Aspects of my training
Time means nothing. Yet marathon swimmers, as a group of endurance athletes who more than most should know this, also consistently ignore the lesson and ask “how fast were you?” or “what was your time?“? We allow ourselves to be deluded into ascribing more importance to time, in its incarnation of speed than it deserves.…
Our eponymous hero first appeared in the letters column of H2Open magazine back in 2012, subsequent to Simon Griffith, (editor of H2Open) posting a link to the one of the articles I’d written about pool lane swimming etiquette. Bob was not happy. Bob was very not happy. I was an elitist. I was…a lane hog.…
It’s sometimes said amongst distance and marathon swimmers that everyone suffers (at least) one nightmare swim. The kind of swim where everything seems to conspire against you. Nature, circumstances, events, planning, details. Nightmare swims are sometimes ascribed to over-confidence by the more self-aware kind of swimmer. Rather than blaming everyone except yourself the self-aware marathon swimmer…
It is known that people are usually more influenced by the other people they know, friends and families, than by experts. It’s from my swimming friends that I have learned most, not distant (both in geographic terms and ability) world champions or experts. I eke out my improvements incrementally, often going backward. I listen to friends, to them…
Normally I would spilt a post of this length into at least two instalments. But I wanted to give you all the information when you may need it, which for some of you may be the period between Christmas and New Year. There are two schools of thought in swimming with respect to the utility of very…
Imagine these brief vignettes: You’re swimming in the pool lane and it’s going pretty much as it usually goes. Outside the lane the rest of the pool is public recreational swimming. In the other part of the pool are a bunch of lads, maybe in their twenties. At one point you flip off the wall mid-way through a 400 or an…
Swimming is very much like the old saying about planting trees: The very best time to start was ten years ago. The second best time to start was yesterday. The next best time is today. But tomorrow is too late. I myself did not start ten years ago but I did incrementally improve my skills and technique…
In the original Star Wars A New Hope movie Harrison Han Solo Ford famously said that the Millennium Falcon had “made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs“. I still remember how annoyed I was, because even as a kid I knew a parsec was a measure of distance, not of time. (No thanks,…
(This is a repost and update, due to a resurgence in interest in this post. As it’s a few years since the original post, I’ve played with other variations of ingredients since.) Swimming generally and open water swimming especially is a sport of high energy demand. Many swimmers struggle to keep weight stable let alone…
In HOWTO Write a basic training system, I said we would progress from the structure of a simple one hour or more training system to devising a more comprehensive swim training plan. A long time ago I wrote a post on introducing interval training to swimming and another on heart rate zones, that one really only included…
I did a 17k pool swim with Gábor at the end of April. It went fine but the next day I developed a head-cold. I doubt they were related as I’ve never been sick after a long pool swim previously and I’ve done quite a few over the past three years, but it was co-incidental,…
In late Channel season 2011 I was in Varne Ridge to crew a solo. Present for that tide were a bunch of Channel Aspirants from Western Australia, advised by seven-times world open water champion Shelley Taylor-Smith. They had had a long wait with bad weather. One of the swimmers was UK-born but WA resident Paul Newsome, the…
I’ve been swimming a moderate amount recently, about 20 to 25 k per week, 23 k the week before this experiment. Enough to stay fit, sufficient for a good swim base, and just about in line with my minimum annual target of one million metres. And then I thought to myself: what would happen if…
The variety and utility of different breathing patterns for open water swimming is a subject of different concerns to pool swimming, as with so much of our side of the swimming sport. I once read an US coach who said about breathing patterns; “if they gave medals for bilateral breathing, I’d coach bilateral breathing“. I…
Beginning or intermediate swimmers considering a long or marathon swim nearly always start with two area of concern: Worrying about their capacity to endure cold water, and asking what training is required. I’ve covered cold water extensively, probably more so than elsewhere, and will continue to so do as long as I find things to…
Guest articles are one of the huge joys and honours for me in writing loneswimmer. I always feel lucky to feature one of them and privileged when people agree and I to get to read them in advance. Chris Bryan is from Shannon, Co. Clare (west of Ireland, origin of the Irish Coffee!) and is Ireland’s first international…
Edit: For all those of you who got this by email, WordPress just completely dropped all the formatting, for no reason I can understand, (but it happens occasionally), and you got a giant wall of text. Sorry! It’s with trepidation I approach this subject. I don’t have the medical background that seems essential in trying…
Swimmer 1: Well, how’s the training going? Swimmer 2: Meh. Ok, I guess. Getting sick of it. Swimmer 1: I know. Week after week of the bloody chlorine box. Swimmer 2: How’s the shoulders? Swimmer 1: I’ve got some twinges but they’re holding up. Had pain in the good one a couple of weeks ago, got…
Every swimmer knows how the actual act of swimming can be both rewarding and frustrating. I can’t speak how it is for everyone else, but for me most of the time it’s somewhere in the middle, (like most of life). Sometimes the frustration is horrible, getting in the pool unconcerned but then the water feels…
I remember my first six-hour pool. It was done with the Magnificent Seven in Source Swimming Pool in Cork in January of 2009. I’d done a couple of four-hour swims by myself, just swimming pyramids. I’d also done one five-hour by myself the previous year (pool). But the first six-hour pool swim with the group…
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…
I mentioned T.I. in an email to a well-known record-setting swimmer and we thought I might write a post on it. When someone who has set a new record thinks it’s a good subject, you write! Many of you will be aware that Total Immersion, (T.I.) is a method of teaching swimming developed by Terry Laughlin, which…
Just thought (since I’ve posted nothing all week) that I’d post this useful training zone chart to follow-up the metabolic energy storage and use stuff that I posted last week. Cross reference your age, to the level of exercise you wish to do (endurance for many of us, with some threshold and maximum effort also). These…
Ok, I think I’ll talk about the bodies energy systems. From where does our energy come , what energy system does the body use for various activities, how is it stored? This is going to be another thumbnail sketch of my understanding of it. Swimming movement comes from muscle contraction. All energy for muscle comes…
I just did a 5k session of alternate breathing rhythms. Part of that was 1k straight breathing on my wrong side. I remember the first time I tried to do that 3 or 4 years ago, I couldn’t make it past 400 metres and my neck got really stiff and sore. When I started swimming…
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