Nightcrawler is Back!

Nightcrawler, you are priveliged in that you are a very good swimmer but I would like you to encourage and enthuse us in believing that we can all get better even despite the effects of age!

You cannot tell us that with expert analysis and coaching in an endless pool we are not capable of improving technique and the holy grail - speed.

We are already better than plenty of other pool dwellers despite being self taught! Just imagine what we could achieve with a coach who made us believe in ourselves!

Please cross out the term DNA in your dictionary!

I agree with you Cottmiler, you can improve. I have seen a very large number of athletes improve a great deal. What is required is someone who can help you to get there. i.e. a good teacher. A good teacher can communicate very well about how swimming should feel. I was also very privileged, I was a very good swimmer (7:47 for 800m scm for example) and also had top swimmers (2002 swimmer was #1 in world LCM). The problem I often see is adults pounding out miles and miles of lengths in the pool creating a neural pathway that will be difficult to change and possibly impossible to change if they become so tight that they are a bundle of hardened muscle. You may have noted that swimmers generally are not like that, a swimmer becomes efficient when they learn how to feel at home in the water. That is what I teach first. Once you are so at home in the water, you can exhale and can sink to the bottom in the deep end, do some stretches there, maybe some toroidal shapes with your bubbles, then calmly swim back up, then you are at home. How you breath, how you float, how your brain talks to you when you swim as you manipulate your arms/legs/body, all play a role on how well you swim. If you were scared of water when you were young you will have to deal with that first...not last.

Holding on the vision "no retreat no surrender" doesnt work in swimming. You cant hide from the beast inside

nightcrawler, let's be wise enough to learn from Gary whilst we have this opportunity

Cottmiler,

What is your goal you already have achieved all, dont think about the next steps, there wont be "the any next" in terms of swimming, swimmers' carrer finishes at the age of 16.

Indeed; when man gets older he is becoming really stubborn, I know our egos doesnt allow this easily, but it will be healty and more optimistic than to be furious to admit the realities first and do the best we can do after now on. Belive me my Pal this will make us more happy and productive.

For instance; instead of the things that havent been changing since 30+ years I would rather prefer to do the only best thing that I can do, be a good grandpa and deal with my grandchildren, we have short time to go.

Life is short for spending 10.000+ hours in the pool in the next 5 years for the goal of 10% development! There are birds singing, trees rustling, children cheering around, consider these beauties of life...

I'll leave you to your philosophical utterances whilst I go and perfect Flee Drill

Are you familiar with the works of Guy de Maupassant?

cottmiler wrote:I'll leave you to your philosophical utterances whilst I go and perfect Flee Drill

Are you familiar with the works of Guy de Maupassant?

Dear Cottmiler,

I havent heard about Guy de Maupassant before, but I listened lots of tales including "swim targets" from master swimmers and pledges their commercial swim coaches for over 20 years, any of those greedy master swimmer's still cant swim a simple 100m 1:10 but their coaches are still selling their colorful DVD boxsets and claiming their pledges.

Popping or Rocking drills wont make us faster to a considerable extent, and training 2x wont worth of 10% development, do you think or can you do 2x for this 10% of no account, which wont carry you to 1:10 pace?

First have to admit that penguins cant fly. Keep in mind that understanding and capaility of doing are different things, if you were capable of it, you had already achieved it until now. As I wrote before, friend(the person without benefit) tells the truth and really "The Truth Hurts".

Inform me when you can swim only one 100m free 1:10, i am looking forward to it, will be so happy to hear that something works, I want to see any development more than you want.

Good luck in your workouts.

The only thing that you can do is imitating an elegant(graceful) technique as much as you can do and taking more pleasure while swimming. Maybe TI for you, think this again. I am saying this free from any benefit.

Nightcrawler, I think you misunderstood our targets. If I take just me as an example,
yes, I want to get faster but I am not planning to win any swim contest. I will be happy to decrease my current 3.8Km time. If I can get the 10% improvement you are talking about I would be more than happy.

Then I like to think of swimming as a backup plan. It is not my main sport at the moment but you never know what can happen. If I have to quit running for example I would still have another sport to exercise. I used to think myself as a runner some years back, now I think of myself just as a sport enthusiast. My world will not collapse if I have to stop running.

I also see Nightcrawlers point.
So many people in the pool that hardly improve and seem a bit frustrated about  it.
We know we are not the best swimmers in the world and never will be, but we still love swimming and enjoy our little victories.
I also started swimming because it offered the opportunity  to loose weight while looking at pretty girls in bikinis at the same time.
Thats still a gooid enough reason to go to the pool, the swimming is more fun than running, and there are loads of guys out there that have even less swim talent, providing a modest ego boost as a bonus.

Forget about improving even conserving the current performance after 20 years of age is so hard. Are you faster than 5 years or 10 years ago? I m training more and harder than those times but almost have the same pace, havent imoroved considerable enough that carries me to one level up.

At the moment my level is 1:18 pace for 5k which is near to my all day pace, i can swim by 1:14 pace but it is not sustainable after a few 100ms. Can watch my 2 paces below, first one is for 200-400m, second one is for 3000-5000m

1:14 pace, can hold upto 400m:
https://youtu.be/Rpncf9r4Hb0

1:18 pace for 5k, my current all day pace:
https://youtu.be/JUM3g5dTzu0

nightcrawler wrote:of course 25m time is not only a measure. 50-100m times should also be considered.

actually, to measure your talent/potential you can ask yourself that how much distance you have swum and how much you have improved since then? if you have been swimming 5 years and swam 5000km in total and still cannot swim a 100m sub 1:10, then it means that you are not for swimming. 25-50-100 times not only short distance indicators but also should better be taken into account for long distance events. for examle a swimmer who has maximal 1:15 100m time cannot maintain 1:30 pace in 800-1500-5000 events, may hold 1:40 which is a very weak performance for 5 years of work.

Ok, so today I tried a couple of fast 25m at the end of the session. I hit 15.33s (water start) and I swam and timed like this: set TT at 90SPM (=0.666s), started AFTER beep 0 (in order not to make a false start) and touched the wall at the 23rd beep, with 20 strokes. I suspect this is still not my "DNA" and I believe I could improve it with some speed work (which I had never done so far by the way). Anyway, DNA or not, this is a useful info to collect and gives me an idea of what to expect/ask myself from a 50 and a 100 (having never sprinted before I also have to learn how to be less conservative and really push to max speed).

Some other data to take the sums: I started training (and keeping a detailed training log) on September 2014. Before that time I was able to swim and used to go to the pool a couple of times per week but I didn't do any kind of training, only focused on learning technique. By the way, I'm self taught and self coached (I'm an "internet swimmer" ).

On September 2014 (I was 37yo) my 1500m pace was 1:50, my best 100m time was 1:32 and best 50m was 42s (best 25m N/A). Fast forward to today: I swam 1137.5 km in 28 months (avg 40.6k/month), my 1500m pace is 1:33 (improved by 15.4%), best 100m 1:18.4 (improved by 14.7%), best 50m 36.75 (improved by 12.5%). Of course I'm also faster over longer than 1500m distances, but here I don't have data to compare.

During these 28 months I did mostly threshold and aerobic sets, and basically zero speed development work. In other words I followed the SS framework and it worked so far. I also feel like the improvements have been quite slow and that if I want to improve more I should also start doing some speed development work. But in the end the only thing that matters is that I never once got bored, I love swimming and I'm loving the journey wherever it takes me.

Salvo

Salvo,
Including me, there are lots of swimmers like you around the pols that i meet, swim and talk about the same subjects for years, they are after 20 of age started swimming men, all developed very rapidly(from 2:30s to 1:50s in a few months), then remained the same for a while, now keep fading to 1:55-2:00 again.

The improvement has a descending exponential curve, for example first you can improve 15℅, then 1,5℅, then zero(plateau), then start falling down 1℅, 2℅... The life's curve is the same; growing fast, staying the same from 17 to 40 then start fading down.

The advantage of being an adult zero swim history starter is that you are more likely to improve than to decline, although its harder to teach old dogs new tricks, so you have to watch out age decline doesnt overtake the improvement pace.

Age decline is slowed by swimming so essentially if you find your swimming times not improving you are still improving. Have a look at Masters swim records on FINA

nightcrawler wrote:

At the moment my level is 1:18 pace for 5k which is near to my all day pace, i can swim by 1:14 pace but it is not sustainable after a few 100ms. Can watch my 2 paces  below, first one is for 200-400m, second one is for 3000-5000m

1:14 pace, can hold upto 400m:
https://youtu.be/Rpncf9r4Hb0

1:18 pace for 5k, my current all day pace:
https://youtu.be/JUM3g5dTzu0

You're obviously doing very well, and the difference between your 400m and all day pace is barely noticeable. Would you also share your sessions every now and then?

Salvo

Hi Salvo,
Nothing special, swimming 20k a week, doing the same kind of usrpt workouts by focusing on less SPL and keeping the stroke rate around 0.90.

Dear Swim Pals,
Happy new year.
Wish you all the best.
https://youtu.be/YjlJKmDu04k

Somebody once told me you lose a certain percentage of swim speed for every year after the age of, what was it, 40? I just smiled. There is indeed an advantage to taking up swimming in middle age. Even though I'm still slow, at 48 I'm still getting a little faster every year! I'm never going to win any races, but I have achieved goals I never imagined possible when I set out on this journey.

This is the problem with the "counsel of despair" for us non-athletic swimmers: should we give up just because we're never going to achieve "respectable" speeds? Of course not! Swimming is good for your health (both mental and physical), and if setting small personal goals helps to motivate you, then there's nothing wrong with constantly trying to improve, from however modest a starting point.

I think the attitude of "don't bother trying if you have no talent" is a big problem in recreational sport generally. We have an increasingly overweight/obese population in the West, and it's not surprising - once we leave school, it's mostly only the talented 10% that continue to do sports, and since most of our jobs are desk-based now, that means something approaching 90% of the population is largely sedentary. This is clearly not good for our health!

The solution is simple: find a sport you enjoy, no matter how bad you are at it, learn good technique (to prevent injury), and then set small achievable goals to keep yourself motivated. Don't compare yourself to Olympians - you are only competing against yourself. Enjoy your small victories and enjoy better health. It's all good!

Happy New Year to everyone, and happy swimming in 2017!

Cheers,
Mike

Nicely put Mike.

I liken it to learning a foreign language. Say we wanted to learn Turkish for a hobby. We would be pleased with every new bit we learned and enjoy the journey, but knowing we would never achieve the same as a well educated native speaker.

There would be different styles of teaching and encouragement and some would resonate with us better than others.

That's a very good analogy, Cottie.

NC, sorry to hear what happened in Istanbul tonight. Hope you and your family are fine. Happy new year everyone,

Salvo

Thanks Salvo,

Middle is hot nowadays though goverment states that everything is going normal. Unfortunately, i m afraid to say that everything may happen, there are lots of refugees from Syria and Iraq, which made the country become more cosmopolite.

We are fine, generally sitting at home at the weekends, except from driving to the pool even dont go out, isolating ourself, sitting at home exercising, reading magazines and watching movies.

Mike A wrote:Somebody once told me you lose a certain percentage of swim speed for every year after the age of, what was it, 40? I just smiled. There is indeed an advantage to taking up swimming in middle age. Even though I'm still slow, at 48 I'm still getting a little faster every year! I'm never going to win any races, but I have achieved goals I never imagined possible when I set out on this journey.

This is the problem with the "counsel of despair" for us non-athletic swimmers: should we give up just because we're never going to achieve "respectable" speeds? Of course not! Swimming is good for your health (both mental and physical), and if setting small personal goals helps to motivate you, then there's nothing wrong with constantly trying to improve, from however modest a starting point.

I think the attitude of "don't bother trying if you have no talent" is a big problem in recreational sport generally. We have an increasingly overweight/obese population in the West, and it's not surprising - once we leave school, it's mostly only the talented 10% that continue to do sports, and since most of our jobs are desk-based now, that means something approaching 90% of the population is largely sedentary. This is clearly not good for our health!

The solution is simple: find a sport you enjoy, no matter how bad you are at it, learn good technique (to prevent injury), and then set small achievable goals to keep yourself motivated. Don't compare yourself to Olympians - you are only competing against yourself. Enjoy your small victories and enjoy better health. It's all good!

Happy New Year to everyone, and happy swimming in 2017!

Cheers,
Mike

Couldn't swim at all at 40 so I'm now way faster at 51
Expecting to get a fair bit more speed for longer swims this year, even though I'll only be swimming a couple of hours a week.
Expect to stagnate from there, gunna try gymnastics again this year, the flexibility and upper body gains have to help the swimming.
The advantage of ageing for me is I'll now try new stuff and not give a dam how I look doing it, don't have to prove anything to anybody, just gotta look after my health.

One thing I've learnt in life if you want to be the best at something, everything else has to be sacrificed, the cost is too high.

"The BEST is the Enemy of the GOOD". Dont think about the best, try being a good swimmer according to your perspective.

For example according to me being a good swimmer means swimming the 5K with sub 1:20/100m  pace and or a 100m around 1:00. For some of my students it is 1:40/100m, which means they will be satisfied by achieving this.

For one of my student who is at the age of 55, satisfaction is swimming as much distance as he can do, he crossed the biritsh channel 2 times (one is two ways) and also in the same month he crossed the gibraltar. He doesnt care about pace and technique just swimming as much distance as he can do, he is swimming in the bosphorus even in winter time at 13C.  For me he is not a successful swimmer/and also I am thinking and saying him that he is dealing with all of rubbish things that wont make him a better swimmer, but he is saying that he is at an unreachable level and my work seems him useless and meaningless Guess who is right? The answer is both of us!