TWELVE MONTHS OF COVID

With a week to go before the National Swimming Championships I thought it might be interesting to look back twelve months and see what the effect of Covid has been on a normal swimmer’s programme. You see, I like the TV1 program “Seven Sharp”, but I’m getting mightily fed up with Hillary Barry’s negative spiel about how hard the past 12 months have been, of how our collective anxiety monitors are at record levels and the danger to us all of Covid controls. New Zealand is not a Covid asylum. 

So how was a national class swimmer like Eyad’s training affected? What are the numbers? Is Barry right? Eyad should be a babbling psychological mess? Or has this Covid year been a bump in the road that we should all comfortably treat as one of life’s ups-and-downs?

So here are some figures describing how the past 52 weeks have been affected.  

  1. Eyad swam for 35 weeks out of 52. 16 weeks were lost to the lockdown and 1 week’s holiday at the beginning of the year. Normally he would swim for 49 weeks with 1-week holiday after major competitions and at Christmas. That’s a loss of 14 weeks or 27% of the years training. Serious but not life threatening.
  2. In the 52 weeks Eyad swam a total of 852 kilometers. In a normal year this number would be 2300. That’s a loss of 1448 kilometers 63%. The loss in kilometers is greater than the loss in time because the training affected most was the distance, aerobic swimming and the added short speed work necessary to accommodate Championship events. Serious and must be addressed.
  3. The number of weeks allocated to each phase of training in Eyad’s program compared to normal is shown in the table below.
Phase of training Actual this year Normal Weeks Lost % Lost
Buildup Aerobic 10 20 10 50%
Anaerobic 6 8 2 25%
Speed & Taper 19 21 2 9%
Total 35 49 14 27%

As you can see, the training that has been sacrificed most (50%) is the buildup aerobic conditioning. This will not have an effect on this years Nationals but will require more aerobic swimming in the future to avoid a deterioration in Eyad’s base aerobic condition. One year’s loss of buildup conditioning can be repaired. Keep repeating that loss and the swimmer’s future will be fatally compromised. Can be repaired.

So, there you have it. Despite Covid, Eyad’s speed work has been done, his anaerobic training is in pretty good shape, but his buildup aerobic conditioning has been badly sacrificed. Next year that must be addressed.

For twelve months, Eyad can look forward to as many weeks as possibly of steady aerobic, DPS swimming, while we fill the tank with gas borrowed to get him through the Covid year. If we don’t, we will become no better than the Saudi Swimming Federation coaches he left behind.

The answer to the question posed at the top of this post is, Covid has been “a bump in the road that we should all comfortably treat as one of life’s ups-and-downs.”

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