without letting the person/people already swimming know you are entering. Do this by dangling your legs into the water or standing to the side at the end of the lane when they are turning. Never stand in the centre of a lane.

Two: Fastest person present has right of way. Note other swimmer’s speeds before you enter. Direction is usually pool AND lane specific.

Three: Do NOT start, turn or push off in front of faster swimmers. Faster swimmers should allow slower swimmers as much time as possible before starting. Don’t turn into oncoming swimmers.

But is even that brief enough?

Surely we can have a Golden Rule of lane swimming. I propose:

Be aware of what is going on around you.

Edit: clarified rules 2 and 3.