By David
Few Swimwatch articles have resulted in the amount of comment generated by the post on Scott Talbot’s aerobic training and our 8000 meter medley set. It is relevant to confirm Rhi’s observation that the 8000 meter swim was swum by only four swimmers on our team recently, three of whom were Open National Championship standard. In fact one was an Olympic Gold Medallist and a second was a Nationals “A” finalist. It might be stretching things a bit to blame this particular session for all Swimming New Zealand’s membership ills. Perhaps ironically, has anyone noticed that swimming’s membership retention problems have increased in direct proportion to introduction of trendy new training programs designed to make the sport “fun”? It seems the fun idea might not be working. Perhaps young people joining a swimming club are looking for success as their brand of fun. A few 25 meter sprints in training are unlikely to give them the success or the quality of fun that they really want.
The fourth swimmer completing last week’s 8000 meters medley is fifteen and currently swims in New Zealand’s Division Two level of competition. She’s one of those rare characters who thrive and prosper on a diet of distance. In the last six weeks she has swum 85, 85, 101, 90, 90 and 90 kilometres. She’s also in the gym three times a week lifting pretty impressive weights. And I would defy anyone to describe this young woman as anything but committed and excited by her journey through swimming. However even she surprised me this morning. Her training day was planned as 10,000 meters in the morning and 8000 in the afternoon. The morning session was 3×1000, 10×200, 1×1000 kick, 20×100, 1×1000 kick, 500 swim, 500 kick. That’s an aerobic session. The afternoon session was not a lot different. Unfortunately the afternoon session was in doubt. A parents’ meeting meant she would not be able to get to the pool. But there was a solution. Could she, I was asked, swim both the morning and afternoon sessions in the morning? After all it was only 18,000 meters. If she began at 5.30am she’d be done by 10.30am. This was entirely her idea.
What would you have done? I have no doubt there are the doubters out there predicting all sorts of ruin; broken shoulders and broken spirits. I questioned the sense of it all for two minutes. Then I thought of Lydiard, Quax, Jullian and others running up to 200 miles a week in pursuit of their dream. Who was I to deny their swimming likeness? Well, all that was early this morning. At 11.30am I got a text message. It said, “I did the 18 btw. I think I might come in and do another 8 tonight. Just kidding!”
There is something really good about that story; a young woman setting her own goals, meeting her own challenges and winning. Hopefully she will be successful in competition as well. However whatever her race results might be she knows, I know and her parent’s know she has set herself goals of a Phelps and Lochte standard and she has prevailed. No one will ever take that away from her. Of course she should have swum the 18,000.
When I first came back to New Zealand after seven years in the United States I was told to forget all that distance stuff. New Zealand swimmers will never do it they said. I don’t believe that. The spirit of Jelley, Lydiard, Snell, Quax and Walker is as alive and well today as it ever was. I’ve seen today’s generation do some remarkable things.
Jane Copland swam 800 meters without stopping when she was three, also because she chose to. I am not sure what drives a child (it was a couple of days before her fourth birthday) to do such a thing, but I certainly was not the cause. She had learned that 800m was half a mile and she decided she wanted to swim that far, without stopping. She did 1000 kilometres in ten weeks when she was sixteen and won her first National Open Championship the following season. Toni Jeffs twice reached 1000 kilometres in ten weeks. Even Nichola Chellingworth who was no great lover of distance conditioning regularly reached 900 kilometres in a ten week build up. Every week Rhi Jeffrey swims in excess of 80 kilometres. National Open finalist Jessica Marston is always around 90 kilometres a week. The American, Joseph Skuba, a 50 second LC 100 meter swimmer, swam over 900 kilometres in all his build-ups. And of course Abigail has just swum 18 kilometres in one training session. None of these swimmers are injured or broken. All of them were or are fine athletes. Yes there is plenty of evidence to suggest the doubters are wrong.
I think it is reasonable to leave the final view on this subject to Dr. Peter Snell. He is now a world authority on the physical effects of exercise and for several years was not too bad at its practice either.
Arthur Lydiard based stock in his elaborate schedules. He talked about balancing the training. My conclusion is that the details were relative unimportant though I didn’t realize that until 1962. That was when I did his schedule and trained right through when I ran my World Records when I ‘wasn’t supposed to’ based on the schedule. Like Marty Liquori said, all you need is a decent base, some leg turnover work and a lot of the scientific stuff is bullshit. Many American runners run themselves into the ground because that is what the coaches think they need to do. When you have done distance for many months you feel that you have lost your speed so many runners stopped the Lydiard distance and started doing a bunch of speed work and they raced well. Then they concluded that since they saw the light they don’t need the distance work. Then the following season without the base they don’t race so well.
Later on as a scientist I learned that the benefits of distance running are achieved after muscle glycogen depletion. So if you run for two hours a lot of the slow-twitch muscle fibers which were initially recruited run out of glycogen and cannot contract any more. Eventually you use the fast twitch muscle fibers which you normally only use when running fast, so that was a stunning revelation foe me. I didn’t know that when I was running my 22-milers. I just knew that the quality of my build-up work had a great relation to how I raced later on the track.
I tried to run everything evenly so we didn’t do those sessions where a runner gets faster as he progresses. I also didn’t do sessions where I went from 200 meters to 400 meters to 600 meters and back down. I think those are little tricks that coaches use to justify their existence. It’s all bullshit. As long as you get an endurance base and avoid the pitfalls of overtraining you will improve. The ideal training is the maximum amount of race related pace running you can do without overtraining. That implies that you must have the base before to allow you to avoid overtraining.
