Once More Unto the Breach!

No Promises, But One Last Word about These New Suits

2008-11-27T21:44:00.000-08:00

The controversy over the new technosuits doesn’t seem to be going away. If anything the debate is starting to build up to a fevered pitch. Over at Floswimming things started getting ugly when one reader got personal and hurled the same words an individual used to indicate his contempt for the LZR Racer right back at him for standing in the way of the “inevitable”. Hundreds of thousands of words are being spilled in the fray, and famous names of swimming’s past and present are lining up on both sides in a conflict looking more and more like it may break out at any time into cries of “Luddites!” and waving pitchforks clashing with shouts of “Heretics!” and bobbing scythes. I find myself disagreeing even with long time associates, and while we may not agree on this one matter I’ve always found their opinions to be both logical and well reasoned before now. We need to accept there are two sides to any debate. We must take a deep breath and approach this concern, one which is having an impact nearly as large as the horrible, ongoing scourge of performance enhancing drugs, in a calm and civil manner with open minds.

So in that spirit, and after deep consideration of all the facts, I will say all those who support the continued use of the new suits such as the LZR Racer are categorically, and without a shred of doubt, completely and utterly wrong. Really - absolutely dead wrong.

Just look at both sides’ arguments and you'll see the truth of the matter.

The biggest argument of the new swimsuit aficionados (the “Technophiles”) are that the suits merely represent the next step of naturally occurring technical advances going on for nearly a hundred years, several having just as a dramatic impact on swimming times then as the present suits are making now. They're absolutely wrong, but at least the error comes from the mistaken belief mere observation conveys understanding. Change, being a constant in life, is always with us. So it is comprehending why change has occurred and its implications is what's truly important. In this case swimming’s own technology driven advances to date have come about not because of any direct attempt to make swimmers themselves faster but rather from a focus aimed at eliminating outside influences. Progressing from fine woolen swimsuits to nylon and then to Lycra polymer blends – an effort to bring swimsuits as close as possible to swimming without a suit; from lane ropes and solid pool walls to energy absorbing lane lines and wave free gutters – to eliminate interference from adjacent lanes and walls; deeper pools – to minimize surface turbulence resulting from shallow water; improved lighting and reduced water turbidity – to provide unimpaired vision; improved water temperature control – to eliminate the effects of variable temperature on performance; and goggles – to protect the swimmer’s eyes from the harsh effects of chlorinated water. And why do I know this to be true? Because up to very recently we have not had sufficient grasp of technology¹ to actually make faster swimmers, only the ability to minimize those things about the water which slow us down. But now with the new technosuits we can directly address a swimmer’s individual performance. The paradigm from which the sport has advanced itself has shifted in a major way.

The major objection coming from those against the introduction of new suits’ (the “Purists”) are the shocking drops seen in elite racing’s overall times; creating concerns the suits are more device than suit, otherwise known as ‘tech-doping’, a manipulation of an individual’s true swimming ability. If correct, Purists reason, the suits are illegal under existing FINA rules and consequently should be banned outright. The Technophiles strenuously disagree with this accusation. They counter FINA has already looked into this question and ruled swim suits are not devices. Yet that particular ruling came several years ago and the difference between old and new is profound enough to have people refer to the old style suits derisively (or wistfully depending one's viewpoint) as “fabric” suits. The possibility of being labeled a device is sufficiently threatening to force Speedo and its captive organizations to give out talking points to avoid mentioning performance gains from wearing the suits; the gag order put in place despite Speedo’s advertising continuing to boast a 2% improvement in speed will be seen by its wearers. An elite swimmer under assurance of anonymity said this about the LZR Racer, "I can't say this openly so please do not use my name. We have been under a lot of pressure to always say good things about the suit. We were also told by xxxxx (a national federation) to deny that there was anything very different about this suit compared to another. That's bullshit, of course. It makes us faster and we all know it. Personally, I wear it because it helps me keep up, I feel great in it in the water ...." The debate whether the suit is a device or not is not just a fleeting concern over semantics, or even over performance. Devices could be banned from competition just for the reason they provide unequal benefits, much less artificially boost speed. Seeing the extraordinary steps taken to quell any talk related to the performance boost from wearing the new suits do you think Speedo believes its LZR Racer is not a device? Is there really any doubt?

Another fault often cited by Purists is the high cost of the new technology: the Speedo LZR Racer costs over $500 and lasts for maybe a dozen or less swims. They argue the associated costs must inevitably create a divide in the swimming world between the relative few who can afford the expense and the majority who can't. This uncontested concern extends far beyond individual families. The financial drain on even American universities, the cornerstone of competitive swimming in the United States, has prompted Speedo to offer special discount rates for conference and NCAA championships. Even with these limited discounts some universities have to devote large percentages of their budgets to purchasing enough of the suits to remain competitive during the regular season. And then there are those colleges, as there are families, who can’t afford the expense even with the discounts. Purists argue the advanced suits are creating an underclass based on economics rather than talent, implying adoption of the suits drags down both fair competition and the numbers swimming competitively.

The Technophiles ultimately, however, disagree with this harsh outlook. They submit competition will eventually bring down costs and therefore minimize any damage. Again this is a false assumption – leading edge high tech competition in small, niche sports markets never see reduced costs. If we are to take our examples from the America’s Cup or Formula One costs often climb in what could best be described as a financial sinkhole of ever better technology. We are seeing the application of a new technology with apparently phenomenal potential. Manufacturers who have never before sold a single swimsuit will able to step in and take away the entire market with one breakthrough innovation, sending the rest who’ve sunk millions into research and development back to their CAD software to start all over again. Product life cycles may only last months at this early stage of development. For the necessary capital investment the market is too small to defer passing along the associated risk premium to the consumer. We’ll have to pay for it all. No less an authority as the sporting goods giant Nike has spoken on this. With no stomach for the coming suit wars after weighing the risks and potential profits of staying in they’re walking away now. Adidas is also said to be considering quitting the sport.

Technophiles offer another defense for the new generation swim suits – that they are an effective way to promote the sport. Linking the increase in media attention to the new world records they assert the world records enabled by the suits (over the schizophrenic objections of Speedo of course) raise swimming’s popularity. But this belief is a grotesque oversimplification of the impact world records have on this or any other sport. Stars are what attracts and holds fans, what we identify with and idolize. For those sports possessing world records the records themselves merely identify who are the stars. In large part world records gain their special status because of their rarity and some are rarer than others. Like precious gems too many means diluted values however pretty. I would dare say most of the current interest is more idle curiosity about the speed suits which have created all these new world records than in the records themselves. Any interest new records bring will be just as long lasting as the latest electronic gadget. Amongst the sporting world cognoscente, a much more knowledgeable breed, the avalanche of world records has brought about an altogether different perception of our sport. No, the technophiles are definitely wrong about the positive impact all these world records are having. What has really captured the public’s imagination is swimming now boasts a superstar of its own, Michael Phelps and his eight gold medals. That’s who they hold in such great esteem and what brings swimming the global attention it now enjoys. The last time we had a similar surge in popularity was with Mark Spitz and his seven races, seven golds and seven world records. But it’s important to note no one is mentioning Phelps’ seven world records. They’re clearly passé in today’s reality.

Better, the lie world records promote their sport can be shown by a real world example. A decade ago Major League Baseball subtly encouraged its athletes to use performance enhancing drugs to build up their statistics and thus draw in larger paying crowds. Yet when the fans started to understand how some of their most hallowed records were being broken the backlash was both immediate and severe. Their vocal protests and boycotts caused the Major League’s front office to hastily backtrack and prohibit the use of performance enhancing drugs as well as institute a proper drug enforcement program. Personally I don’t think the average person can make the distinction between someone taking officially acceptable steroids and someone who uses sanctioned swimsuits to swim faster. To them the new technosuits are no different than using a corked bat. Someday there will be a reaction and it won’t be favorable.

I acknowledge the fascination the new suits holds for many. Ever since someone held a shard of razor-sharp flint in his hand we've been obsessed by tools and their power. Even today social status depends in large part on what tools and possessions we control. So one would be a fool to deny the influence technology has on our society and individual lives. Nevertheless technology still has limits and nowhere are these limits better illustrated than in sport. By all means technology should be used to mitigate outside influences, but on the other hand we have to draw the line when it starts to directly affect athletic performance. We may not be able to compare the present with the past but there is no reason to think we cannot take the necessary steps to allow today’s times to be comparable to those one hundred years from now. Neither is there any reason for us to adopt new technologies which will condemn us to meaningless world records. Our sport needs all its heroes past, present, and future. Let’s take the steps to ensure they keep their rightful place in history.

¹ Noting for the record that pharmacology has been known for some time to improve individual performance.

King Aquatics coach Sean Hutchinson discusses the impact the new technosuits have had on competitive swimming and the ways he's adapting to the new reality.

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Alexander and I

2008-11-21T08:05:00.000-08:00

Several days ago I watched a girl three years old or so literally running circles around a mother who pushed a baby carriage ahead of her, the child scuffing up the fall leaves and waving arms about. Around and around she ran until, with a delighted cry, she spotted my dog and ran to him instead. Kaz, himself bounding towards this whirling dervish of energy to investigate, suddenly found himself stopped dead in his tracks cautiously wagging his tail, uncertain whether to greet the child or flee to safety.

So young, so much zeal. When I see scenes such as this my first thought is of George Bernard Shaw’s famous quote “youth is wasted on the young”, and then I always go to a memory of a quantum physics text illustrating the concept of particle randomness by showing the heavily used paths taken by adults surrounded by the aimless wanderings to and fro by children and pets. It never fails to bring a smile to my face watching real life play out textbook theory. Life may be complex with varied and conflicting goals but our common desire for physical health is straight forward. We all want to capture youth’s bountiful energy and keep it for as long as possible into our autumn years. The intelligent will put in the effort to maintain their fitness; the ignorant will take it for granted and will not. This past week the American Heart Association published the results of research on adolescent obesity where they found some obese teenagers tested had arteries with a ‘vascular age’ nearly three decades older than their chronological age. That’s not good. Another joint study by Princeton and the University of Munich last year found American males, after leading the world in height for two hundred years, are now shorter on average than every country in Western and Northern Europe. The Netherlands, with an average height of 187 cm. (6’1”) holds the title today, with Americans trailing well behind at 179 cm. (5’10”). A population’s height tells a lot about a country’s relative well being: the adequacy of their diet and overall health care. We Americans shrinking relative to the world? Not good at all.

I made the mistake of forgetting this truth about fitness for a few years and paid the price. Hopefully I don’t make the same mistake again. It’s taken me two years to return to full health and the effort necessary to do so comes as a shock to me. I still vividly remember as if it were yesterday only taking a couple of months to get into game shape as a teenager.

I can count three positives coming from of this experience. During my search to end my pain everything from acupuncture, chiropractics, heavy duty drugs, rolfing, massage and physical therapy, all the way up to contemplating surgery was tried. The first positive was getting back into the pool for overall fitness, something which never would have happened without the driving incentive of a crippled back for motivation. The second positive was discovering Bikram’s yoga, a rehabilitative form of Hatha yoga, for improving flexibility and core strength. And the third positive was my eventual experiment with Alexander Technique for my posture problems. I'd like here to write a little about Alexander Technique for those unfamiliar with it.

The premise of Alexander Technique is pretty simple. If we’re lucky enough not to be born with any abnormalities to begin with time will always ensure we'll accumulate enough of them to force change on our bodies anyways. Many of these adjustments, such as relying on adjacent muscles to relieve the stain on the damaged part, or by avoiding use altogether, are temporary but some last longer. Long enough to alter the habitual way our body holds itself upright. In time these compromised habits become more and more entrenched and, because the body begins to depend on muscles not originally intended for the role they're performing, they fatigue and force recruitment of other additional, even less related muscles. And so on and so on. Not just injuries. We’re talking here about damage and impairment caused from repetition injuries and neglect as well. From the child who plays too many video games to a stock trader who spends his day looking up at trading boards we have almost infinite ways to harm ourselves carrying out routine and mundane activities. No wonder almost everyone ends up with more than a few muscles working at cross-purposes, showing up in both posture and the way we move. It’s bad enough for the average person, but for an athlete it can spell disaster. A case in point is Jodie Henry, a former world record holder and multiple Olympic gold medalist from Athens, who had to withdraw from the Australian 2008 Olympic Trials and consequently from the Beijing Olympics because of a late diagnosed imbalance in her pelvic muscles. That should never happen with the medical supervision she should be receiving. I’m convinced if she or her coach had known about Alexander Technique it wouldn’t have.

The process which the Alexander Technique uses to teach the necessary corrections, however, is somewhat unorthodox. It is grounded in very simple activities: you work with movements like getting in and out of a chair, walking, and bending down; you look at how you breathe and speak. The teacher observes your habits of posture and movement primarily through touch by gently placing his or her hands on the neck, shoulders, back, and so on while asking the student to perform a prescribed movement – and then uses those same hands to guide the student into a position which encourages the release of unnecessary muscular tension¹. You can definitely tell when long established bad habits are broken: there’s a strong sense of ‘floating’ as tired, overworked muscles finally get to rest. For many years other than the belief improvements in posture, performance² and the reduction of pain was real there’s been little to support the Technique’s claims beyond anecdotal evidence. Finally a major scientific study just published this past August in the British Medical Journal Randomised Controlled Trial of Alexander Technique Lessons, Exercise, and Massage (ATEAM) for Chronic and Recurrent Back Pain concludes Alexander lessons can be as effective for controlling long term back pain as regular long term exercise. I'm sure given enough time and money science will eventually come to understand what F.M. Alexander intuitively knew must be true.

Personally most of my own problems can be traced back to a collapsed rugby scrum at twenty six. I didn’t realize how much my back was still out of kilter until I saw the pictures taken at the start of this adventure. If there was definite disappointment with my physical improvement after a year’s effort I was flat out distressed there hadn’t been one iota of progress on the posture front. A desperate willingness to do anything led me to try some Alexander Technique lessons. The first exhibit of their effectiveness: my before and after pictures below coming after one year of lessons. I think they show a marked improvement.

In my 'before' picture the left side is considerably lower than the right, which in turn is severely compressed against my body; and if you look closely, you can see my head is tilted back with my chin out. After one year the left and right shoulders have leveled out considerably, the right shoulder has decompressed slightly, and my neck is now held so that the weight of my head sits directly over the spine without my chin jutting out.

Interestingly I believe the impact these lessons have had on my swimming performance actually confirms the validity of the technique’s underlying premises. My teacher Gaby often talks against “end gaining”, meaning not trying to address the most visible problems in a direct manner. I see a droopy shoulder and crooked back and naturally that’s what I want to correct. By the time I started lessons, however, the actual problems causing my skewed body were buried under several compensating layers which needed correction before we could address the source problems. The therapy succeeds as the problems are 'unwound' starting from the most recent and working back towards the original injury. For me progress has come in stages: three times I’ve made significant breakthroughs and each time I’ve had to retrain newly reintegrated but feeble core, hip and leg muscles which set back my training plans. The good part is I'm continuing to make real progress and the changes definitely will make for faster swimming in the future. The bad part is my latest picture shows I still have some way to go before my back is 100% rehabilitated – and that means ...

¹ There may be some who will ask the question if the student has to disrobe as with massage therapy. For the shy the answer will come as a relief – students are taught fully clothed.
² The technique is popular with professions such as musicians, dancers, and singers in dealing with the particular problems overuse brings to their performances.

Self-Coaching

2008-11-14T14:06:00.000-08:00

There are some people who are meant to coach. My maternal grandfather, for instance, always wanted to manage a baseball team. He was one of those individuals who could quote every major league team’s starting line up and batting statistics, along with their hitting and pitching tendencies, from the early 1900’s on. One rare visit coincided with the World Series, which meant spending the afternoon watching the game. As a small child I was less than enthralled and complained, a heretical attitude prompting grandfather to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening meal educating me on baseball’s intricacies. While I never became an aficionado of baseball his own passion began a slow, ever growing understanding in me of the unseen and endless depths of complexity existing around us. Age and experience has merely increased my desire to understand this complicated and confusing world.

With this predilection it should come as no surprise taking up competitive running as a young man caused me to dive into the science behind the sport. I stripped my local library of its books about track, went back for more books on its history and related physiology studies, and then went back again for a second serving seeking more performance related publications. Now running is not a particularly complex sport. After a year’s study I’m confident I gained enough understanding of track’s fundamentals to competently train myself. In spite of this I signed up with the local running club my second year. First of all I wanted to train with others who shared my interests and clubs are perfect for that. You gain some new friends who share your natural competitiveness, friendships which develop into friendly rivalries that help with the motivation it takes to excel. And secondly I still wanted a coach regardless of any book smarts. A coach provides much more than expertise. He or she can provide the necessary mentor relationship which both sustains in times of discouragement and lifts one to achieve more than thought possible in good times. Furthermore coaches contribute their experience and informed second opinion on training choices. The old saying “two heads are better than one” could have easily originated from the athlete/coach relationship.

Yet running shares little with swimming. The big difference? Running doesn’t involve technique. Not that there isn’t a well understood model of perfect bio mechanical efficiency for runners. Just that, given running’s intimate relationship with the survival of our species, we run as efficiently as our body allows. Incorrect running technique results from physical deficiencies, which need to be identified and corrected with targeted therapy. This typically takes the form of weight lifting programs to correct muscle imbalance or weaknesses, stretching exercises to improve fluidity of motion, diet, orthopedics, and other like rehab. Another pretty big difference is swimming having four strokes compared to only two different ways to run¹; and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention breathing while running isn’t nearly as complicated it is in swimming.

Really, the only shared aspect is their mutual need to build stamina in the distance events. In this training for the two is remarkably consistent - you get in as much kilometers in as you can without breaking down. Consequently my training was a very straight forward matter. We had a number of designated routes of varying distances marked off at roughly one kilometer intervals radiating from the local high school track where we did our speed work. I also set up a few centered on my home. Each week we were given a schedule to follow: daily distances to run, intervals to make, track sessions to attend, and weight programs to carry out. Except for the track sessions I could either show up at designated times and run with others, or go off and run alone. Everything I did had to be written down in my training log. What distances were run and when, times and heart rate from start to finish including the desired intervals, how I felt, what I ate, the hour I went to bed and the hour I awoke and their respective heart rates. Then once a week we’d bring in our logbooks before heading off on a run and when we came back we’d have a new week’s training schedule handed back to us along with our logbooks. I looked forward to listening to my coach’s conclusions after his review of my training and discussing the objectives behind next week’s schedule. Still I could have done some version of this myself, even if it wouldn’t have been the same quality.

It's not anything like the same for swimming. Noting down interval times and heart rates during a practice is a bitch if you try to do it yourself. You really need a coach to do it properly. And of course observing one’s own technique is virtually impossible on your own, even if you have the technical qualifications to do so. It takes years of education and experience to become a competent competitive swimming coach, a commitment of time and effort I’ve neither the desire nor the inclination. Right from the beginning it just seemed more efficient to simply rent the necessary expertise. After all this is essentially only a rehab project. So joining the local masters swim club seemed to fit the bill very nicely.

Things are seldom as clear cut as they appear however. The Hyacks Masters Swim Club is a very low key affair, really just an after thought to the true raison d’être of our parent club – all out competitive swimming. Most of the membership only attends practices and rarely, if ever, competes. The program itself is split into two distinct clubs according to the pools where they train, and because they bizarrely share the same practice schedules there’s no option to swim at both and double up. Training just three hours a week presents problems for anyone wanting to compete. The club's serious swimmers have to go out and train on their own in order to get in the necessary kilometers.

My first couple of years this wasn’t a problem. I’d simply add workouts to bring my kilometers up to the quantity I wanted. This year, however, I’ve had to reschedule my normal routine in order to get in sufficient swimming time. My new morning workouts conflict with the late evening Hyack practices and their typical 2,500 meters or thereabouts don’t fit into my plans anymore. I tried for a week to do both but found it wasn't practical. So now I’m swimming on my own six times a week and slowly building up my meters.

What’s it like being my own coach? Well I don’t really think of what I’m doing as self-coaching. I’m approaching this the same way as I had with the Harriers so many years ago. Stroke clinics and private coaching will provide me with the necessary instruction; I’m simply going off to train by myself and then report back for correction and some more instructions. The big change between track and pool is instead of just a week in between I’m absenting myself for months; enough time to allow integration of new techniques into my strokes. I prefer to think of myself as an apprentice sculptor, where my job is to take the piece of marble selected by the master and rough it out to the desired shape. Nothing fancy, just the basics you'd teach any beginning eight year old.

My primary objective right now is improving my rotation around the core and overall body position. At the same time each stroke has some half a dozen specific corrections to make, mostly associated with catch and finish. And trying to get everything working in harmony is only a far off dream. Sometimes I’m focusing so hard on technique during laps I forget the walls. I haven’t yet crashed into one but I’ve certainly given myself a good scare a couple of times. Aside from stroke technique my turns also need a lot more practice so it's been strictly short course for me. I'm emphasizing getting in more submerged dolphins off the wall from my backstroke rollovers. Presently I’m having difficulty with my ‘hop’, a twenty centimeter downwards shift of my feet after the flip to ensure I don’t come off the wall too deep. I developed the bad habit to avoid experiencing the very unpleasant fact I possess lungs rather than gills: the maneuver so effective I can only get in two kicks before breaching the surface. Now that I’m actually wanting to stay underwater longer I have to convince myself to leave my feet where they land; not only to extend my kicking but to go deep enough to avoid the surface turbulence. The mental image of running out of air a meter underwater upside down, however, is proving a formidable obstacle to overcome. At the same time I’m working on better freestyle turns by trying to forgo any breathing until after the first cycle coming out of the turn. Delayed breathing not only reduces drag and maintains more momentum, but also coincidentally happens to be excellent aerobic exercise. A somewhat dubious bonus as far as my lungs are concerned. Little consistency yet as I’m insufficiently disciplined, but there’s observable improvement as time goes by. A coach screaming at me impugning my manhood and pegging kick boards at my head would help immeasurably but, alas, that’s not to be. Finally I’m introducing more and more kicking into my routines as my meters build, trying to acquire some flexibility in my ankles, more mobility in my hips and the necessary strength in my legs. Again, just like every eight year old should. I had some doubts drawing up my plans whether 30,000 meters a week would prove enough to work on everything I need to improve. Now, as the weeks fly pass, I can see I was right. So much to do, so little time.

¹ You forgot hurdling (running over obstacles) didn’t you? Though in practical terms hurdlers can run, but runners rarely hurdle.

Right Back At You: My Favorite Swimming Blogs

2008-11-06T14:36:00.000-08:00

Okay, I’ll admit it – I walk a different path from the average individual. My recent efforts in the pool should be proof enough of my eccentricity, but if you are even moderately observant the particularities of this blog would confirm it. Even my sister American Sis once commented to me, “Your blog is only about swimming. Is that all you do outside of work?” Thankfully at the time she asked I could truthfully answer no. Yet as a topic of conversation I do think my swimming differentiates me from the rest of the crowd, and thus perhaps potentially noteworthy and interesting to an outside observer. Likewise my internet preferences are somewhat narrowly defined. The big thing nowadays is I’ve limited myself to a very small list of blogs for recreational reading. Almost all are devoted to swimming. There is one I read on a semi-regular basis which deviates somewhat from this, but The Secrets of Isis enjoys grandfather privileges from when I had more time to waste. While her blog is for those with an intellectual bent, especially in literature, on the swimming front she’s trying to rehabilitate a shoulder after multiple surgeries and get back to competing in masters events. I’m looking impatiently to the day when she achieves another personal best to give the final finishing flourish to what I hope is a complete recovery.

So with that rather longish introduction finished it’s time to begin reviewing my list. First thing you’ll notice is there are no recognizable names here. Several world class swimmers blog but I’ve quickly reviewed and dropped one after another – they stick to lifestyle issues rather than discuss the technical side of their expertise and blog infrequently. I understand. When one spends as much time training as they do their natural inclination will be to focus on life outside of the pool. Unfortunately that attitude doesn’t help me learn something new about how to swim faster. Worse, they leave all teaching of the finer points of stroke and conditioning to their coaches in order to concentrate at competing in the international arena. If they reveal anything at all it is in the rare disclosure of a workout or two, and reluctantly I’ve come to disregard even these tidbits as the distances swum, intervals, and recovery periods take on a near fictional hue. It appears details of specific practices at the international elite level are only divulged to psych out or mislead any potential rivals peeking in. How else can you read some of these workouts? One recently released practice belonging to Phelps, for instance, was so difficult even experienced swimmers weren’t reading it properly; commenting on the total yards swum rather than the fact it was mostly anaerobic training. A distance anaerobic workout? Isn’t that supposed to be an oxymoron? My masters club this summer swam a 10 x 100 freestyle set adapted from one Phelps did which Bob Bowman made public. Not a single swimmer in attendance that day could match the speed of Phelps’ final rep ... and it was a kicking set for Michael. More distressing I recently learned the set was only the last ten reps of what was actually a 25 x 100. Who does a 2,500 meter kick set? Apparently some elite swimmers do. You want something truly outrageous? Erik Vendt, the noted workhorse of American distance swimming, once swam a 40 x 1,000 yards on ten minutes with a two minute rest in between. For non-American readers that’s an eight hour 37,000 meter set averaging a sub 1:05 pace throughout. What can I learn from that? I don’t swim 37,000 meters in a week. Do I really need to know what, say, Grant Hackett was capable of? Or what Rebecca Addlington is? Allow me live in my own make-believe world please.

Having thus eliminated most of the swimming blogs out there here are the ones I do follow:

Robs Aquatics.com was officially listed just last week. I was surprised to learn Phelps’ history making accomplishment in Beijing this summer had inspired a horde of adults to start competitive swimming. Curious to see how long they lasted I started to follow a few of their blogs and this is the only viable remaining survivor less than three short months later. Contrary to one blog’s title “Swimming is Easy” swimming is actually rather difficult – and everybody who tries to compete seriously learns quickly swimming fast is very hard indeed. I have hopes Rob will continue blogging his experiences in masters swimming for the rest of us to follow. It bodes well that, unlike the other fantasists, Rob has had experience as a competitive swimmer in high school.

Ande Rasmussen is the fastest swimmer I follow over the internet through his Ande’s Swimming Blog. A world-class masters competitor who holds world masters records in the competitive 45-49 age group Ande’s specialty is the 50 backstroke. He also has the advantage of hailing from the outskirts of Austin, TX and consequently trains at the University of Texas. On rare occasion he has the privilege of being critiqued by Eddie Reese himself (as I said he's seriously fast). One interesting perspective of the blog is because Ande’s a sprinter he trains as such; something very different from my own training approach. He also seems to have a swimsuit fetish. At least he possesses a sizable collection of performance suits and will often change mid-practice into another suit for certain 'fast' sets. Readers should note Ande’s very knowledgeable about the sport and always happy to give advice so don’t hesitate to call on his expertise by leaving him a question at Ask Ande. He’s recently switched from a message board format (USA Swimming kicked him off their message board after three very well attended years) to Blogspot.com. Let him know he hasn’t been forgotten.

I was introduced to blogging by the author of See Joe Run. See Joe Swim. Joe is one of my teammates in the Hyack Masters Swim Club and gives a very good blow-by-blow description of the team’s workouts. Coverage has been a little spotty as of late because of his many commitments but obviously for me he’s a must read. Interestingly his readers are overwhelmingly female – so if you’re of that persuasion you might just want to take a peek to find out what the fuss is about.

The next blog was discovered when a comment was made congratulating Joe setting a couple of new PBs. A long ago post described my reaction to this.

An aside here: my teammate is an active blogger and one of his readers, a very good master swimmer from California, congratulates him on his race results in a most exuberant manner. After seeing the quality of Californian’s own posted times, however, I think I detect a little tongue-in-cheek in his generous accolades. To be fair, as a quiet Canadian I might just be misreading one very outgoing and gregarious American (there are a lot of them and frankly I find it irritating). Regardless, our Californian speedster would probably be impressed my teammate accomplishes what he does averaging just a couple of swims a week.

I have had no occasion since our introduction to feel the need to change that initial impression of Joel. Over the past two years I’ve followed his blog I’ve come to think of him as someone I could become friends with if I didn’t live 1,800 kilometers away. Not to mention that as a consistent USMS Top 10 swimmer in several events he really is fast. His workouts are many and varied, and his blogging equally prodigious. Rarely a day goes by without at least a couple of posts on The 17thman. Plus, because he lives in Hollywood, on occasion he’ll treat you to some tantalizing pictures of well known personalities he comes across. A very interesting blog to follow.

Tony over at Southern Cal Aquatics Swim Club is another blogger with whom I share thoughts about our shared sport. A popular blog even with non-swimmers Tony blogs pretty well anything to do with water on almost a daily basis. He has a great artistic eye and will take you from a swimming hole perched right on the edge of Africa’s Victoria Falls to the latest in techno pool design in New York City; show a video exhibiting ‘water dresses’, delves into stirring discussions like how one university requires its students to be able to swim in order to graduate; and on rare occasion even exhibits some of his own computer drawn artwork. For the dedicated swimmer Tony relies on lots of instructional videos on technique, news about open water swimming, and a broad smattering of posts on his own efforts in the local masters swim scene along with the latest results in international competition. You’ll always find something interesting on SCAQ.

But my favorite blog is Floswimming; which some may not consider a blog at all. The website is a collection of videos from all over America interviewing coaches and swimmers about what is going on in swimming right now. It’s an invaluable resource to learn more about the sport. Some of the world’s best swimming coaches hold forth on various topics of interest, favorite practice sets are revealed on Wednesday Workouts, and top flight swimmers discuss their tapering, competition, and drill work along with many other aspects of their training. Recently the website has started presenting tips on specific techniques in a guest video every week called Technical Tuesday – a great addition. It would be nice to see some non-American faces reveal some tricks of the trade which have worked well for them, but until they do the States has more than enough to carry the site for a few years to come. This is a must view blog for anyone who coaches or wants to know how to raise their training to the next level.

An example of what I'm talking about is this video from October presenting a distance set both fun and competitive as well as having a little speed work thrown in. Every coach needs a few of these to pull out of his or her pocket when needed.

Visit Floswimming For More Videos

So there are my favorite swimming blogs. I’m still searching for a couple good ones from the U.K. and Australia so any reader who can recommend something from those far off lands please send me your suggestions. And best of luck in your own swimming pursuits wherever they may take you.

Dara Torres Struts Her Stuff

2008-11-06T09:14:00.000-08:00

A short clip from the Tonight Show with Jay Leno where 41 year old Dara Torres shows off what nearly won her first individual gold medal at this year's Beijing Olympics.

Vote for Skin

2008-10-31T11:59:00.000-07:00

Troubling times. There are so many events happening right now demanding our attention; truly important issues which involve millions of lives, trillions of dollars, justice, and how human society is to proceed over the next few decades, it’s difficult not to feel overwhelmed. My humble apologies, but please allow me to add one more concern to dump onto that ugly steaming heap of troubles on your plate. It’s a little thing as problems go, won’t really have any effect on your life, but will need to be dealt with before it becomes irredeemable. What I’m writing about here is whether or not swimming should accept the new technically advanced suits, in particular the Speedo LZR Racer, as part of the natural evolution of our sport.

I’ve partially addressed this issue from my own limited perspective as one who thinks the suit's adoption is wrong because of a desire not to break completely with the past and the issue of fairness. Others are just as adamant any rejection of the benefits which technology brings to swimming is a backward denial of the inevitable. Now Craig Lord, perhaps the most preeminent journalist covering swimming, has written a detailed five part series about this landmark event looking at the controversy from all sides. Everyone who cares about the future of our sport should read this series to fully understand the issues and what is at stake for swimming.

Suit Week 1: In the Beginning
Suit Week 2: How Speedo Won the Battle of Beijing
Suit Week 3: Vested Interest
Suit Week 4: The Case Against the Suit
Suit Week 5: Solutions

What makes Craig Lord a better journalist than I is rather than just rant against the suit (for he’s as decidedly against the suit as anyone) he still presents the other side's arguments and, better yet, offers possible solutions. One of those solutions forms the title of this post – that we should rely on the characteristics of human skin to provide the technical standards against which future suits should be measured. In short he calls for as much skin as possible. Marketing wise I think it’s a winning concept which has been discussed by several of us bloggers for some time. The one thing Lord doesn’t do is go into are the technical details as to how the suit rules would have to be worded in order to promote the “more skin the better” change in suit design. Perhaps there are some readers who may have some ideas on how this should be done? If you do then let’s hear them. I’ll be the first to throw a stick into the fire by saying I’d achieve the objective by requiring the suit’s drag coefficient to be worse than smooth skin, say a minimum of 5%, which should achieve the desired effect. At least it sounds pretty straight forward and relatively easy to enforce. What do you think?

P.S. I’d also like to take this opportunity to announce this is my blog’s 200th post. A trifling sum for many but for me an amazing total.

A Sporting Icon: The Great Arthur Lydiard

2008-10-25T20:13:00.000-07:00

This blog tosses about ‘great’ a lot when referring to today's elite swimmers. Yet the word is never used casually. It is chosen with nearly the same care that occurs when I apply the term ‘mediocre’ to an Olympic medalist – which is to say only with considerable reluctance. The problem (as I see it) is the number of tremendous swimmers in today’s generation – several who have not only advanced the sport faster than thought possible but also have transformed swimming with historically significant accomplishments. Instead of the usual one or two every generation I'm seeing a pack of them whom I'm confident can be accorded such distinction. Maybe there are some who will disagree with my choices. I won't take offense. From my vantage point things get a little blurry way up there. There are better judges than I on what constitutes greatness in a swimmer.

But I can use the same accolade with serene confidence when I associate it with Arthur Lydiard, despite the fact most athletes of this era have never even heard his name. And yet, though he made his mark in athletics, there are few endurance based sports who cannot trace the basic foundations of their training back to this man.

Arthur Lydiard (1917-2004) started his coaching career simply enough – when in his middle twenties he decided to get back into shape and chose running to do so. Initially he tried adopting the training practices of his day which could be best described as “no pain, no gain”. Finding them unsatisfying and unproductive he turned to experimentation by varying the distances and pace at which he ran. After years of analysis he discovered when distance and speedwork were properly balanced his overall performance in both track and distance events improved. Thus was born a theory when fully fleshed out would eventually transform sport: "…that long, even-pace running at a strong speed produced increased strength and endurance – even when it is continued to the point of collapse – and was beneficial, not harmful, to regular competition."¹ Lydiard continued with his training, building success upon success, which reached its apex when he represented New Zealand in the 1950 Empire Games marathon. More importantly he was faster on the track as well.

By this time Lydiard’s unorthodox training methods were attracting interest from fellow athletes who had begun training with him. In 1955 Arthur Lydiard, the self-coached runner for fitness, finally turned professional and became a coach. Over the next three decades Lydiard would come to coach Olympic gold medalists and world record holders such as Peter Snell, Lasse Viren, and Murray Halberg as well as several other Olympic medalists and international marathon winners. But he never forgot the reason why he started running. Throughout his life he continually promoted long, slow distance running as an alternate way to fitness for everybody.
"The fellow who can run only a few hundred yards before tiring, then has to walk 10 minutes, thinks he's not getting any real exercise and may decide to quit," he said. "But even that helps his heart to work more efficiently. You can go too fast, but you can never go too slowly to develop cardiac efficiency”. Today we know this as jogging, a Shakespearean word Lydiard reintroduced to the world to describe his new form of exercise for the masses.

The methods ascribed to him for training elite endurance athletes, however, are not without critics. There are few swimmers who swam in the sixties, seventies and eighties who will not curse the workloads they had to endure because of his heavy emphasis on mileage. But if their angst was ever aimed at Lydiard it would have been misdirected. All too often intellectually lazy coaches seized only on his massive distance program without actually studying how Lydiard integrated this with other essential components such as anaerobic workouts and rest. In fact Lydiard’s methods (known as the Lydiard Way) utilized all the available tools in a coach’s repertoire which existed at the time. The website Hillrunner.com has an article on its site with the title Lydiard Misconceptions Explained which quotes from the Lydiard Clinic. Since I don’t believe I can present its arguments any better I’m going to quote a large part of it below:

There are two facts here to consider. First, base building is indeed important. Show me a successful runner who has never established a base and I'll show you a runner who could be much more successful than he or she is. Second, while Lydiard focused more on base than most people, that does not mean that is all he focused on. When it was time to run hard, nobody - past or present - would promote as much intensity as Lydiard did. The Lydiard program is all about balance. When it's time to establish your base, that is the priority. When it's time to develop strength and speed, you don't let base training get in the way.
Consider the following quotes from the Lydiard Clinic:

The Lydiard training system is based on a balanced combination of aerobic and anaerobic running.

If you continue reading, you will see that's the case.

The conditioning phase of Lydiard training stresses exercising aerobically to increase your Steady State as high as possible given your particular situation. For best results, you should exercise between 70 and 100 of your maximum aerobic effort. This, therefore, is not Long Slow Distance. This is running at a good effort and finishing each run feeling pleasantly tired. You will certainly benefit from running slower, but it will take much longer than if you ran at a good aerobic pace.

Indeed, it is not long slow distance. You're not just jogging around, you're out working at a fairly solid effort. Of course, many people are constantly racing their training runs so it may seem like long slow distance to them but, if they do it right, they will realize that it is very beneficial.

Similar to the three long runs in aerobic conditioning, you should run hard (anaerobically) three times a week during the anaerobic phase. Be sure to allow yourself to recover between hard workouts, at least a day in between. The idea is to stress your system, recover completely, then stress it again. It is not all that important what the distances or speeds are, just run repetitions and intervals until you are tired and have had enough for the day. No coach can tell exactly how many repetitions you can do, or what your recovery intervals should be, on a particular day. So trust you instincts and use any schedule as a guide only.

A different phase, a different focus. How many programs that are supposedly not long slow distance like Lydiard have people running hard three times a week at any point? I'd challenge anyone to read that quote and then think the Lydiard plan is nothing but long slow distance.

Anaerobic training is essential if you want to race well. Bear in mind, however, that if you overdo anaerobic work, you will sacrifice the very thing you have worked so hard to achieve, your good condition, which determines your performance level.

Would anyone who is all about long slow distance say anaerobic training is essential? I doubt it. Once again, the first quote is the key. The Lydiard system is all about balance.

So why exactly are Lydiard’s methods relevant to swimming? Even though I’ve always taken the position swimming and athletics actually don’t match up well when trying to compare their respective athletic performances there is one important aspect they do share: endurance. In fact sports physiologists rank swimming’s endurance requirements even higher than running’s by placing swimming on a par with cycling and cross country skiing as one of the most exacting endurance sports around. From distances as short as 100 meters on up aerobic conditioning becomes progressively more critical and speed increasingly takes the back seat. Let me try to illustrate this point. Our elite swimmers can expect their 100 meter free to be about four seconds slower than merely doubling the time he or she can swim the 50. Let’s say in our example the difference is eight seconds, which implies four seconds possibly available for improvement. We can attempt it two different ways. We can work on improving endurance, which will require the subject to practice more and train harder; or we can try to drop the subject’s 50 meter time a couple of seconds by increasing his or her speed. The first option requires only the willingness and ability of the subject to put in the additional effort. The second requires sufficient talent. That's something which can't be assumed. When you also consider Lydiard's methods naturally improves overall speed it is easy to see why his discoveries are now incorporated into virtually every swimming program throughout the world.

No real surprise a former runner such as myself has bought into this versus the more anaerobic approach exemplified by the “Less is More” crowd. It has some clear advantages for me. The process of base building provides the time and pace I need to work on technique as I simultaneously improve both strength and aerobic capacity. It’s also easy to recognize, however, that a commitment to Lydiard's training principles does present risks for someone my age. For one any base I can create is going to be rather truncated. Bill Sweetenham figures to maximize long term development swimmers will need to begin to emphasize base building as soon as they enter their adolescent growth spurt and from there gradually increase their kilometers until they reach what he refers to as ‘Breakpoint Volume’² somewhere between the ages of 13 to 15. The first drawback is Sweetenham's assumption the swimmer has been concentrating on honing their skills before entering the base building phases. I’m trying to do both at the same time. The second is his calculation most swimmers will find their Breakpoint Volume to be around 2100 to 2500 kilometers a year (about 50 km/week). Consequently his development program (and in this Sweetenham is considered the world’s leading expert) anticipates seven or eight years devoted to base building prior to moving into ‘high-performance training’ as the swimmer enters his or her peak years. I’m going to fall hopelessly short of those numbers. The big question is will I be able to build at least some sort of base off of which I can race, or will I simply be exhausting myself to no avail? Sweetenham suggests I have a big problem when he concurs with Balyi³ that “swimmers acquire the ability to absorb and adapt to training principally during the learn-to-train stage of their careers”. So while I may end up swimming the same meters as our elite masters they invariably trained competitively through the crucial adolescent years when I did not. I also would be remiss not to point out standard orthodoxy for training masters swimmers emphasizes anaerobic training for several good reasons – the minimal meters we normally train, our slowing metabolism, and the short distances we typically race. I’m certainly bucking conventional wisdom here. Theoretically I should be able to find out in a year a two from checking the progress in my recovery time from test sets, but until then I’m winging it.

¹ Gilmour, Garth. (1978) Run – the Lydiard Way, Hodder and Stoughton, New Zealand
² Sweetenham has a rather lengthy definition of Breakpoint Volume but for this blog's purposes it can be described as the maximum workload an individual can tolerate while optimizing performance. Sweetenham defines it as “the optimum volume performed at optimum skill level achieved through participation in a maximum number of training sessions of controlled intensity. The training volume achieved at the end of the maturation period will essentially be the training volume an athlete will maintain for the remainder of his or her swimming career. We also believe that an athlete’s recovery profile largely determines his or her future ability to handle intensive training situations (that is, a combination of high-performance training volume and intensity)” Sweetenham, Bill and Atkinson, John. (2003) Championship Swim Training, Human Kinetics, USA
³ Balyi, I. (2002) New Zealand Coach 10(3) (autumn):6-9 titled “Models of long-term athlete development and training requirements of different sports”.

Making Time

2008-10-19T12:39:00.000-07:00

A reader asked how I managed to squeeze all this swimming into my life. The short answer is not very well. The problem is the same we all face: there simply isn’t enough time to do everything we want in the day. Right now I’m working my way up to twelve hours of swimming and 4½ hours of yoga a week along with daily core exercises. That’s twenty hours each week not counting time spent in physiotherapy or traveling to and from pool and yoga. Throw in the fatigue factor from all this and, let’s face it, my social life is shot.

The singular advantage I bring to this situation is prior experience. After articling I took up competitive running on a whim and so have already encountered many of the same problems I'm facing now. Of course in my twenties I had the energy and desire (heavy on the desire) to simultaneously continue on with my night life as well. Yet despite the handicap of youth I managed to learn how to train seriously while working full time. These lessons are once again proving their worth.

The most important adjustment is to create time for training and, for all intents and purposes, this means getting up early in the morning. By the time you get home from work, eat, and deal with the various happenings of the day there will be precious little time left over for training. Too many people will want a piece of you in the evening. So instead of wasting morning in bed get up and get to it. And when I say early I mean early. I’m instituting a routine where I get out of bed before dawn at four o’clock Monday through Saturday. That horrid time gives three extra hours a day for working out, which not coincidentally adds up to getting to the pool and back along with two hours of practice. The practice length is important for a couple of reasons. The first was pointed out to me by no other than Karlyn Pipes-Nielsen, who gave me two pieces of advice if I was going to train 30,000 or more meters a week: one, always schedule a day off; and two, add meters to existing workouts rather than more practices because fewer workouts means less time wasted in commuting. The second reason is more wishful thinking because there's only a lingering hope I'll ever be able to train part time with our club’s elite 2:30 group. Even so, if this aspiration is to have a chance to come about I will need to be able to swim a senior national caliber workout covering well over five thousand meters in an hour and a half some day. The program Hyack Masters provides is very nice and all but with only three hours a week it’s completely inadequate for competition. While I can get by for now training on my own eventually I’ll need the crucial input of professional coaching and training to have a shot at the elite masters' ranks. I might as well get used to swimming the necessary distances now and prepare for that fateful day.

Rest is another important part of the equation. To continue training at this tempo I need eight solid hours of sleep a day. So if I calculate this correctly it means I should go to bed around eight o’clock in the evening. That was my bedtime when I was a child. Living life as an adult the past quarter century I’m presently trying without much success to turn in by ten o’clock. Compensating for the missing hours of sleep with weekend naps isn't entirely practicable and consequently I’m building up a sleep deficit at a minimum rate of ten hours per week. I know I have to go to bed earlier, but there always seems to be good reasons to stay up. Unfortunately I'm struggling to see the humor in my making this plaintive whine now after so proudly putting it away ever so long ago.

Thankfully eating does not present the same problem and no, I don’t depend on delivery. I do however cook. This is a good thing since a proper diet and eating out is almost an oxymoron nowadays. As a result, aside from the occasional dinner of sushi or fish and chips, I’ve stopped eating fast food. It’s my own personal Don Quixote-like protest against our food industry stemming from my research writing Lets Talk About Trans Fats. Neither do I rely on a wife for my meals as I’m unmarried. Frankly if I was married I almost certainly wouldn’t be involved in this silly ego-centric adventure. Besides which how many women cook nowadays? What would be the odds? So my solution is to use my weekend to cook for the rest of the week. When I ran I'd cook overly large meals and then freeze the ample leftovers for later consumption. Now I’m approaching this on an industrial scale. Instead of cooking three or four times what was necessary for a meal I’m cooking enough for eight or more. For example I cooked a fifteen pound turkey which gave me a nice turkey dinner, a couple meals of turkey sandwiches, a dozen large turkey pot pies, and several liters of curry. After only a few short weeks I can now reach into the freezer and select from meat loaf, real scotch broth, chicken cordon bleu, spaghetti sauce, two different curries, chicken noodle soup (home made noodles!), chili, and those turkey pot pies. I'll be adequately fueled for my quest at least.

Yet strain as hard as I can to change the count of allocated hours there is precious little left over. Television is out (well almost) as is recreational reading – no time. And this time around I have another sacrifice to make with my internet habit. This blog is witness to how difficult eliminating that can be! Essentially everything else is to be tossed overboard. Routine has become my life’s byword. It will take a few months to get used to – at least I’m hoping I’ll get used to it. There are some mornings diving into the pool where I wonder if swimming a few seconds faster is really worth it. Of course it isn’t the end result which is important here. If I could swim fast enough for my times to be important I'd have to turn myself in for cheating. It’s the process and sacrifice involved in seeking the answer to the question I’m really asking: am I still mentally and physically strong enough to do this? Some men my age go out and buy an exotic car and date young women, others quit their jobs and travel the world but, as I step outside of myself for a moment, it seems I’ve decided to convince myself it isn’t too bad growing old. I’m not sure the answer I’m getting is the one I want. But if reality does eventually keep me from my objective then at least I’ll be one of the fittest men over fifty most people will ever see.

Walking the Talk

2008-10-14T11:19:00.000-07:00

This writer believed, rather arrogantly it may be added, that he was relatively impervious to the effects of our omnipresent mass media. In the past year or so I’ve awakened to the realization my perceived immunity isn’t altogether true. Take for instance how easily I believed physical perfection was only an arm’s reach away – a natural product of work ethic, genes, and a good understanding of physical training. I’m blaming those ads which promise athletic, well muscled bodies in less time that it takes most people to eat lunch. It didn’t help hearing about those actors who spent a few weeks with a personal trainer to get into fantastic shape for a role either. Some pitches go as far as claiming their miracle exercise system can provide the lean, well defined muscular/toned bodies displayed on the screen for a daily cost of only ten short minutes. And while most viewers will discount these ads the idea at least some observable improvement can be expected is implanted into the subconscious. Like mine.

Recently an advertising blitz for an exercise program promising spectacular results in just ninety days has been on TV. I’ve looked it over closely and while I believe it is built upon solid principles and is well designed it presents nothing new or cutting edge in our understanding of physiology. Gratifyingly the program requires a full hour of vigorous training every day – a major commitment for anyone. In addition to the exercise the system also requires the buyer to participate in a highly regimented low carbohydrate diet. To give you an idea of what sort of results they claim I’ll provide the before and after pictures of one of their customers who bought the program.

This individual goes by the name of JoeB and he’s fairly representative of the examples provided on the program’s website. I admit his improvement over ninety days is not as spectacular as the two or three men late night television programming showcases, but I discount those results as virtually impossible without some sort of deception being played upon us. Even so, while JoeB is a more conservative example, I don't have to work very hard to detect a couple ways they manipulated his before and after images either.

First I’m going to point out weight loss makes by far the largest contribution in any of the before and after pictures justifying this or any other advertised bodybuilding system. It isn’t coincidental the most dramatic losses from diets are realized in the first three months – when the body has the most excess fat and before the body’s metabolism can adjust to the new diet. In low carbohydrate diets this is referred to as the Induction Phase, and when combined with exercise reports of weekly weight losses of 2-4 kgs (5-10 lbs.) are not uncommon. In JoeB’s case his before picture shows a body with a reported 14% body fat, a level indicating good physical conditioning with little, if any, excess weight¹. In the after picture JoeB’s body fat percentage has dropped to an amazing 8%. This is a tremendous accomplishment. Reducing fat after reaching our predetermined ideal body fat percentage becomes increasingly more difficult – a fact well known to every dieter trying to just get close to normal weight much less well below it. The body shuts down metabolism in an effort to keep some reserves. This is where exercise is crucial for maintaining the metabolism necessary to continue burning fat. Certainly exercise is involved in JoeB’s case, but he's transitioned from a fit body's fat level to a professional athlete’s equivalent in a mere three months. I find this difficult to believe without some sort of catalyst. Starvation would have cannibalized muscle tissue as well as fat.

On the other hand I’m considerably more accepting in regards to his increased musculature. A good hour with weights just prior to the picture being taken would suffice to highlight the now revealed, bulkier muscles of shoulders, arms, and torso. Muscle gain is something a man of his age can reasonably expect to see after ninety days of intensive effort. Having conceded this, however, the unflattering direct lighting used in his before picture has been changed to more intense side lighting for better definition in the after picture. At least he's not changed his posture and switched to the partial abdominal twist bodybuilders use to minimize their waist.

Now let’s look at my own efforts at physical rehabilitation. When this blog started I began taking pictures of myself every month expecting slight but observable changes to show up each time. After six months of humiliation and no discernible progress I cut them back to every three months and then, still seeing no progress, all the way to just once a year. The gullible fool I was I had truly expected to see marked progress in my physical form in a matter of weeks.

So here are pictures showing my progress after an entire year of exercise; a sustained effort which saw my weekly workouts increase from five hours of swimming to close to nine. On top of which I participated in a couple of hour and a half yoga sessions a week for my flexibility.

After so many times I shouldn’t be surprised when I view these pictures but damn it – I see a different body in the mirror. Part of it is the foreshortening which comes from viewing myself in the mirror; partly the loss of depth perception in a two dimensional picture which adds the proverbial “ten pounds”; and yes, the lighting in the picture is atrocious. But I cringe every time I put up these things. I’m now down to 80 kilos (176 lbs) and I have put on muscle in spite of what my after picture may suggest. Yet my measurements suggest my body fat percentage hasn’t budged over the year. That’s difficult to believe. More likely is when I measured myself last year I was rather generous and when measuring for this post perhaps a tad harsh. The other significant improvement I hope you can see is how much straighter I’m standing now. That’s because of my lessons in Alexander Technique and will be covered in another post. Overall, however, my improvements aren’t anywhere close to those exhibited by JoeB and his ilk on TV. Ah well, what counts is not where I am now but where I’m going.

This year my goal is to build up my core and work off that ever so persistent bulge around my middle. But beyond doing about twenty minutes of core work a day I’m going to rely once again on swimming alone to do the job. No weights for me. I figure the extra meters and stroke work my program calls for over the coming year should more than suffice. I’ll start back with weights next year. My target for fat loss the coming year is 3-4 kilos and a similar amount of muscle gain. I'm hoping the two combined will make a significant difference in next year’s picture. The long term goal is to lose 6-8 kilos of fat to bring me down close to a 10% fat content while increasing my muscle mass by 10-12 kilos to finish at around 85 kilos or better (close to 190 lbs). I figure it will take me three more years of work to realize my goal. Unfortunately no quick fix for me, but that's what happens when you start getting old.

¹ For most men the first sign of carrying excess fat comes from the appearance of rolls of flesh at their waist, something showing up in males with around 15% body fat. The American Council for Fitness calculates a fit man should have a body fat percentage between 14-17% and an athlete between 6-13%. A woman should look for 21-24% and 16-20% respectively². You can calculate your own body fat percentage quickly and reasonably accurately with a tape measure using the military method by going here and downloading the U.S. Naval Health Research Center’s Technical Document No. 99-2B in .pdf format.

² Just so you don’t get too depressed about your own fat percentage the acceptable level of body fat changes when we reach middle age. You can check the adjusted ranges here.

Betrayed: How USA Swimming has Sold Us Out for Money

2008-10-07T11:45:00.000-07:00

Dateline September 27, 2008 – Washington Post

USA Swimming banned the revolutionary, high-tech swimsuits worn by nearly every swimming Olympian in Beijing for athletes 12 years old and younger during its annual convention in Atlanta on Saturday.
About 65 to 70 percent of USA Swimming's house of delegates, which consists of hundreds of voting members representing swim clubs at all levels across the nation, voted to ban suits that extend past the neck, shoulders or knees, officials said.

I’m sure readers will have almost certainly heard of Zen Buddhism. Perhaps, however, there are some who aren’t very clear about what Zen teaching is exactly about. Well aside from Zen masters who really does? So please forgive me if I go the extra step of trying to explain this very arcane philosophy in simple terms; not because I think you, my dear reader, are ignorant; but only to ensure some sort of understanding as it will be necessary to follow the rest of this piece. Zen Buddhism asserts that all sentient beings have a Buddha-nature of inherent wisdom and virtue, a nature which is created from the mind itself. The aim of Zen practice is to discover this Buddha-nature within ourselves, the search for which can provide the perspectives and insights on existence that can, ultimately, lead to enlightenment. Clear? No? Well I don’t blame you. Then how about this – Zen Buddhism is all about discovering what it is to be a complete human being by stripping away everything else. You’d be surprised at how little is left.

Now swimming is a very Zen sport. It is a very complex, intricate weave of exactly choreographed motion set in a dangerous environment, where pain and exhaustion are inevitable companions in the pursuit of unattainable perfection. In order to do our very best in a race we, like the Zen masters, must set aside thinking about specific techniques and discomfort and instead allow our form to flow unconsciously from the mind. Of course, since we want to set our personal bests before the age of sixty, our young swimmers tend to opt out of spending their time in reflective study and devote themselves to practical training in the pool instead. Even so, though the methods are different, our goals are similar – a very narrow focus on achievement and complete devotion to its attainment. The strength of a swimmer’s mind will often determine the victor. That and of course hyper flexible joints, size seventeen feet, and thirteen litre lungs.

USA Swimming's Age Group Committee at first recommended a ban on the suits for swimmers up to age 18, but it met resistance from members who feared U.S. athletes would be at a disadvantage if they didn't have access to the suits. The sport's rules and regulations committee, meantime, urged members to let athletes have access to the best equipment available.

I’m not sure how many international age group swim meets the typical American competes in but I’m going to guess it wouldn't be all that many. Wouldn't it be more effective to provide an exemption from the new suit ban for those specific events rather than open up the entire country to the expense? Just speculating here.

In Canada, as in many other countries, there are special rules for youth swimming. Up in the Great White North competitive age group swimming starts at the age of eleven. For these younger swimmers special rules to guard against excessive competitive pressure and early burn out before reaching their true potential. Rules and guidelines for our 10&Unders limit the number of hours a meet can have; advises giving out ribbons for placing, aggregate scores, and personal bests rather than the traditional first, second, and third; restrict the total number of hours they can train, and calls for training with the national federation’s proscribed Long Term Athlete Development philosophy in mind, an approach which stresses training orientated towards individual medley and distance freestyle. In the United States serious training is only recommended once the child becomes a teenager. So when USA swimming talks about placing suit restrictions on 12&Unders they are for limiting the new rules to the one segment where competition isn’t its primary focus. Even so, Swimming World magazine’s October 1st edition of The Morning Swim Show makes the point these rules don’t really stop anyone at all from wearing the new technology. It was discouraging to hear Tony Young, Chairman of USA Swimming’s Age Group Development Program virtually concede this point. Incredibly he even refers to the fact the restrictions put in place were modeled on suit legislation passed in Southern California in 2000. Clearly these so-called limits have nothing to do with today’s concerns. In my mind this is a non-ruling: practically speaking USA Swimming has ensured there are no barriers to using the new high tech suits in competition for anyone who desires to wear one.

USA Swimming's Club Development Director Pat Hogan said delegates were concerned that the pricey suits, which can cost as much as $500, would drive promising youngsters who couldn't afford them out of the sport and possibly deter proper stroke development.
"We're in a position where we want to grow participation in our sport," Hogan said. "We don't need to have false barriers to participation. The cost of those high-tech swim suits, for a young swimmer, doesn't really make sense."

But spending a couple of thousand dollars a year on swim suits makes sense for everyone else? To compete in a local regional meet? An adherent to the Zen philosophy would ask one simple question. Why is it necessary for everyone to swim 2% faster? Is it right to question why Hogan feels that thirteen or sixteen year olds are different from ten or twelve year olds when it comes to shouldering the costs of the new suits? I fail to see his logic. Let us have no misunderstanding about this: the number of parents who will stick with the sport after their child has torn both their primary and backup racing suits at a meet is virtually nil. The number of parents who will gracefully accept seeing their child denied a place on a select team because they can’t afford the suits? None that I know. This decision is a crushing blow to the long term future of swimming in the States.

Now I’m going to concede I’m one of those who believe the suits are bad for the sport regardless of the level of competition. There are enough of us that FINA has been forced to engage an independent firm to verify the new technology does not violate existing FINA prohibitions. At least it's a step in the right direction rather than naively relying on the manufacturers’ in-house testing for their rulings.

I’ve argued in an earlier post the manufacturers’ own descriptions dictate the suits must fall into the category of devices, something specifically banned by FINA rules. If I’m correct then there’s more than just a simple rule violation involved here. The real problem is that a device is a tool, and tools work by expanding human ability in highly specific ways. The science on which they rely upon to improve performance will affect swimmers differently depending on the various mix of skills and abilities every individual brings with them. For example as a poor kicker fins help me considerably more than they'll help someone good at kicking. If the new technology helps stabilize the core it logically provides more benefit to those whose core integrity is deficient. There's decent anecdotal evidence to back this up, like the fact Michael Phelps didn’t feel the need to wear the full body suit at Beijing, or that Gary Hall Jr. is on record saying the suits didn’t provide him with any noticeable increase in speed. If the current studies don’t conclude the suits should be banned I’m going to consider performing a scientifically based statistical analysis of the suits and see if there's evidence the new tech suits discriminate against the very best in our sport.

A final statement. I lied when I wrote earlier I couldn’t understand Pat Hogan’s not being concerned about the cost for anyone older than twelve. I unfortunately understand only too well. The host of The Morning Swim Show Peter Busch brought it right out in the open when he said, “... it would be unfair not to allow these new technologies to enter the market place ...” There can be little argument this present farce is all about the large amounts of money Speedo's pumping into USA Swimming. But really why hasn’t a complete ban on the new technology been considered? It’s done all the time in sports. If NASCAR for example didn’t ban certain technologies we’d be watching Formula One America. Why, if we are to accept the technological advances incorporated into these suits, shouldn’t we also accept monofins? We’d certainly swim faster with those. I must ask the question. Just why do we have an obligation to swimsuit manufacturers to accept their products?

Shouldn’t swimming be all about being the best we can be?

Breaststroke, Backstroke, Butterfly and Free – Oh My!

2008-09-25T06:08:00.000-07:00

I’ve always known technique is one of the preeminent factors in determining how fast someone can swim. Yet despite this as time passes and I learn more its importance continues to climb. That’s an opinion many of the world’s top coaches share. Way back when I first swam as a youngster technical skills weren’t really on the radar for me. I simply assumed there were those who couldn’t swim very well, others that could, a handful like me who could swim really fast, and then the rare few who could swim really, really fast. I thought it was all in the genes so to speak. Now in hindsight I can wonder if my early success was more due to the fact I was coached my first year by Archie McKinnon, a George Haines-like figure in Canadian swimming, than my own innate talent. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

No surprise then on my return I was happy to take advantage of the team’s coaching by attending every clinic offered by my club. Yet always underlying my efforts was the idea that, aside from my fly of course, I only needed to tinker with my strokes. In this I was sorely mistaken. Just how mistaken was driven home one practice where we did a set of freestyle stroke counts in a long course pool. I finished the first pair with counts of 39 and a 53 for fists only, which turned out to be significantly better than the numbers the rest were announcing as their own. I was figuratively patting myself on the back when, with our set resuming, our coach leaned over to Doug standing next to me and in a normal voice asked him what his own counts were. “Ah, 28 or so swim ... and 40 fist” he responded. A simple nod was Brad’s only response, his casual acknowledgment providing ample proof he’d fully expected those numbers. It came as a profound shock someone could be so much more efficient at swimming than I. My deficiencies meant I would never compete along side our elite masters with what I had; and made it blindingly clear wholesale changes to my strokes were necessary – mere tinkering was not enough. So a couple of weeks later I bit the bullet, ripped my strokes apart, and started from scratch with several suggestions for each stroke from Brad.

A year later has seen some progress. My breaststroke kick has shown a profound improvement to the point where it’s now a ‘good’ kick technically speaking. Much of the improvement has to be credited to Alexander Technique which has made huge strides in bringing back my hip flexibility and thus allowing me the proper kicking motion. My pull, on the other hand, requires considerable work to bring it to a point where my drag coefficient becomes acceptable. Overall body position is also a problem, as is getting both pull and kick together into a cohesive and fluid undulation that moves me forward rather than up and down.

If my breast has shown solid improvement my back has been the opposite. I’ve better technique in the various individual facets of the stroke such as catch, pull, arm placement, finish, kick, etc. but, like breaststroke, I’ve been unable to tie them all together into one synergistic motion. Paradoxically I believe the fault lies here in the fact my natural backstroke comes the closest to the ideal out of all my strokes, resulting in conflicts and/or confusion for me when I unconsciously relapse into habit during a race. Of course lots of work remains; especially in delivering a solid, rearward directed pull and inducing more shoulder roll for my catch. But integrating all my separate parts is my primary goal for now. Also my lack of strength is very evident in my pull, often causing me to deliberately fall away from proper form just to give my muscles some rest. Hopefully with time and more work this will pass.

Now my fly. Jeepers, what can I say? Originally I planned on spending five weeks to master the basics of the stroke. Two years later I can only say I’m confident this will be the year it all comes together and I’ll finally have a legitimate 100 fly. I can boast a real dolphin kick now, even if it pales in comparison to the kick of an actual fly specialist, and my integration of pull and kick is reasonably fair. Emphasis this season is on my head position, pulling rearward rather than down immediately after my catch, and staying on a flatter plane in the water. But my lack of strength really shows up here.

Finally my free. My coach has told me he believes this stroke will eventually become my most competitive when I can work out my problems. That might be some time away. Besides it's hard to believe when I can’t even come close to breaking a minute swimming short course meters. On the other hand watching a video of me trying to swim arms swung out flat and elbows low with a pronounced lope I can see there’s considerable room for improvement. It has meant a major effort in redesigning my pull but I can sense progress slowly coming my way. I’ve even come around to understand what Brad means when he refers to incorporating a “shoulder shrug” in my stroke. Plus, in addition to the above, I also need to induce more body roll and better coordination into my stroke, and finish with my hands by my hips. Right now, however, everything feels very artificial and forced. Much, much work remains.

A lot to push through, but I feel I’m in the right place for my long term plans. Because of the efforts I’ve been putting into revamping my strokes I wasn’t going to be setting impressive new personal bests whatever I did. With speed work not being conducive to mastering new techniques, and the need to practice my new strokes as much as possible, I think my 30,000 meter weekly target is very compatible with my immediate needs. More pounding away in the pool will be good for building my strength up too. So onward I paddle. Time will tell if I’m on the right path.

The "Program"

2008-09-19T10:27:00.000-07:00

Two years back in swimming and now a year and a half has gone by with no improvement. What’s up? Well first of all I’m not panicking, though I have to admit thinking when I started my present program I’d be seeing a slight downward drift in my times. Okay, truthfully I’ve seen my hundred times improve by a second or so with the notable exception of backstroke, but such small margins of improvement on times achieved after only six months of swimming might as well be nothing. So why the lack of progress?

Alas I have only myself to blame. Once I decided to swim Masters competitively I became “serious” as one of my teammates put it. For me you see there is a huge difference between exercising for fitness and training for competition. Fitness is something you can approach on a casual basis because ... how should I put it ... the definition of what constitutes physical health is both relative and flexible. But when you compete you are trying to be the very best you can be, to test your limits and go beyond them. Certainly if I was a former Olympian or college swimmer this blog wouldn’t exist because I’d already know those limits. But I’m not one of those select individuals. So for me the question remains – just how good of a swimmer am I? My current training program is my attempt to answer this simple question.

A conundrum is presented by this decision. To be the best I can be would seem to require that I train as hard as those who aspire to Olympic glory. Bill Sweetenham figures this means something between eighteen to twenty four hours of swimming a week. Okay, that’s not happening. But clearly I’m going to have to devote a significant part of my life to swimming if I want an answer. And then I have to decide on how long will I need to train to reach my goal. Well physiologically it takes at least five years to recover whatever aerobic capacity an individual has remaining, and six or seven years to build sport specific muscle from scratch. So I’m looking at six years or so before training can bring me to my maximum potential. Multiply the two together and you’ll come up with some mind-numbing numbers. If I’m going to invest that much time then I had better do it wisely.

Swimming has two major components to success: physical conditioning and technique. Both, I’ve unfortunately discovered, are very problematical for me. Let’s take physical conditioning. It turns out one cannot start swimming the same workouts as elite swimmers after a few months of training. At least this is the case for me, but then I’m old and not Dara Torres. On the other hand it typically takes age group swimmers years to work up to the punishing two hour practices and the 60,000 meters or more national caliber swimmers regularly put in every week. Thankfully this is double the 30,000 meters/week normally committed to by our top masters swimmers, but even at this relatively low kilometrage the hours are significant and present a significant hurdle to overcome. For instance a well regarded U.S. university coach keeps mileage within 5% after he found increasing yardage by 17% over a single season had a distinctly negative impact on performance. I started competitive swimming from a base of 3,000 meters per week. The first year I increased my weekly workouts to an average of around 12,500 meters. That year I felt like I had been beaten on a daily basis and mere walking brought forth a chorus of complaints from my stressed out muscles. The second year my training volume increased by two-thirds to just over 20,000 meters. And while the cries of disbelief coming from my body became more muted it was likely because they were too exhausted to complain. This year I’m planning to hit 30,000 if things go well – a bump of another 50% and invariably another year to be written off competition-wise. And through all this at the back of my mind is the nagging thought I should consider specializing in the 200 events to take advantage of the endurance I showed as a youth (I know I must have a little remaining somewhere). If I go ahead with this idea I’ll need to consider increasing my kilometrage to around 40,000 meters to exploit my perceived advantage (remember we’re talking masters here). That’s a lot of meters in a very short time. But do I have a choice if I want to end this experiment in six years? I don’t think so. And then there’s the big question mark regarding my swimming technique. Thankfully I’m going to leave that for my next post. It’s a complete subject on its own.

Third Time’s the Charm

2008-09-13T12:13:00.000-07:00

The most pleasant surprise I’ve had returning to ‘competitive’ swimming has been discovering how much the overall quality of coaching has improved the three plus decades I’ve been away. Swimming with a masters team that's affiliated with a major swim club allows access to underwater cameras and stroke analysis reserved only for the elite back when I was a child. So now instead of merely swimming up and down the pool in mind-numbing monotony I can consciously work on correcting any one of my strokes’ many known flaws. There are enough to keep me busy for a long, long time.

When I started back in the pool a couple of years ago I limited myself to trying only a couple of changes at a time. I felt attempting any more would overwhelm my efforts and I’d end up with little real progress or, even worse, create new problems which would need correction. After several months and a couple of clinics, however, it became clear trying to compartmentalize my stroke deficiencies wasn’t working. There was simply too much else going wrong elsewhere for me to isolate and target specific problems.

Realizing this I took the plunge late August last year and adopted a radically new approach to my training. I would try to tackle all my flaws in one cohesive whole. The idea was to bring my overall technique up to a point where I could start addressing individual problems without being overly distracted by the other niggling deficiencies. In effect I threw out the idea that I could swim competitively with my existing strokes and decided to start fresh, really fresh – dropping myself to the level of someone new to age group competition where the general rule of thumb is that any time spent on specific problems is a waste of time. For me training became oriented around the same basic stroke instruction and overall conditioning given to every eight year old. My practices reverted to drills, kicking, and distance work. To become more at ease in the water I had to swim more, but to handle the heavier workload and still maintain proper technique I required much better conditioning. It was, is, a slow and tiring process which I estimate will take at least three more years to build up to my maximum potential. A year of this, however, has been enough I think to start correcting some of my major stroke deficiencies.

Consequently by the end of the short course season I was looking forward to a review of my various strokes which eventually led to a clinic with Brad one sunny Saturday this past June. I am pleased to report it was a very productive hour and a quarter for me. Boiled down to its essence for the next several months I’m going to tackle two primary themes – my catch (early vertical forearm) and maintaining proper rotation around my body’s core. A couple of following posts will look at each stroke analyzing my individual flaws and how I intend to improve. So once again, for the third time in two short years, I’m making serious changes to my strokes. Some are more refinement than wholesale change, such as the changes required for my backstroke. Others are at the point where I’m able to retain some major components but still need to introduce completely new concepts, such as revamping my breaststroke and fly pulls. And then there is freestyle, where I’m just starting over and completely rebuilding my stroke from scratch. I feel like a school boy on his first day back at school looking forward to another year of learning and some good grades. I’m hoping by the time I go back for my next stroke review around December I’ll get mostly A’s for progress made.

Memories of Gresham, Oregon

2008-09-07T09:48:00.000-07:00

Last month I attended my first USMS National Championships. My first ‘real’ swimming meet for a long, long time if you consider, like I do, that legitimate competitions must require their entrants to meet minimum qualifying times. Even so the atmosphere was decidedly casual and easy going on the pool deck – clearly there’s no going back to the days of real competition. I’m going to miss that. But it was an enjoyable experience with lots of interesting observations:

– I was very surprised getting off my flight to enter a very large, bright, and modern terminal on my arrival in Portland (Gresham is referred to occasionally as East Portland). Despite being named Portland International Airport I had in my mind’s eye the same sort of small ‘international’ facility as my birth city Victoria, B.C. influenced no doubt because I thought the two cities were roughly comparable in size. Not correct. Metropolitan Victoria has less than half a million souls while metropolitan Portland’s population boasts over two million, ranking it in the top 25 most populous population centers in the United States.

– My second surprise was to be greeted by a modern LRT (light rail transit) system. I immediately canceled my plans to cab it over to my hotel in favor of riding what Portlanders call the MAX. No worse after the experience of disembarking once at the wrong station and a rather long wait for a connecting bus I eventually found my hotel for the grand cost of $4.25 and no carbon emissions. Thereafter, aside from twice using cabs early on because of my unfamiliarity with Portland’s public transit, the rest of the weekend I found my way around the city and back to the airport using buses, MAX, and the pool shuttle.

– The Mt. Hood Community College Aquatic Center had a novel upgrade a couple of years ago when they added a meter of depth by raising a concrete platform some two meters wide around its edges. The extra depth makes for an even faster pool. I was, however, more impressed by the touch pads they employed. Most pools I swim in have somewhat slippery to very slippery walls or, like our club’s Canada Games Pool, walls like rough sandpaper which over time tend to shred the skin off your feet. These pads were perfect – not particularly rough to the touch but providing enough grip to eliminate any chance of slipping.

– In a masters meet of this caliber the announcers play an important role because of the presence of so many varied stories of interest. For one they tell the spectators when there’s a good chance for a world record to be broken. And there were a lot at this year’s championships. At other times they identify swimmers of note such as former distinguished Olympians. One such individual I was pleased to observe was Yoshi Oyakawa, a former world record holder and Olympic gold medalist for the United States at the 1952 Helsinki Games. He set two world records in the 75-79 age group 100 and 50 backstroke events with times of 1:22.78 and 36.54. If only I could be that good when I reach his age. The announcer also let out an historical tidbit by noting for the audience that Yoshi Oyakawa was considered to be the last of the great straight arm backstrokers. That put some historical context into seeing him swim. It also drove home the point that Helsinki was over half a century ago!

– If the Speedo LZR Racer was the singular suit of choice at Beijing then the equally clear favorite at these Long Course Championships was the Blueseventy Nero Comp. It was everywhere. I talked during a social one night to a top ranked 50+ swimmer who purchased the suit just before this competition and he raved about the effect it had on his swimming. But I will say he was a little skeptical about the claims of neutral buoyancy for the suit.

– Those males who didn’t wear a fully body suit tended to be shaved. I was one of the few who appeared on deck still ‘fuzzy’ but this was intentional. Given my recent swimming performances I wanted to make very sure any casual observer was well aware I wasn’t taking myself very seriously.

– The organization of these Championships was absolutely first rate. The only complaint I can make is the BBQ I signed up for ended up putting on my plate a warmed, pre-grilled chicken breast and a charred hot dog with not a drop of BBQ sauce in sight. I was hoping for something resembling ribs, perhaps some version of pork or maybe a little Texas chili. No such luck. Perhaps I was overly optimistic shelling out only $15 for the dinner but no BBQ sauce? Charge $30/plate if necessary but at least barbecue the food.

– I guess I’m about average at estimating peoples’ ages but I do have a really hard time guessing how old masters swimmers in serious training are. For example when I first met Doug, one of our club's best swimmers, I had him pegged at around five years younger than me ... only to find out he was a year older. It was just as difficult at this swim meet, which displayed a relative abundance of bodies approaching those of our elite swimmers. Well close enough. It wasn’t hard to observe the strong correlation between the quality of the individual swimmer and his or her physical appearance. I’m going to have to really work on my core muscles over the next year and get some definition. If I can’t swim fast maybe I can fake it.

– Friday and Saturday were blistering hot 105ºF (over 40ºC) and it was an outdoor pool. I wilted even keeping under the tents which were arrayed around the pool deck. Eventually I went indoors to the warm up pool which I used as a ‘cool down’, and that’s despite the fact the 25 yard pool was allowed to be warmer than typically seen in competitions.

– That wasn’t the case for the main pool which had the chillers going full blast to keep it at a perfect temperature for racing. Many were comparing the overall pool conditions very favorably to last year’s USMS Long Course Championships held at The Woodlands, Texas where apparently the outdoor temperatures were just as hot. It seems the difference at The Woodlands was a broken chiller allowed rather warmer water than desirable. Although I’d have to say considering the number of world records broken in Texas the conditions didn’t seem to slow them down much.

– I signed up for the meet as a member of the Hyack Swim Club, completely forgetting my provincial swimming association tries to collect together all local swimmers going to these out-of-province meets under its banner to allow fielding relay teams. I’ll remember next time. On the other hand I was greeted three times by people who had lived in New Westminster or had some association with the Hyacks. One individual from New Westminster I met was Jill Black, who is now swimming with Oregon Masters. She had been a Hyack until she won a scholarship to a Californian university where she ended up meeting her future husband. For her swimming really did change her life. I'm kicking myself for not finding out her maiden name.

– I had a hard time hanging on to my sunglasses during the meet. I blame the fact that I’ve just started having to use reading glasses and the constant juggling between reading glasses and sunglasses threw me. Not to mention that as a long time resident of the Pacific Northwest I’m not used to wearing sunglasses anyways. On Sunday I left my sunglasses on a table while I was reading the paper waiting for the shuttle bus and had regretfully written them off as lost. Later on, getting out of the pool after my 50 back, I was approached by a man who asked if I swam for the Hyacks. When I answered in the affirmative he handed me my missing sunglasses. To him and the citizens of Portland my sincere thanks once again.

– Standing in the shower at meet’s end the fellow next to me, apparently knowing my age group, complained about swimming at last year’s long course championships at The Woodlands as a 45 – 49 year old where the competition was brutal (and it was – almost all the world’s top ranked swimmers in my age group showed up for that meet). This year in Gresham virtually no one showed up and he was moaning the fact he had placed sixth in the 50 free as a 50 – 54 year old with a time that would have placed him fourth if he could have swum with us younger guys. I guess that’s the problem about masters competitions for us Type-A competitive folk: there’s no single competition you can go to where you’ll be guaranteed to find all the top swimmers gathered together. So you get a national championship which really isn’t a national championship and a gold medal’s true worth varies wildly depending on the level of competition which happens to show up. The real competition is on paper in FINA’s Top 10 lists.

Next year the long course championships will be held at Indianapolis, Indiana at the famous Indiana University Natatorium. That should be another interesting experience.

The Greatest Olympian of Them All

2008-08-30T09:24:00.000-07:00

At a pizza and beer social with my masters swim team a teammate leaned over and asked, “Do you think Phelps is for real?” Before I could put down the beer and reply my coach answered for me. The abridged version can be paraphrased as ‘We know he’s for real because he’s always been Michael Phelps’. One of the select few destined for greatness in their sport. At this year’s Olympics I watched the performance of another athlete marked for stardom but around which swirls persistent rumours of performance enhancing drugs. Usain Bolt. It does not help quell doubters the facts that Jamaica didn’t have a national anti-doping agency going into Beijing, that several Jamaican sprinters have been caught cheating over the years, or the improbability such a small country could dominate both men’s and women’s sprints. Yet there are other countries who lord over a single sport all out of proportion to their size. New Zealand for example, another island nation, reigns supreme over the world of rugby; the relatively small country of Canada is the perennial favorite in ice hockey; and Brazil sees its football players acknowledged as representing the very best in the world. Jamaica’s national sport is sprinting. Are we surprised Tiger Woods is an American? Wayne Gretzky is a Canadian? Then should we be surprised it was Jamaica, where sprinting is the national sport, which produced Usain Bolt?

Having never seen Bolt run but having read so much about this young prodigy I was very interested to watch him compete. Seeing him race was thrilling. There's little doubt in my mind Bolt is the real deal. His physical size and build, his youth, and that beautiful stride – if a man can do what was done that night without drugs then Usain Bolt surely is that man.

However the topic of this post is not Bolt but Phelps, because his now epic achievement seems to demand consideration as the “greatest of them all”. Not everyone agrees with this assessment. A runner's blog dismissed Phelps’ Beijing triumph by denigrating swimming as an Olympic sport, “... we’d be giving out medals for the 125, 150 and 175”. Clearly a man who hasn’t even swum 100 meters, much less tried doing it butterfly. Yet for me Phelps’ foremost accomplishment is not the number of gold medals, or the number of world records he set, but the fact he managed to do it all so well in nine days.

Contrary to the aforementioned blogger’s belief that an excess of swimming events exists the facts show the number of Olympic medals offered by the two sports is roughly comparable. Track has eleven individual, one combined (pentathlon for the women and the decathlon for the men) and two relay events for each sex; whereas swimming has eleven individual, two combined (the 200 and 400 IM) and three relay events for each. Three of Phelps’ gold medals and world records were in the relays. Likewise relays figure prominently in the great track Olympians’ haul of gold medals. Both Jesse Owens and Carl Lewis, for example, won golds in the 4x100 relay while Paavo Nurmi won two of his five 1924 gold medals in the 3,000m and 8,000m cross country team events. In order for proper comparison of individual talents, however, we should put these aside. That leaves Phelps winning five compared to the three individual gold medals collected by each of our track legends.

In athletics the ultimate in success is considered to be the “double”, or Olympic gold medals in two individual track events. It’s considered almost impossible to compete for more given the strikingly different abilities required to run sprints, middle distance, and the distance events. With distances roughly doubling each time the range required to win three is simply too much. Then too, as the distances go up, the problem of exhaustion rears its head. Both Jesse Owens and Carl Lewis doubled in the 100 and 200 in their respective Olympics. In Beijing we were treated to a rare double double: Usain Bolt in the 100 and 200 and Ethiopia’s twenty three year old Tirunesh Debaba in the women’s 5,000 and 10,000. Owens and Lewis supplemented their doubles with a win in the long jump. Paavo Nurmi did it the hard way by performing a triple, possibly the only Olympic track triple in history, by winning the 1,500, 5,000 and 5,000 cross country (nowadays this is the 3,000 steeplechase). And don’t forget his team event golds were in distances of 3,000 and 8,000 meters! No wonder Nurmi is an Olympic icon.

For a runner to win five golds to match Phelps he or she would have to win, say, the 400, the 400 hurdles, the 800, and the 1,500. That’s four, which leaves the 200 or the 3,000 steeplechase as the obvious remaining options for the fifth. Only the great Michael Johnson has ever doubled the 200 and 400 (normally the two events mark the dividing line between sprints and middle distance respectively) and going in the opposite direction and adding the steeplechase makes a seemingly impossible situation worse. Winning five golds, even by adding the quick 200, still means racing at a world-class pace throughout nearly twenty three minutes of an incredible mish mash of prelims, semis, and finals. Anyone who competes in track will say that's surely impossible. To attempt five by adding the steeplechase would make the situation even worse. No wonder our blogger friend believed any sport which allows five individual gold medals must be inferior to his beloved athletics.

He fails, however, to comprehend the critical input technique contributes towards success in swimming; an attribute which is also crucial to success in gymnastics - the only other remaining Olympic sport blessed with an abundance of multiple gold medalists. A swimmer or gymnast who exhibits an advantage in technique over the world will be able to transfer this advantage to all events, even non-specialties. Runners must do it on physical ability alone. Gymnasts need to depend on strength, flexibility, and technique. Not swimming – swimmers can succeed going either way, but should an individual combine both raw physical strength and stamina with a more efficient technique than the rest then wonderful things will happen. No wonder swimming dominates the multiple gold medal winners in Olympic history. Phelps not only has incredible natural talent but has a clear advantage over the world with his turns. It’s this, combined with his phenomenal ability to recover, which brought him his scintillating achievement. Totaling up all his events Phelps raced nearly thirty three minutes to win his eight gold medals, an incredible display of endurance. Only Nurmi himself has matched that amazing combination of recovery and stamina.¹ Is Phelps the greatest Olympian ever? Personally I’m philosophically opposed to such measurements. I don’t think you can compare athletic performances from different sports and to date no one has been able to arrive at a defendable formula to do so. Besides I believe I’ve demonstrated swimming has a stronger tendency than any other sport to reward dominance with more individual chances at gold medals. But regardless Michael Phelps’ achievement at this year’s Beijing Olympic is epic in its nature. Something indeed for the history books.

¹Nurmi’s ability to recover was legendary too. In order to compete in the 5,000 meter final at the 1924 Paris Olympics he had to line up for the race only twenty six minutes after taking gold in the 1,500.

Update: I have subsequently read that there have been others who've achieved the 200-400 Olympic double. One of these is Frenchwoman Marie-Jose Perec who doubled in the same Atlanta Games as Johnson. I have to plead mea culpa for omitting her feat. I unfortunately share the strong tendency of males everywhere to be blithely unaware of female athletic competitions and their achievements. Even more regrettably I haven't yet been able to identify a possible third who accomplished this trick. Perhaps the deed occurred in the distant past. I'll make the correction when I finally do learn his or her name.

Confessions of a Doubting Thomas

2008-08-13T11:21:00.000-07:00

Right now at Beijing's Watercube history's being made. Michael Phelps has swum five of his eight events and won five gold medals setting five world records in the process. He has two more hurdles to overcome given a gold and new world record in the 4x100 medley relay is a virtual lock. The first will be the 200 IM in the form of Ryan Lochte and Laszlo Cseh, and the second in the 100 fly where he has to deal with Ian Crocker. Yes, it may be true Ian Thorpe didn’t believe Phelps had a chance at winning eight golds, but he had plenty of company. Count me among the doubters and I’m a huge fan of Phelps. It just didn’t seem feasible. Michael’s schedule has him swimming seventeen races and that, even with his amazing and well documented ability to recover, is a huge obstacle to overcome. Monday at practice we were divided into relay teams and assigned many of the individual events to allocate between ourselves – all in fact excepting the two distance and the 400 IM and 200 fly events. With a very broad range of swimming ability on our relay I ended up doing the 400 free, the 100 fly, and the 200 back. Five minutes after putting in a less than stellar 400 I was again swimming 100 fly. Not my best event for sure (OK, other than the aforementioned 400 IM and 200 fly it’s my worst) and still tired I ran out of gas midway, limping home more than twenty seconds over my best time. How Phelps can race Olympic finals less than an hour apart and set world records in both is completely beyond me. There’s also all the pressure to perform he has to deal with, pressures most people sitting on their couch aren’t able to comprehend. It has laid low some of the best swimmers in the world. People such as Lochte, Hoff, and Manaudou have all felt its bite these Games. Yet Phelps has cruised through so smoothly I wonder if the rumors he went through U.S. Olympic Trials only partially tapered are true. I’ve often said I’m in considerably more awe of the great track stars than swimming’s best but Michael Phelps is rapidly climbing my sports pantheon. And I hear the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has been receiving complaints they’re showing too much Michael Phelps on their Olympic programing. Are the viewers mad?

Field Trip

2008-08-10T20:00:00.000-07:00

This weekend the US Masters Swimming’s 2008 Long Course Championship takes place and I’m going to participate. If you ask me how I feel about it I’d have to say I’m ... ambivalent. Last year I was all signed up and ready to go to this very same meet at The Woodlands in Texas when work obligations intervened and I had to cancel at the last minute (not very well as the following Monday evening, when I was back home sitting at my desk, I received a phone call from my airport shuttle bus wondering where I was). The Woodlands was supposed to be the meet where I’d get out and talk to some of the best masters swimmers in the world on how they train and why, all the while gaining some experience for this year’s Championships. That didn’t happen. Now this year rolls around and I find my situation unchanged. Admittedly stagnation was all but decided when I chose the high mileage route and thus concentrated on stroke technique and aerobic conditioning rather than speed in my training to date. Still it’s a little disconcerting to start out slow and after a year and over 700,000 meters in the pool achieve only very modest improvements in times.

This year’s Championships are being held at the Mt. Hood Aquatic Center in Portland, Oregon (technically Gresham, Oregon but judging from the map I might be able to throw my kitbag into Portland from the pool). The pool is outdoor of course, with all the baggage which goes with that. Still, it does look like a marvelous facility and it should be an enjoyable weekend complete with a couple of socials. I entered into the same six events I did last year but only under duress. The schedule has me swimming the 200 back Friday and the 100 back and 50 free on Sunday; but unfortunately also had me trying to swim the 200 IM, the 100 free, and the 50 backstroke in back-to-back events on Saturday. I looked at substituting a 100 fly or 100 breaststroke for one of my non-backstroke events but neither helped much so I grudgingly plunked myself down wondering how I would plan my Saturday races. It turned out my idea to switch events was moot anyways after checking the necessary qualifying times and realizing I didn’t qualify in either one. Though I just miss breaststroke I’m way off the fly qualifying time of 1:12.86 – impressive there are so many 45-49 year olds who can swim a 100 lcm fly that well. But perhaps Americans are natural butterflyers. Ian at my club was marveling at the fact this year’s U.S. Olympic Trials needed fifteen heats for the men’s 200 fly despite a stupefying fast 2:03.99 qualifying time. Fifteen heats! At our own (Canadian) Olympic Trials we managed to fill four by having a qualifying time a smidge above 2:07 flat. Not that I’m knocking my country’s butterflyers, certainly not with my pathetic excuse of a stroke! Anyways it was with some relief I discovered this past week my sixth event, the 200 IM, had been scratched at the discretion of the meet organizers due to the large number of participants. Anytime you can tell teammates that you really wanted to race the 200 IM but those damned meet organizers wouldn’t allow it is a pretty good day in my books. I’d try for an even better impact with the 400 IM but it would be just my luck they'd have happily waved me in and I’d be stuck either actually attempting the event or scratching and knowing I was coward (sane, but a coward nonetheless).

All in all I’m looking forward to the experience before flying off for another week on the road. I’ve always liked Oregon yet have rarely spent more than a weekend in the state and never in Portland itself. On the other hand at The Woodlands, TX a half dozen of the top masters backstrokers in my age group showed up and this year only one appears on the meet’s psyche sheets. That’s regrettable because it would have been fun to watch a bunch of men my age all clustered close to a minute flat in the 100 back. I can only hope for a couple of good races and at least a little improvement.

No Sense Flogging a Dead Horse

2008-08-04T17:39:00.000-07:00

Time to make a tactical withdrawal. For the past month I’ve been struggling to finish off some of my unfinished doping articles before dropping the entire sordid venue and resuming my blog’s original purpose – to be an informal training log for my own, ineffectual swimming. Several times I sat down and spent an hour or so trying to make head way – all to no avail. It was like doing breathing drills for an entire practice. So I’m killing my final Dara Torres piece as well as the article on WADA. In order to salvage something from my efforts, however, I'm going to keep my ethics post around for the day when I can stomach polishing and refining the arguments presented by proponents for legalized doping.

My dedication to pursue the subject was also hobbled by some recent revelations. The Jessica Hardy incident, where a swimmer tested positive at her Olympic Trials for a banned substance, hit me hard. Not that she cheated – I mostly concur with the speculation she ingested the clenbuterol as the result of a tainted supplement – but the fact by miscalculating the timing of their doping test results her federation missed the deadline for naming replacements and deserving individuals were denied their chance to participate in this year's Olympics. Executive Director Chuck Wielgus should have done the proper thing and fallen on his sword. Resignation is the only appropriate response for such a massive failure of office. But, alas, accepting responsibility is not something we see anymore.

Then there is the horrible Nick Fahey, current President of WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency). Late last year former French sports minister Jean-Francois Lamour was slotted to replace what must be considered the disappointing oversight of Canadian Dick Pound. The well respected Lamour was reported to be planning implementation of a much more intensive out-of-competition program with less random, more targeted testing when he took over the reins; that is until the United States weighed in and had Fahey appointed instead. No doubt USADA wanted more control over the anti-drug agency after the numerous doping scandals it had recently undergone. Fahey, a former Australian politician, more than adequately demonstrated his incompetence for the post when in his first public statement as head of WADA he made the completely fraudulent claim the Agency was responsible for Marion Jones’ confession. Another unfathomable, counter-intuitive appointment by the Bush/Cheney Administration. This past month he once again put his foot in his mouth when he falsely announced Ricardo Ricco had been caught using a third generation EPO due to the addition of a molecular tag. His statement was later retracted by a WADA spokesman who was reduced to saying that “his words may have been misinterpreted”. No, he just didn’t know what he was talking about. Worse, in a telling recent interview, Fahey came out during this year's Tour de France and stated, “Unless cycling changed how it dealt with the problem, "they are in real trouble" and "they have recognized this … but we haven't reached the point where we can give them the stamp of approval” Apparently he feels aggressively going after the cheats and prosecuting them is the wrong way to go. Thankfully the French Cycling Federation (FFC) has decided to tackle the problem head on, warts and all, in a desperate effort to clean up their sport. I applaud their efforts and indeed this year’s Tour was the closest and most competitive in years. In a similar fashion the International Association of Athletics Federation has just recently taken the extraordinary action of ordering additional tests because of suspicious circumstances and caught virtually the entire Russian women’s middle distance team substituting urine samples. Yes, another painful black eye for the sport. But a necessary and unavoidable step I think towards deterring doping in sport. Nick Fahey, one of those despicable career politicians, would disagree. To him all these positive test results are a public relations disaster better to have been swept under the rug, never to see the light of day. The idea of actually going out and looking for cheats must strike him as organizational suicide.

So that’s it for my foray into performance enhancing doping. But wait ... one last parting shot. After posting several times about the impossibility of Dara Torres not being guilty of doping I have to admit I was depressed at how often the same, disproved arguments continued to be raised in her defense, along with the idea we must assume she isn’t doping without a positive test result in hand. Most of her supporters of course are ignorant about swimming and of elite athletes in general and could be easily discounted – but from the key group I most wanted to hear from, the elite swimmers and coaches themselves, only silence was heard. I could and did explain their reluctance to speak out in terms of their desire to protect the sport, the fear of losing sponsors, and of basic good sportsmanship; but my assertions that I was saying the very same things they were surely saying amongst themselves did place me in a rather uncomfortable position. Facts and logic only go so far.

It was with some relief I could finally see some cracks in that wall of silence when I wrote “Asking All the Wrong Questions”. As time goes on more carefully worded expressions of disavowal have appeared in the community. In a Southern Cal Aquatics Swim Club blog post Janet Evans is quoted saying, “Although I do not consider her the favorite to win this race, we can never count out Torres and her incredible will to win, especially because this race could represent the first and only individual gold medal of her Olympic career.” No one could find fault with that last statement could they? Certainly not.

On Gary Hall Jr.’s Race Club Message Board the man himself (who while very outspoken on the subject of doping in sports and swimming in particular was, until now, very careful never to come out and say anything directly about Dara Torres himself) quotes Mark Spitz as saying, “"I am a big advocate of the way the IOC does its drug testing," he said. "They have a list. If you take something on that list, you get caught. If you don't take anything on that list, you won't get caught. There's just no other way to look at it." So Torres? "She's obviously drug free of what they test for," Spitz said. Ouch! Read Hall's post further and you'll discover after retiring from swimming he's become a lot more forthright about his thoughts on Torres.

At least I go away from this smiling.

Gene Doping Has Arrived in China!

2008-07-22T08:22:00.000-07:00

In a breaking story by German television broadcaster ARD in conjunction with several journalists it has been revealed gene doping is now available for a fee in China. The documentary, aired Monday evening, outlines how despite China's official anti-doping position the problem of performance enhancing drugs is widespread and apparently tolerated at least at the local level in the country. It also detailed the state's continued recognition of national level coaches with histories of doping infractions, the lack of any testing in high risk sports, and the active participation of the country's medical community in the abuses. In one example cited by Swimnews Online, whose Craig Lord participated in the investigation, a young squad of swimmers from Hunan province have been making great advances by training up to 120 kilometers a week. That's twice the distance covered by most Olympians and some are reported to be as young as twelve. The story also notes we're only three weeks from opening the Beijing Olympics but China has not yet announced its national swim team.

Asking All the Wrong Questions

2008-07-20T22:42:00.000-07:00

John Naber ranks among history’s great backstrokers. With his background in media broadcasting no real surprise he was chosen to be the U.S. Olympic Trials master of ceremonies. It seems some of his banter, however, rubbed people the wrong way. Apparently a lot of them. Since I wasn’t there I can’t really comment on this, though my natural inclination is to give people the benefit of doubt and assume they’re not trying to be nasty. For example one quote which was repeatedly used by the blogging community was the question he asked Natalie Coughlin, “What does it feel like to lose to a forty one year old?” It took a little digging to find out her answer but it evidently was a terse “That’s not a nice question” and an end to the interview. If true that’s a very interesting response. Leaving out the obvious reference to Dara Torres the question was a pretty basic variation of the standard “What does it feel like to lose” probe every champion faces when finally beaten. For example Brendan Hansen had a full blown press conference to answer this very thing after failing to qualify in his favorite event the 200 breast. A consummate professional Hansen handled it all with aplomb. He admitted he had an inexplicably bad race and then gave out the equally standard reply – praising the winner (or in his unfortunate case, the winners) as tremendous athletes and champions in their own right and declaring there was no shame in losing to such great competitors.

Coughlin has certainly shown over the years she’s at least Hansen’s equal in public relations. And yes, even Coughlin loses on rare occasion. So why was she offended? She must have faced this question before. Please allow me to speculate. I think Naber created the 'nastiness' by throwing in “... by a forty one year old” and in doing so moved the question’s emphasis from Natalie losing to Dara Torres winning. In a single, unmistakable gesture, Naber clearly indicated where he thought was the real story of the race was – Torres absolutely phenomenal, unprecedented swim – and was prodding Natalie to talk about Dara. I believe he wanted her to say what a giant she was in the sport and how inspiring to everyone around her, including the great Natalie Coughlin herself. That is, Naber wanted her to give the standard response. It was the only answer she could give standing there in front of thousands, knowing they would be teammates in Beijing, and even sharing some sponsors with her. But it didn’t happen did it? Why not? Because I think Natalie Coughlin, faced with an instantaneous decision, couldn’t bring herself to say those words. And that’s where the “that’s not a nice question” came from. She seems to be sure Naber, another great individual gold medalist, would know she’d be reluctant to praise Torres. But Naber went ahead and asked anyways. She was right – it wasn’t nice. But it was ever so revealing.

Fair and Balanced

2008-07-13T13:54:00.000-07:00

In my post “It’s Getting Surreal Out There” I wrote about the recent improvement in swimming world records and speculated as to the reasons why the sudden lurch forward. The queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach it may be because illegal doping has become commonplace, however, was hard to ignore. To deny this I followed up with “Believe”, a post about why this worse possible scenario isn’t necessarily the right or even most logical conclusion and provided several perfectly valid reasons for the outstanding times we’ve seen recently. Yet I find myself drawn back in uneasy speculation about the marked improvements being shown by so many: improvements which in normal times would draw immediate suspicion or outright denouncement. So in this post I’m going to look at the dark side of swimming; of the apocalyptic possibility which in polite circles cannot be spoken of. If you tremble with anticipation for the Beijing Games to begin so you can watch some spectacular swimming and cheer on your favourite stars you’ll want to seriously consider not reading any further. For, as one popular movie’s protagonist was told, “this is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes”.

Where is swimming really trending with regards to performance enhancing drugs (PEDs)? Just how deep is the rabbit-hole? When I came out last year and publicly accused Dara Torres of using PEDs it wasn’t personal maliciousness on my part. It was my concern for the possible impact her story may well have on our sport. Every professional coach and elite swimmer in the world knows a forty year old woman cannot come back after several years of retirement, train for less than a year, and then dramatically improve enough on what was originally only a moderately successful career to become one of the leading sprinters in the world. Even her personal coach is on record¹ stating it’s not supposed to be possible. Dara Torres has quite literally thumbed her nose at WADA daring them to figure out how it’s being done. And no doubt the swimming world has watched in sick fascination to see if WADA would discover her secret. It was then and remains my belief Dara Torres standing up on the podium at Beijing would signal not only successful cheating is possible but unstoppable; and the money and fame following from her triumph would usher in a new age of unprecedented rampant cheating. Eventually such a debased culture must destroy swimming as a viable professional sport. Dara Torres, I personally believe, is our generation’s Typhoid Mary, a harbinger and bringer of disaster. It now seems possible, perhaps even likely, that after watching for over a year the rest of the swimming world has decided not to wait to see Torres to mount the Olympic podium. They’ve decided to follow her lead in time for this Olympics.

Let’s start with the question of whether or not PEDs work. Well do they? Oh, absolutely they do. In their post “Drugs Work – But by How Much? A Look at Doping and Performance Improvements” South Africans Jonathan Dugas and Ross Tucker analyze a paper authored by Franke and Berendonk which was published in the journal Clinical Chemistry in 1997. The paper compiles data from scientific studies produced from East Germany’s extensive state doping program. The paper’s abstract discloses:

Top-secret doctoral theses, scientific reports, progress reports of grants, proceedings from symposia of experts, and reports of physicians and scientists who served as unofficial collaborators for the Ministry for State Security (“Stasi”) reveal that from 1966 on, hundreds of physicians and scientists, including top-ranking professors, performed doping research and administered prescription drugs as well as unapproved experimental drug preparations. Several thousand athletes were treated with androgens every year, including minors of each sex. Special emphasis was placed on administering androgens to women and adolescent girls because this practice proved to be particularly effective for sports performance.

Of course, as this was in the very early stages of employing drugs for performance enhancement, the studies concentrate on the more obvious hormones, primarily testosterone. Ross and Jonathan expand on this to include analysis on the effectiveness of EPO vis-à-vis cycling. Their conclusion? It seems doping works “very well”, estimating benefits of at least 15% in the power sports and slightly less in endurance sports such as cycling. When we saw again and again finalists in the last Olympics all finishing within fractions of a second of each other the effectiveness of doping can not be debated.

What about health risks? It didn't take long to learn that though the hazards of steroid use and other performance enhancing drugs are well known and documented it’s also true they stem almost entirely from overdoses rather than any inherent pharmacological problem. It is safe to assume today’s elite athlete will be under strict medical supervision, if only to ensure his or her doping goes undetected, and consequently any potential for overdosing on these drugs is going to be either minimal or virtually non-existent. Of course injecting anything isn’t the preferred method of taking ‘health’ supplements but practically speaking the risk is minor compared to the serious and potentially crippling injuries from training and competition most athletes must contend with. Not that I’d recommend their use. If you want to vicariously experience what taking performance enhancing drugs actually entails you could do a lot worse than read Writer’s Workshop novelist Craig Davidson’s description of his short foray into this world here, all done in a misguided effort to give verisimilitude to his first novel.

What are the chances of being caught? Well the correct answer here is, of course, it depends. But for this article’s purposes we’re going to limit ourselves to looking at the sophisticated cheats, the ones who stand to make a great deal of money and therefore can afford to have the best medical advice and doping procedural experts close at hand to guide them through the potential traps and pitfalls of WADA and its national federations.

The first line of defense is to simply avoid being tested at the wrong time. Doping can be, and often is, done in cycles. Normally the athlete will go on his or her drug regime during heavy training, and then ‘coast’ for a period of time off. Not coincidentally this seems to invariably align with competitions. To forestall this WADA implements “out-of-competition” testing where athletes can be tested without notice at any time. Critiques of the current testing procedures, however, have pointed out the relatively small number of these unannounced tests when compared to the population under scrutiny. Then there's the problem posed by the three strikes rule for missed tests. Presently a doping athlete can avoid giving a positive test by providing just enough information to WADA about their whereabouts to be in compliance but not enough for them to actually be found should they, by bad luck, be one of the few selected for random testing (ex. ensuring their mobile phone message box is always full). Certainly this results in a missed test but with another two in hand the exception isn’t a big deal. The cyclist Michael Rasmussen, for example, just recently won damages for his ‘wrongful’ firing from the cycling team Rabobank during last year’s Tour de France, something Rabobank carried out despite his wearing the treasured maillot jaune at the time. He was fired because he was discovered to have lied about his whereabouts prior to the race. The implications were obvious to all and personally speaking I think Rabobank was correct to fire him. Yet according to the rules currently in play Rasmussen had merely made a mistake. There's little doubt this technicality was crucial to his successful lawsuit.

But why go through all this bother and subterfuge if the desired performance enhancing drugs can be made undetectable to any the known test. The BALCO scandal opened the world’s eyes to this possibility. With only the help of an organic chemist Victor Conte created tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) aka “The Clear”. “The Clear” would probably still be in circulation today if it wasn’t for a coaching rivalry and a sample sent to WADA. In another sobering Science of Sport article “Drugs in Sport – Could It Be Bigger Than We Thought?”, which is in turn heavily reliant on the investigative writings of ESPN’s Shaun Assael, the two trudge through the depressing success story of steroid manufacturing today. The hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, the dozens upon dozens of manufacturers, the huge profits, the surging demand, they’re all covered in excruciating detail – including the plentiful availability of undetectable drugs.

Having set up a supplement company, the journalist orders products that are sold to him on the premise that they work and are undetectable. Sure enough, he has them shipped to his address from a company based in the USA, and has them tested for the 11 known classes of steroids. The result - negative.

Experts believe there could be up to a hundred custom steroids, all requiring their own special test to be detectable, floating around for sale. If you think all these drugs are headed for high school students, bodybuilders, and recreational athletes (after all what wouldn’t you do to be able to hit the ball out of the park in the company’s recreational softball league?) then I suggest you consider why the demand for undetectable steroids has soared. The very existence of devices for cheating tests, such as the Butt Wedge (no longer marketed but apparently very popular during the 2004 Athens Games) and the surprisingly still available Whizzinator, will undoubtedly come to those who deny drugs are a serious problem as quite a shock. I was also interested to discover it’s possible to purchase synthetic urine, though I’m not sure why anyone with a modicum of intelligence would be comforted by the double-your-money back guarantee offer.

But whatever I've written here the decision to use or not use drugs ultimately comes down to each athlete’s sense of ethics and economic need. And that I feel will be determined in large part by whether athletes believe the competitors lining up beside them aren’t doping. Sadly when I look at what’s going on right now I’d have to believe the chances for a drug-free Olympics aren’t very good. Not good at all.

Post Script:

Recently we’ve been hearing about American athletes who have been volunteering to contribute samples at frequent intervals both in and out of training and during competition. They belong to a USADA pilot program modeled on the “Passport” programs first implemented in Europe. I’m not quite as confident in the project’s infallibility to catch cheats as the mass media presents it to be so I’ll reserve any judgment until I can gather enough information together to give a reasonably informed opinion (i.e. contact experts). I will say at this time, however, that WADA withholding the program's protocols from the scientific community suggests there are ways to beat the test. USADA’s problem is reverse engineering applies as much to science as it does to manufacturing, and with enough effort the applicable protocols can be established and appropriate counter-measures taken. Nor can flat out espionage be ruled out. Secrets are notorious for being short lived. Sometimes they have no life at all.

I also want to take the time to thank Jonathan Dugas and Ross Tucker for their excellent selection of articles on doping practices. Their blog The Science of Sport was a tremendous source of scientifically grounded information. If I find their doping articles individually crushing in import, taken together they are absolutely devastating for those who believe drugs have no place in sports. Another most informative overview of the testing process and what athletes do to beat them can be found on the Meso-Rx blog in an post entitled "The History of Drug Testing in Sports & How Athletes Beat the Drug Tests". Read all the links, you won't understand the depth of the problem until you do.

¹"Her comeback is just mind-boggling," said Michael Lohberg, Torres's coach in Coral Springs, Fla. "I don't think people can actually comprehend what's happening here. It hasn't happened before and it probably won't happen again. A 40-year-old who hasn't been swimming for years should never go this fast." – At 40, Torres is Back in the Fast Lane, Washington Post, Aug.2, 2007 (my italics)

A Reader Weighs In

2008-07-08T14:19:00.000-07:00

My major piece on Dara Torres is without question my three part post dated almost a year ago titled "I Came to Praise Dara Torres, But Intend to Leave Seeing Her Drowned", an article which continues to attract comments that, if an honest attempt to discuss the issues is raised, I dutifully try to answer.

Note to readers using this link the article is split into three parts and the other two can be accessed from the first by scrolling to the very bottom and double clicking on the blue highlighted "Newer Post" located after the comments.

The most recent visitor to the post has been Robert. His rejection of my entire premise covers ground already well traveled and, in an attempt to forestall repeating the same arguments over and over again, I thought I'd republish both his observations and my response for the more recent readers of this blog. Consider reading the comments section after the last part where I defend my blogging. Several readers clearly put considerable effort in arguing both for and against and overall I think they have reasonably delineated the strengths and weaknesses of flatly asserting Dara Torres is cheating with performance enhancing drugs.

Robert writes: Scott, because of recent high-profile doping cases, one can understand you having your stated point of view. We've been disappointed by athletes too numerous to name in just the last couple years. I have to admit myself that this remarkable comeback by Dara Torres evoked a skeptical reaction in my own head.

However, I don't want to address whether or not she's doping. She could be taking undetectable drugs, or have taken drugs while "retired". She could be completely clean. She's never tested positive in her life for anything.

I want to address, as some previous posters already have, your lack of knowledge about the sport of swimming. You know a little about swimming. Just enough to be dangerous. Dangerous enough that I wouldn't want you anywhere near a pool deck coaching children or masters swimmers.

You also make some bold statements about the body's [in]abilities that you provide no references for. You intermixed your personal beliefs in a manner that make them appear to be fact. However, when you see through the smoke and mirrors, your argument rests on baseless assumptions.

I personally know many masters swimmers who re-entered the water after considerable layoff and returned to their previous levels of competition, and even faster. And most of them do it on 3 workouts a week. Why should it be that Dara Torres could not re-enter the pool and return to her previous level (world class) and then surpass it? We're all human and we all have limitations. But masters swimmers have shown time and again that they can return to and surpass their personal previous level of competition.

I think that you have a good topic to work with, but I'd like to see you remove your personal agenda and anecdotal arguments from the piece. I want to see you back up your claims about physiology, and show modern research behind your swimming-specific statements.

P.S. I believe that definition of insanity is attributed to Benjamin Franklin?

I respond: Well of course I disagree with you, first and most of all with your statement about my “lack of knowledge about the sport of swimming”. Actually I have a long history of competing at a reasonably high level in several sports as an adult and consequently possess what I consider a reasonable grounding in physiology as it applies to performance, even if swimming wasn’t included in the mix. But when I wrote this article I consulted many scientific sources to establish the veracity of my statements, as well as discussed my opinions with friends who happen to be in the medical profession. It’s as objective as I can make it and now, after over a year of accumulating quite a file of books, articles, scientific papers on athletic performance, current practices in the training of elite swimmers, and the physical effects of aging and detraining, I’m gaining considerable confidence in the truth of my position. If anyone is flinging unsubstantiated personal beliefs around surely it is you.

To compound your problem you then raise a very common rebuttal to my position – that many, many masters swimmers have seen improvements in their times, so why can’t Torres? This is a completely fallacious argument and invariably comes from individuals who have never competed at a high level in anything, certainly far below the level Dara Torres has competed her entire life. She’s now more than 4% faster than the fastest she ever went during the span of her first three Olympics (not counting her recent improvement with the LZR Racer) and that percentage, in Olympian terms, is a massive improvement. Olympians improve by tenths and hundredths of a percent, not several. Read my rebuttal in the above comments. Just what is she doing now so differently that she didn’t do in ten years of performing and being coached at an elite level? You are also totally disregarding the negative effect of aging on athletic performance. I think that’s a pretty big deal. How can Torres beat the finest sprinters in America but then joke about how her failing eyesight makes reading her time off the board difficult? How can she swim as fast as she does, but then be forced to drop an individual event, a sprint event mind you, because of concerns over her ability to recover adequately enough to compete in her remaining individual and relay events? It’s illogical – on one hand she’s showing the performance and athleticism of a twenty year old, but on the other she’s exhibiting plenty of evidence of a deteriorating, middle-aged body. Bob, you’re looking at Dara Torres with Pollyanna eyes and you clearly had made up your mind before you even read my post. If you want to argue my position is premised upon baseless assumptions the very least you must do is identify those assumptions and state why they are so. If you do so I’ll be more than glad to defend my position and critique yours.

P.S. Though a great admirer of Benjamin Franklin the definition of insanity quote wasn’t his. According to a recent Wikiquotes, however, apparently it wasn’t Einstein’s either, these being the two most misattributed with the now famous line. It seems to be the creation of Rita Mae Brown, an American playwright.

Update: Robert has responded to my comment with a detailed critique and I thought it would be unfair to leave readers with the possible misunderstanding he meekly accepted my response without rebuff. Of course I answer back ... Part 3 with the bulk of reader comments (and where Robert has posted) can be accessed directly here

Dara Torres Sets Two New American Records & Another Personal Best

2008-07-07T06:59:00.000-07:00

Update:

With the U.S. Olympic Trials over I can report Dara Torres, competing now with the help of a LZR Racer, set two new American records this past weekend - both in the 50 free by dropping her time first to 24.38 and then lowering that to 24.25. To round everything off she set a new PB of 53.78 in the 100 free. That's an improvement of just a touch under seven percent (6.98%) over the best 50 free time she could manage at the 1992 Olympic Trials. Her 100 free time is unspeakably fast. Really, when I try to talk about it I start choking. In a post written several months ago I flippantly wrote that at her present rate of improvement she would be setting world records by the time she started collecting social security. I thought I was being sarcastic, certainly not prescient. Apparently I was wrong.

Trojan Says

2008-07-01T16:03:00.000-07:00

Gary Hall Jr. hit the news yesterday once again with a controversial statement that his guts told him the recent glut of world records this year is as much due to doping as it is to technological advances in suit design – and he feels the problem is world wide ... his beloved United States included. While he certainly won’t get an argument from me there are many prominent individuals more than willing to take up the banner of drug-free swimming. You can find them every where. A few days ago on Gary Hall Jr.’s very own Race Club message board the subject of thirty eight year old Briton Mark Foster setting a new personal best of 21.96 was raised. For those who aren’t immersed in the minutia of sprint swimming Mr. Foster formerly held the short course 50 free world record several years back. He’s also known for the longevity of his career. Refused a place on Britain’s Athens Olympic team he quit for a spell but returned to successfully qualify for Beijing. A blogger going by the moniker Trojan immediately claimed vindication for Dara Torres. His comment, “He just dropped his PR in the 50 by .16 (sic¹) – he has been at this since 1987. Where are all the Dara doubters now?” was met with the collective equivalent of a polite pat on the head along with reminders the questions about Torres’ performance weren’t just based upon her age. Undeterred Trojan hit back. “Sorry – but you guys are rather selective in your reasoning” he wrote, “his time is 0.66 (sic) off the WR – Dara is 0.59 off the WR. The 50 is the main question here – I don't think swimming a 54+ when you are able to go 24.5 is any "miracle". Since the thread was about Mark Foster and not about Dara Torres there were only a couple more desultory posts on the subject before the conversation switched back to Foster and his achievement.

But I’d like to respond to the challenge. By all means let us compare the two and their achievements. When Trojan asserts Torres’ times are equivalent to Foster’s I’d like to quote Mark Twain, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. Rather than relying on the two’s relative proximity to different world records (something not possible because they’re independent of each other) I submit to use instead the much more defensible analysis of relative improvement over time. For this I’ll rely on Olympic Trial performances for my source data: one because they provide both a regular flow of data over time and also because they provide reasonable guarantees they reflect peak efforts. Foster at thirty four, for example, swam a 22.49 50 free at the 2004 British Olympic Trials (good enough for the IOC but not good enough for Bill Sweetenham). Thus his recent 21.96 translates into a 2.36% improvement over that, or a 0.77% improvement over his previous personal best (PB) established seven years ago. To me this appears plausible after factoring in he was wearing the new LZR Racer. Regrettably Dara Torres’ situation is rather more complex so you’ll have to bear with me here. Today her career best is 24.53, achieved last year at the age of forty, and it’s important to note this was done without the aid of today’s advances in suit technology. Now let’s go back ... waaay back ... to Dara’s first retirement. It came right after the 1988 Olympics where in Trials qualifying she had swum 25.83. Her 25.61 PB at that time (which was for a short while the world record) had been achieved fully four years earlier. Thus now over forty she’s able to swim 5.03% faster than at twenty one, or 4.22% faster than what she could do as a seventeen year old with her best ever world ranking. After a short retirement she returned for the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Trials but once again finished without an Olympic berth in an individual event, swimming a 26.07 in prelims and a 26.15 in the finals. Three different times, three different Trials, but surely the trend which led to her second retirement is easy to see – she was getting slower. Now sixteen years later, thirteen of which were spent out of the pool in retirement, she’s swum an amazing 5.91% faster than her 1992 trial performance without any help from the new suits. Contrast this to Mark Foster’s bettering his 2004 performance by 2.36% with a LZR Racer. Trojan thinks their performances are comparable? I have to disagree.

Of course I have no actual evidence to support my contention Dara Torres is cheating as, because she’s never recorded a positive test result for performance enhancing drugs, it’s just pure supposition and a wheel barrowful of circumstantial evidence on my part. Neither does Gary Hall Jr. have anything to support his “gut feeling” doping is wide spread in swimming. The response to his statement has been swift and furious. Australian Libby Trickett, current world record holder in the women’s 50 sprint, thinks he needs “to keep his mouth shut, especially when he doesn’t have anything to back it up with”. American Amy Van Dyken, a former world record holder in the event and someone Hall specifically mentioned being on the same BALCO list as Marion Jones, sputtered in an email to the Associated Press “It is ridiculous that Gary would say something like that. It’s slanderous, outrageous, and unfounded!!!” Give me a break ladies. The history of the women's 50 free absolutely reeks of doping. In fact it’s a source of considerable personal amusement I actually believe it possible Dara Torres was likely the last clean world record holder in this event; at least until perhaps a couple of months ago when Veldhuis and Trickett stepped in with a big assist from the new suit technology. But listening to Trickett saying “If you are doing it here in Australia you are definitely going to get caught” and “FINA and WADA are doing a great job” knowledgable insiders of the sporting world must wonder, performance enhancing drugs or not, what recreational hallucinogen she’s indulging in.

¹ Actually Foster's new personal best was an improvement of 0.13 seconds and he’s 0.68 off the world record (WR). Not much of a difference but in the 50 sprint hundredths of a second take on enormous importance.

Wherefore Art Thou?

2008-06-29T12:44:00.000-07:00

Yes, I’m still around. Regrettably both circumstances and other factors have conspired to keep me from posting the past couple of months. April, May, and June are at the best of times exceedingly stressful for me as the busiest time of year workwise and this year was no different. The time required to research, outline, and grind through drafts of even one article a week is surprisingly time consuming and this year with its changes there's been little or no time to write. Most of all, because I’ve decided on a long term approach to swimming fast, I've radically increase my swimming kilometrage and therefore this busy season instead of cutting back to considerably less than 5,000 meters a week my meters only dropped to around 12,000. A significant change which entailed not only more time but left me with less energy to tackle my day-to-day commitments. The other major reason for not posting at least something is more complex. Originally this blog was to be a personal training log which merely tracked my progress in rehabilitation. As I grew to better understand swimming as a sport, however, I also wanted to join in the swimming community’s discussions. In short order I went public and started posting ‘articles’ exploring certain aspects of the sport in more detail. To my delight I’ve discovered swimming is an incredibly complex sport to master – there’s plenty of subjects to choose from (I have some thirty topics on my list right now waiting for enough time to address them). Some articles write themselves, others take considerable effort, and still more find themselves in limbo due to problems in construction, research into underlying facts, or simply falling into disfavor. Over time the numbers of these work-in-progress/on hold drafts started to accumulate (one nice thing about a personal blog is having neither deadlines nor an editor/instructor requiring any particular assignment to be handed in). If I ran into a problem I’d just walk away from it and go onto the next subject on my list which attracted my fancy. Still, it was bothersome to have considerable time and effort invested and no publishable results. Eventually the unpublished articles were reduced to just those less favored and unpleasant as compositional difficulties and deficient research can be, and were, dealt with. After a year and a half I have four partially completed posts in various stages of completion – all of considerable merit, a couple to my mind actually a source of considerable pride – but all generally depressing in nature. Frankly I avoided dealing with them by immersing myself in writing posts on current topical swimming issues. That is, until two events happened. The first was Eamon Sullivan’s mind-blowing 21.28 50 free. The second was the introduction of the Speedo LZR Racer. Addressing Sullivan’s massive improvement lead me to eventually look to what extent doping might have penetrated swimming and what I found was devastating to me ... absolutely crushing. And the more I look at the LZR Racer the more I’m convinced the suit is illegal even under FINA’s existing rules. The intended follow up post on FINA’s selling out of what was a relatively pure sport was equally demoralizing. By April I was stuck with choosing to finish off depressing posts with topics such as yet more evidence of the inevitability that Dara Torres dopes, humankind’s natural inclination to cheat, what is clearly a doping epidemic in sport, FINA’s hand over of swimming to corporate interests, the tacit acceptance of doping by the IOC and WADA, or how I can’t reasonably expect any significant progress in my times for at least a year or two. If you were handed a subject list like that to write about would you be posting regularly?

Now I’m going to start writing again in July but I intend on clearing off my slate before continuing anew. If I get them dealt with quickly hopefully you readers can use the Olympic experience to wash away the bad taste left in your mouths. But for me my romance with elite swimming was, like a summer affair, wonderfully intense but short-lived. My blog will be returning to its roots as my personal training blog with only the occasional foray into commentary. In a month’s time I think you’ll understand why.

Scott

Could the LZR Racer be Illegal?

2008-04-10T15:38:00.000-07:00

Forward:
I had promised my readers my next post wouldn’t be until the weekend because of work but this has to be addressed immediately. So despite everything else going on in my life I’m writing this as a rush. I must be crazy!!

I’ve been rather skeptical about the claims being bandied about the performance benefits from wearing the new LZR Racer. Still like everyone else I’ve closely followed any discussion on the hows and whys the suit works. As I’ve never even seen the suit, nor had a company representative explain to me the design concepts behind its success, I’ve been forced to accept the more than abundant evidence the suit just makes swimmers swim faster. Why it works apparently isn't really understood but the secret seemed to lie in the suit’s muscle compression. Trying to rationalize why this would improve performance I speculated it might affect the way the muscles metabolized oxygen and cellular waste. Later on reports started to trickle out saying the suit supported the core and consequently improved body position in the water. Figuring the typical Olympian would already have fairly well developed abdominals I was a little skeptical of this too. It was only when I read Craig Lord reprinting Swim Australia Ambassador Forbes Carlile’s open letter declaring the suit “prostituted” the sport did everything click into place.

It wasn’t the prostitution angle that grabbed me (though I agree 100% with Mr. Carlile on his assertions) but rather his almost casual reference to already banned swimming aids such as hand paddles, fins, and wet suits. It was when I read that sentence the other factors I had read concerning the suit came into place: datum such as Arena’s CEO pushing to have the suit banned as illegal; FINA’s almost slavish defense of its acceptance of the suit by saying it had passed the buoyancy test; and a swimmer saying the suit supported her legs as she raced. I realized with a start I had been misdirected by Speedo’s claims. Muscle compression is the key to the suit’s success but only incidentally, because the compression is not a design feature – it is merely a consequence of the design. The body fits into the suit rather than the suit fitting up against the body. It is a racing shell which is worn! Forget the fact the LZR Racer is made out of fabric. The suit is to all intents and purposes a racing shell – a boat, albeit a soft sided boat, but a boat nevertheless! And using a boat to reduce your drag is most definitely a swimming aid, and aids to swimming are specifically banned under FINA’s own rules. FINA was looking in the wrong place. The LZR Racer is illegal!

My Fault

2008-04-10T12:26:00.000-07:00

My dog woke me up at 3:30 this morning wanting to play catch and it was my fault entirely. I had gotten out of bed a few minutes earlier for a trip to the bathroom, something I almost never do, and he promptly went off to find one of his tennis balls to play with me. By the time he returned I was already in bed well on my way to sleep, a blissful state he corrected with a couple of taps on my head with a paw followed by dropping his ball to my cheek, which rolled off my face on to the bed and thence to the floor. This I studiously ignored. What? No response? Then repeat as necessary. I sat up before he could drop the ball on me for the fourth time and the next five minutes tossed him the ball in the dark (I throw within a meter of him in the sitting postion and he tries to catch it before it hits the floor). What with work the way it is I haven’t been spending the time I usually do playing with him so I guess I owed at least this. The same goes for this blog. I’m stalled in the midst of three significant articles which right now require more hours than I can rationally even remotely consider putting in. I have my “The Ethics of Cheating” article almost completed, but because I think this post has the potential to be one of my better pieces I don’t want to rush it out before it’s ready. My Dara Torres post is still only in outline form and requires far too much work to contemplate at this time (I now understand why nationally syndicated columnists only write one article a week). Besides which, recent events have seemingly overtaken her and piling on yet more evidence of cheating doesn’t seem to be a particularly rewarding endeavour anymore. If individuals still believe Torres is clean in the face of what must be considered rational logic then some more indirect evidence isn’t going to budge them a bit anyways. So no rush there. I do have my end of season report card post virtually finished except for my comparison photos; but with very little accomplished this past season except for my near miraculous physiological transformation the pictures will become the post’s centerpiece. Consequently until I get them done that post isn’t going to see the light of day either. This leaves me with my current project possessing the working title “Fair and Balanced”, which will become the third piece of a three part exploration inadvertently started with “It’s Getting Surreal Out There” and its companion post “Believe”. I’ve committed myself to getting this one out but it still has some hours to go. It will be, with sincere regret, by far my most controversial writing to date and is yet another reason why my Dara Torres post languishes unfinished. I’m aiming to complete it, however, before the weekend is over so for those few who do read this blog thank you for your patience and hang around a little longer.

Believe

2008-03-31T20:41:00.000-07:00

While the recent spate of world records and the impact of Speedo’s new LZR Racer swimsuit have seen a certain amount of controversy swirl about them the true nexus of the storm appears to be Eamon Sullivan’s stunning 21.28 50 free; a time nearly four tenths of a second faster than Alexander Popov’s long standing world record of 21.64. During the former record's seven year reign only two other swimmers even delved below 21.80. It was seemingly an epic, near unassailable time until Sullivan and then Bernard burst through within weeks of each other. Before Sullivan hadn’t even broken 22 flat.

Several on the internet have compared Sullivan’s achievement to Bannister’s first sub four minute mile, but frankly I believe it's a bad comparison. I don’t think breaking the four minute barrier was anything like comparable to what we witnessed in Sydney. Sullivan’s swim is equivalent to Bannister running a 3:57.3¹. Forget the hyperbole about the four minute mile being considered “not humanly possible” – the only question about the four minute mile which existed at the time was when it would be broken and by whom. World War II only partially delayed the pursuit as a pair of Swedes brought the record down from a pre-war 4:06.4 to a tantalizingly close 4:01.3 by war’s end; and after a momentary pause by the rest of the world to recover from its recent trials the hunt was taken up in earnest. Bannister was the first only because he moved up his race to preempt Australia’s Landy from taking the prize before him. There was never a real barrier.

Other bloggers have proposed the psychological boost coming from breaking Popov’s record (the “leading the way” theory of motivation) lent support to both Alain Bernard’s own wondrous improvement to wrest the record away from Sullivan, and to Sullivan's retaking and subsequent obliteration of it. That may be true but then they mistakenly refer to Bannister’s iconic race as likewise opening the competitive floodgates and enabling several to run sub four minute miles soon after. In fact only Bannister and Landy ran under four minutes in 1954, three more joined the club a little over a year later (all, coincidentally, running in the same race) and by the end of 1956’s racing season a total of nine men had broken through.² Not exactly a deluge. And it does nothing to support Sullivan's massive improvement.

Let’s not forget to address the LZR swimsuit controversy which has been very much in the spotlight the last month or so, seeing that seventeen out of the eighteen world records set during this brief period were by swimmers wearing the new suits. I wouldn’t be the first, however, to applaud the marketing savvy of Speedo in their choice to introduce the suits just before Olympic Trials when several world records are invariably broken anyways. And like many contrarians, I can and do question the level of the suit’s actual contribution. They may indeed improve times somewhat but I don’t see many willing to attribute all, or even most, of the recent gains in swimming to technological progress alone. It’s difficult to believe swimsuit design can make the qualitative jump which many are claiming, even if one accepts the premise that a swimsuit nowadays can create a significant reduction in drag or an improvement in metabolic functioning. Personally speaking I’m not one of them.

Yet despite all this I believe almost all these results will prove in the end not to be drug enabled – even Eamon Sullivan’s. Why? Well for several reasons. First I think the U.S. team’s performance at last years World Championships was a watershed moment for many around the world, which led the way for higher expectations from the elite swimmers in every country while providing the necessary clues as to how to go about achieving them. Another is 2008 being the quadrennial year, the year of the one competition which makes or breaks every swimmer’s career and consequently the ultimate test to train for – the Olympics. The 2007 FINA World Championships can almost be considered a preliminary event leading to the Games themselves. It’s equally obvious some of the new record holders had to have been anticipating rather significant improvements in their times: Libby Trickett (nee Linton) came into her country’s trials already knowing she could swim a 100 free under 0:53, she just had to do it in a sanctioned event; so her new world records of 0:52.88 and 0:23.97 for the 100 and 50 free respectively shouldn’t come as any surprise. Eamon Sullivan has been plagued by hip injuries for most of the latter part of his career and still remained one of the best sprinters on the planet – he’s been healthy for over a year now. Very few argue he doesn’t possess the talent to be holding a world record a la Michelle Smith. It’s only his overall qualitative improvement which has the knives out in certain quarters.

But where I take my greatest solace from is the great success Australia continues to enjoy in swimming. With only a little over twenty million Australia competes way out of its weight class in most international sports. Her story is an inspiring one to me though almost certainly not in the way most would envision. Because measured against the cold, hard reality of numbers Australia simply doesn’t have the population base to compete head-to-head with the rest of the world and come out anywhere close to the top. For example in the two most popular sports on earth, football and athletics, Australia is not a significant factor at all. The fact no one country dominates them either is not the point, it's that Australia does dominate swimming – slugging it out with superpower United States possessing a population fifteen times larger. And if twenty million people can achieve that it must mean the world combined can swim a lot faster. A whole lot faster. In an idealized world where everybody has access to a pool, proper nutrition and training there inevitably will come a day when Michael Phelps’ current and future records will be regarded in the same light we now consider Mark Spitz’s former ones – with a smile. A future where to be an Olympic finalist in the men’s 50 free will require bettering twenty seconds, and where women will be challenging Grant Hackett’s current world record in the 1500. It will happen. Put in that light Eamon Sullivan swimming a 21.28 becomes a little more palatable.

¹ Sullivan’s time was a 1.6636% improvement on the world record
² Google Answers: Number of Runners to Break the Four Minute Mile Soon After Roger Bannister (isn’t the internet amazing!)

It’s Getting Surreal Out There

2008-03-26T13:37:00.000-07:00

There are eighty six events in swimming recognized by FINA for world record status, split equally between the two sexes. Historically many have had records which lasted for years. They represent the ultimate achievement in the sport by our species, and they are very, very, very difficult to break. Or they should be. For some time swimming has come under considerable scrutiny with its history of drug abuse; the perception rightly or wrongly that swimming is more susceptible to the influences of performance enhancing drugs than most other sports. The fact all but a couple of the existing world records have been established after the turn of the millennium has raised many eyebrows around the world. Little wonder swimming is currently labeled a ‘high risk’ sport.

Recently an amazing and rather bewildering flurry of world records has been seen. In just five weeks fifteen world records have been set, and without any real participation from the United States, the dominant power. Let me hasten to say along with the multitude of others who’ve commented on this phenomenon that I’m not saying drugs are involved in these recent records – just that this recent flurry of world records is ... well, surreal. And these new world records are not just the incremental improvements we’ve normally come to expect. The old times are being obliterated. Former world record holders are waking up in the morning to learn not only they’re no longer the standard bearer but now they lag well behind the newly minted champion. That must come as an awful shock. And in keeping pace with these world records a flood of similar improvements is coming from a host of other, albeit 'lesser' competitors. A time which just a month ago would have led a swimmer to believe he or she was a legitimate medal contender is now looking more and more like something which perhaps won’t even qualify for the finals at Beijing.

Why? Most are pointing at Speedo’s new LZR Racer swimsuit as the reason. Fourteen of the fifteen records have been set by swimmers using this new suit. The new Aqua V-cap used by Natalie Coughlin and others may also be contributing to the dramatic drop in times. But there are doubts which will require time and better understanding to completely dismiss. For instance the new LZR Racer’s effects are being attributed to the increased compression and core stabilization offered by the suit rather than the materials, which essentially are the same used in Speedo’s older Fastskin models. Given the exaggerated claims made for years about one swimsuit or another’s effectiveness it is only natural to question whether the recent dramatic drops in times can be attributed entirely to just wearing a different swimsuit. After taking a look at the typical Olympian’s body is it logical to believe wrapping it in cloth differently can make such a profound difference?

Consider, for instance, the well publicized controversy coming from Eamon Sullivan’s and Alain Bernard’s world records in the free sprint events. In Sullivan’s case rather thinly veiled innuendo about the possibility his improvement could have been enabled by drugs has been hotly denied, even though there is little Sullivan can do to defend himself against speculation. Craig Lord at SwimNews.com has written an excellent piece upholding Gary Hall Jr.’s right to question the drop in Sullivan’s times you should read here. Lord argues that Eamon’s improvements are indeed unusual at the elite level and, when viewed in an historical context, such drops often have indicated doping. Then what about Alain Bernard bettering Eamon? What does one say about that? Bernard has cited his increased emphasis on power as making the difference and personally I think his stated approach is perfectly reasonable for a sprinter. So I can rationalize the why of his improvement even if the amount he’s improved is difficult to fathom. But right now on the various chat sites it’s being bandied about that Bernard has gained anywhere from six to twenty kilos of muscle in the past eighteen months in order to make those improvements. As Mr. Lord says we need to learn more.

I can also draw upon an uncomfortable analogy from my work with taxes, where loopholes are created when a provision is interpreted in a way not envisioned by the original drafters. On rare occasion this novel approach is perfectly legal, but more often than not the users simply hope to fly under the radar of the tax authorities. It’ll work for two or three years before whispers leak out into the professional tax community and by next tax season I’m looking at the new shelter’s basic structure to gauge how defensible it is in court and its applicability for my own clients. Very few past muster. Yet invariably, like clockwork, years later I’m fielding calls from my clients telling me about this same tax shelter being offered to them for a fee. Equally certain is that by this time the tax authorities are well aware of the scheme – the number submitted has exploded from a few dozens to tens of thousands, none of which are nearly as sophisticated or subtly presented as the ones the original innovators had designed. No surprise when they are uniformly rejected, often after being hit with penalties and interest, or already shut down by statutory change. So am I be surprised when I start to see world records fall like rain just before the Olympics? After observing over the past couple of years a forty year old woman become a world class sprinter on virtually no training? Unfortunately not. If she can obtain her results just imagine what the elite swimming community consisting of teens and twenties could do? But I’m practically sure this isn't the case. I really do believe these recent results aren’t drug related, that they are due to a new bathing suit and swim cap and, of course, to superior talent. Well, I certainly hope so. And hopefully when the suits become more common and more and more wear them we’ll see everybody’s times drop and my lurking suspicions will fade away. Really. But until then the Eamon Sullivans of the world will just have to grin and bear the innuendo until time validates their marvelous achievements. Or in this case times which apparently merely mark technology's inevitable progress.

Swimming On My Own

2008-03-23T11:14:00.000-07:00

Because Hyack Burnaby Masters only swim three times a week any Hyack who wants to compete needs to swim some practices on their own to properly reach race condition. In fact a couple in my lane swim extra practices even though they don’t compete. This Sunday morning I went to Canada Summer Games Pool, my local pool, for what is now a fairly typical workout.

6 x 200 warm up: (200 free/200 kick/200 back drills/200 kick/200 free breath 4/6 and another 200 kick). This is the warm up I do every time I’m on my own. The kicking covers back, breast, and fly which I randomly allocate between the three 200s, never more than a hundred at a time, and for the past month has been done without fins so they take some time (I used to use fins for 400 of the 600 meters but had to stop when I got my turf toe). The 200 breath drill is really a 2x100 as I always take a few seconds to rest at the midway point because my legs feel rubbery (by the end of the second 100 my arms don’t feel all that good either). The rest of my practices can vary but since I leave most of my anaerobic sets to Coach Reid and Hyack practices my emphasis tends towards aerobic conditioning and stroke technique. This morning my sets were:

4 x 300 back @ 5:15 concentrating on a long fluid pull with a good finish

4 x 50 fly @ 1:15 (w/fins) Another set intended to work on the length and power of my pull: I fished out my fins after a month of disuse to help, but about two meters into the first rep I discovered my turf toe was still around plus my foot immediately cramped as well. Consequently I changed it into a 8 x 25 @ 0:45

4 x 100 breast @ 2:15 only concerned with technique, with an emphasis on maintaining a proper kick (bringing the legs up, pointing feet outward, and a strong whip from the knees) but also trying at the same time to work on bettering my pull. Trying to work on two different aspects isn’t really advisable – my breathing, coordination between kick and pull, and body position were atrocious (even though there were a couple of times when everything came together by accident and I felt myself swooshing along like a water bug for a second or two)

8 x 25 fly @ 0:45 likewise adjusted for no fins. Was pleased with my pull this time around

400 free @ 6:30/7:00 Warm down. My workout allowed for me to include another 400 on 6:30 if I was up to it for my first 4,000 meter workout but I was sore after the fly and breast so I took the 7:00 interval and ended the workout at 3,600 meters. Time taken was just under an hour and a half.

My weekly meters over the past year and a half have gone up and down like a yo-yo. Starting from the 1,000 I was swimming every Sunday before I joined Hyacks I steadily forced my way up to 15,000 a week before overtraining left me beached for three weeks; thereafter I steadied my weekly meters at 10,000 until last year’s tax season, when they dropped on average to well below 5,000. After that I worked my way back up to 15,000 this past September and then in January this year made the big jump to over 20,000 meters a week, which I’ve maintained right up to this year’s busy season. For the next two or so months I plan to try swimming four times a week and keep my weekly meters as close to 15,000 meters as possible. If I can then I’ll be able to boost my meters right back up to 20,000 in June, and then hopefully proceed to 25,000 in September. Ultimately I want to reach or better 30,000 meters a week – but that might take a while.

Road Trip

2008-03-16T15:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I attended the Victoria Masters Annual Swim Meet, the only long course meet of our season (unlike in the U.S. Canadian Masters do not have a separate long course season). As I live on the mainland and Victoria’s located on Vancouver Island it means taking the ferry over early in the morning and then getting back late at night which is a hassle – but as I said, it’s the only long course meet we have. I arrived nearly an hour ahead of warm ups because of the ferry schedule but was rewarded by catching the tail end of Island Swimming’s morning workout, where several of the club’s swimmers were preparing for our Olympic Trials in April. While most headed straight into the showers Rick Say hung around and did some stretching for about twenty minutes. Of course at almost twenty nine Rick is the oldest member of our national team and swimming competitively at such an advanced age requires extra work which I well understand. Incidentally the workout was split into several different programs depending on the individual swimmer but most exceeded 7,000 meters, had a lot of speed work, and all relied exclusively on short rests between the reps. In my club our sets are almost always on intervals such as “on 45 seconds” rather than the “10 seconds rest” employed by Island Swimming; probably because our wildly disparate swimming skills require some consolidation at the end of every rep or else chaos would reign.

I was delighted to discover that Karlyn Pipes-Neilsen herself was entered to swim some races at the meet as she was in Victoria to give some clinics. I managed to track her down and asked her if she would be willing to give my blog an email interview about her masters career, her training methods, her swim clinics and, out of pure curiosity, how long she plans to compete seriously as a master. To this request she very graciously agreed so that's something to look forward to. She even spent the time to find me afterwards and hand me a copy of an article she’d written about shoulder rotation for Swimming World Magazine where she’s one of their featured writers. I’ll have to try to attend one of her clinics and see if this technique she's adopted for her own use could work for me. Karlyn also provided the meet’s high point when she broke her own 45-49 100 fly world record.

Emboldened with my first successful approach for an interview I next approached a notably fast swimmer in his twenties by the name of Benji Hutton and inquired whether he was any relation to local legend Ralph Hutton, hoping to garner some way to contact Mr. Hutton and ask if he too would be willing to do an interview. Alas my luck ran out at this point as Benji was not related. In my defense he politely told me I was definitely not the first person to ask him that question. Too bad, Ralph Hutton would have been another great interview.

But the most interesting story belongs to a local woman, Cindy Mabee, whom I previously mentioned back in November when she set some personal masters bests and a new national masters record for the 35-39 100 back. Karlyn Pipes-Neilsen was equally fascinated judging by the time she spent talking to Mabee. Cindy returned for a second shot at masters swimming early last year at thirty eight, after a youth which saw her reach the backstroke finals in several national championships but never the honor of representing Canada internationally. As a mother of five children as young as seven (three being her own) and a professional swimming coach with Island Swimming she has priorities which preclude heavy training. But with a frenetic schedule limiting her to not much more than an hour a week swimming she’s done very well. Extraordinarily well. This past January in Duncan, BC she swam a new world masters record for the 50 back short course in 29.91, a career best time by 0.15 seconds. Later at a non-masters sanctioned meet she swam a 100 back short course in 1:04.7, a time only a tenth of a second slower than her career best and one which would have placed her second only to Karlyn Pipes-Neilsen in the FINA world Masters Top 10 All Time rankings in that age group.

Yet even more amazing Cindy swims a very respectable 200 back as well. Much more than respectable – her recent 2:22.08 short course time from Duncan catapulted her into third place on the FINA All Time list for that event; and all on less than a couple of hours training a week. To my mind that’s absolutely mind-blowing. I asked to what she attributed her phenomenal success and she felt it was being tougher mentally than when she competed as a girl. Certainly many swimmers believe mental toughness is a major reason for their success, yet the rationale rested uncomfortably on me. Perhaps it was only a fragile ego which made it difficult for me to accept this as the entire answer. Perhaps because I felt her 200 backstroke success could not be explained by ‘mental toughness’ alone. As a result of my doubts I went back and asked her a second time why she thinks she’s able to swim so well on such little training. This time she guessed she might also be stronger due to her running and all the lifting and toting a mother does every day. Well cross training definitely does help (and here I am cursing my competitive running past for my anchor-like ankles) and certainly additional strength is a big asset to a swimmer: even if I have not personally observed efforts expended in managing a household to be an effective way to achieve a lean, athletic body. On the other hand other things she mentioned while talking to me, such as how effortless she was finding racing, offered up an alternative explanation. Perhaps her age has brought an increased familiarity with her body and gives her more efficient movement. That would at least present an appearance of increased strength and would go a long way to explaining how she can include a 200 in her repertoire on such little training. Whatever the explanation Cindy Mabee is certainly swimming some marvelous times. While they aren’t at a level which would allow her to seriously compete in open competition who knows what the future may bring? With a proper training schedule we might be seeing some great things from her in the next couple of years.

Starting Back

2008-03-11T05:52:00.000-07:00

Being able to swim butterfly well would be cool. Being able to do a good backstroke roll-over turn and follow up with a few underwater dolphins would also be pretty nifty. Performing either one well would impress any swimmers and lifeguards hanging around at the local pool. Unfortunately I’d also seriously impress myself too if I could do them. Leaving off the increasingly apparent pipe-dream of becoming an accomplished butterflyer I’m left trying to master the turn. Originally I allotted five weeks to accomplish this task, a length of time I felt would be more than adequate for achieving this goal. A year and a half later I’m at the point where I can get three, sometimes four, underwater dolphins coming off the wall – if I’m rested and don’t need to do them in a race. My problem is the turn compresses together into a few seconds several swimming fundamentals such as flexibility, kicking, aerobic conditioning, and streamlining, all of which I’m sadly deficient in and all of which require years of practice for proficiency. My struggles for mastery inevitably led to more swimming which in turn contributed to my uncovering the many and varied problems which permeate my backstroke as well. Don’t get me wrong, this is all great stuff: it’s just it's taking a lot longer than envisioned when I first returned to ‘competitive’ swimming. I was so preoccupied with the various nuances of swimming fast I didn’t really think about trying to master the one remaining facet of backstroke – the start.

One reason why I deliberately left the start to last was because I've always been aware of its heavy emphasis on technique. A backstroke roll-over turn is essentially rolling over into a freestyle flip turn with some kicking away from the wall on the back. It really doesn’t sound all that hard. But a backstroke start is a backwards dive into the water from the water’s surface. Any way you phrase it the start sounds more like a gymnastic diving routine rather than something from swimming. The swimmer launches from the wall propelled by the legs while swinging the arms wide, arching the back and dropping the head backwards in line with the arms. The hands enter the water first followed by the arms, head and then shoulders; all entering at the same point. At the same time the swimmer needs to kick up the legs to bring hips and legs in line with the body so that they too follow the rest of the body through the same hole in the water and complete the dive with the least possible amount of resistance. Once the dive’s momentum starts to slow the swimmer begins to dolphin kick to both maintain speed and return to the surface once, twice, three, four, five, six, seven, eight times or more and then, almost surfaced, commences the flutter kick and a final single arm pull to breach the surface already swimming backstroke in full flight. The video shows this better than I can write.

Now for me my troubles start with the initial thrust from my nearly fifty year old legs. Because I don’t yet possess the explosive leg propulsion and upper body curve needed to consistently clear me completely out of the water I have a tendency to ‘plow’ on the start. Image me in the traditional start position at the blocks and how I’d look if my backwards momentum was not planned but the result of taking a shotgun blast in the chest from short range. That’s what my starts look like much of the time right now. Even on those rare occasions when I do have an acceptable ‘launch’ the clean entry takes me more than a meter under water. For those who know what they’re doing and are planning to spend several seconds under water anyways this isn't a problem. But for me the difficulty lies with that several seconds thingy – because whatever I do upside down underwater it had better be done in no more than a three count. If I’m not at the surface after two I start to run out of enough air to clear my nostrils of inrushing water; and choking oneself at the start of a race is not a recommended race strategy. But like my turns my starts will improve. Slowly ... very slowly, but they’ll improve. It’ll just take some time and effort.

Scheduling Races

2008-03-06T19:48:00.000-08:00

One of the many things where swimming masters differs from competitive swimming is in the brevity of its competitions. Instead of a weekend sitting around in the morning waiting for your events and then having to deal with finals in the evening it’s just one quick afternoon and you’re home for supper. For the busy adult who wants to do a little racing the time commitment requires only some minor juggling of affairs to attend a meet. The draw back for this convenience is the reduced the number of races I can compete in. After a rocky start where I bit off more than I could chew in my first swim meet I’m up to racing a combined maximum of 450 meters a meet. If scheduling works out for me I try to enter two 100 races, a single 200 event, and a throw-away 50 sprint for the afternoon. I even have a list I select from: either free or back for the sprint; all four strokes in the 100; and back, free, and IM for the 200. Unfortunately even with a palette of nine events to choose from I rarely squeeze in the maximum four races.

Because of the difficulty getting race experience I looked at competing in this year’s Provincials despite it being smack in the middle of my busy season. Like most other state or provincial championships the competition is spread out over an entire weekend rather than an afternoon which allows enough rest for several races to be entered. However the event scheduling at this year’s Provincials is horrible for me. Great if you happen to be a breaststroker but not so good if you fancy yourself a backstroker and want to swim some free or fly too as I do. So I’m not going to our Provincials this year. In its place I’m considering entering the SPMA Short Course Meters Regional Championship this fall to get my last short course times before I move up in age group. Hopefully its event scheduling will be better.

Thinking about all of this brings me to understand the full import of what Michael Phelps will have to do if he is to win eight gold medals in Beijing this fall: eighteen or more races in eight days. It seems the betting has Phelps entering the 100 and 200 fly, the 200 and 400 IM, and the 200 free plus the three relays. At the Missouri Grand Prix three weeks ago he beat Ian Crocker in the 100 fly final with a 51.52, narrowly lost to Aaron Peirsol in the 100 back final ten minutes later touching in 53.70, and then only twenty minutes after that took sixth in the 100 breast final, won by Brendan Hansen, with a 1:02.57. That’s a lot of swimming in a short space of time. It’s curious as to why he’d swim three events so close together. Could it portend something at Beijing? Could Phelps be planning to enter the backstroke races and compete in ten events? It wouldn’t come as a complete shock – Michael Phelps’ noted knack for quickly recovering from hard races makes anything seem possible.

The Exception Proves the Rule

2008-02-25T05:52:00.000-08:00

It was Tony over at the Southern California Aquatics Swim Club blog who first brought my attention to Stefan Nystrand’s unorthodox straight-arm recovery. At the time I just watched the video Tony provided a couple more times to convince myself he really did have a straight-arm recovery and then left with the thought such an idiosyncratic stroke couldn’t be good for the shoulders. I however sat up and took better notice when Tony’s next blog on the subject pointed out Eamon Sullivan also used a straight-arm recovery in setting a new world record in the 50 free at last week’s NSW state championships – that’s two swimmers setting world sprint records recently using the straight-arm technique. A column written by Olympic gold medalist and physician Gary Hall Sr. goes a step further and speculates this technique may be a major contributing factor in their success by virtue of its ability to utilize centrifugal force to speed up the recovery stroke.

After some consideration, and using Dr. Hall's hypothesis as a starting point, I’d like propose an alternative explanation. While the recovery stroke certainly has an effect on pace I don’t think it has the same importance of, say, the recovery kick in running where it determines a runner’s maximum speed. I'd argue on a purely intuitive basis it is the speed of the pull rather than recovery which is the limiting factor in water. I concede a straight-arm recovery may be faster than the traditional bent-elbow but surely this couldn’t be more than three or four milliseconds per stroke. After all the straight-arm has to travel a circumferential route while the bent-arm cuts right across the surface. If I'm correct then using a straight-arm recovery could save at most a tenth of a second or so in a fifty race; a saving to be sure, but insufficient to warrant deliberate adoption. On the other hand I think the technique may provide significant advantage from the extended reach it guarantees a swimmer. In short sprints where turnover is paramount the tendency is to shorten the stroke. Alexander Popov, whose world 50 free record Eamon Sullivan broke, mitigated this as much as possible by putting in prodigious amounts of kilometers to ingrain the desired technique into his natural stroke. Sprinters nowadays don’t put in anywhere near the same meters. Logically their strokes are more susceptible to a shortened reach as a consequence and the straight-arm technique prevents this. A few extra centimeters on the all important pull, the ability to ignore technique while concentrating wholly on turnover, and a potential faster recovery all add up to a significant advantage. Perhaps up to half a second in a fifty. And that’s worth changing one’s stroke for.

The technique comes with a very large caution though. The bent-arm recovery is orthodox for very good reasons. It is the most efficient way to raise the arm out of the water and employs the shoulders as they are intended to be used. The straight-arm on the other hand mimics baseball's pitchers or cricket's fast bowlers who rely on the extended arm’s extra inertia for more speed but in return accepts terrific strain on the shoulder from the unnatural movement. Rotator cuff injuries are legion among these athletes – and they’re throwing through air. What would be the result of having the shoulder half submerged in water and repeating the motion not a few hundred times a week but tens of thousands? There may be a few athletes who have the flexibility to arrive at a straight-arm style naturally as Dr. Gary Hall Sr. points out, but for most of us this will be a direct route to blown shoulders. Even so the straight-arm technique certainly appears to confer an advantage in speed. It will be interesting to see how many will gamble their careers for a few tenths of a second this coming August in Beijing.

All In Good Time

2008-02-21T10:36:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in an earlier post how my Alexander Technique lessons seem to be at the root of recent advances in rehabilitating my decades old back injury. There's been real progress in hip flexibility and the way I hold myself. All the same the distances I'm now swimming has created a lot of shoulder strain because, despite Coach telling me to relax on recovery, the only way I can bring my arms forward is to ‘muscle’ them through the shoulders: a very tiring process. Plus I can still observe the severe compression evident in my left side even if my shoulders have pretty well leveled out. Impatient I want to see more improvement there as well. So when my Alexander teacher Gaby left my back for a few minutes and looked at my shoulders I was delighted.

We first tried to see how high I could lift my arms from the prone position without engaging my shoulders, but didn’t get much farther than a few centimeters before they started seizing up. Next we tried having me completely relax and rely on her to move my arms. No luck there either. Reminding me about the perils of ‘end-gaining’ she then took hold of an arm with one hand while resting her other on my shoulder blade and while moving the arm applied a certain directed pressure to my shoulder. I was almost immediately rewarded with a dull ache from deep within the shoulder. Wonderful stuff! After about thirty seconds of this she then went to the other shoulder and did the same to that side. Once finished Gaby said she'd not do that again; my shoulders were far too resistant to tackle in a direct manner and we’d have to ‘trick’ them into releasing by using more indirect approaches over time. I only partially accepted her verdict. Figuring I could duplicate the shoulder position I decided I’d work my shoulders on my own. So for the rest of that day and the following I would revisit my shoulders on a regular basis and work them for a couple minutes. By the second evening, however, my lower back started to hurt. The next morning I woke up to back pain which necessitated a prescription anti-inflammatory before leaving for my next Alexander lesson. Gaby shook her head at my story. “Never work at recreating the feeling”, she explained, “because what feels right or comfortable to you right now is almost certainly something which comes from habit, and for you habit is not good.” Serves me right for trying to hurry things up.

Speaking of putting in the required time and effort rather than take short cuts I decided early last month to abandon my aspirations towards setting any notable times this year and instead concentrate on building an appropriate aerobic base for two or three years in the future. A significant departure from the anaerobic training prevalent in masters swimming today. Admittedly there are good reasons why masters training concentrates on anaerobic sets rather than aerobic. For one thing speed is a real concern for most of us old codgers so we need to practice at being fast. For another thing we consider a 200 to be a distance event. With a population who race mostly fifties and hundreds many who coach masters rightly believe there’s no reason to concern themselves with endurance. But ultimately the reason why more time isn’t spent training aerobically is that we don’t train enough. Why even try if the average masters athlete can’t put in the hours of practice necessary to achieve proper aerobic conditioning anyways. Well, I’m going to be one of the few to bother and at least try. Certainly this is a real gamble on my part as I might not be competing next year much less in three or four. On the other hand I’m weary of trying to ‘taper’ every month for every local race while simultaneously trying to build up my conditioning. I’m also sick of being afraid at the start of any race over a hundred.

My inspiration towards a more aerobic oriented training program came from an article transcribing a talk Eddie Reese gave the ASCA World Coaches Conference in 1998. Titled, “What To Do and How To Do It” Coach Reese discusses how American swimming could be improved and what he proposed needed to be done. It focused exclusively on age group swimming and the need to allow the greatest number of America’s youth to reach their maximum potential while preventing some of our most talented youth from burning out. At least back in 1998 what Eddie Reese thought coaches needed to concentrate on when training age group swimmers were, in order of importance: aerobic conditioning, stroke work (particularly distance per stroke), and the dolphin kick. Sounds good to me, and since James ‘Doc’ Councilman was the ‘go to’ person when I last competed I’m not going to quibble about any minor changes which may have arisen over the past ten years. Besides which, just as Coach Reese likes to quote people who share the same views he does, I happen to prefer a training philosophy which ties in very nicely not only with the giants of my era (Doc and George Haines) but with many of today’s leading figures like Bill Sweetenham and Bob Bowman. And of course, let’s not forget Eddie Reese. Take a gander and find out how a world class coach views our sport by reading his presentation. It’s exactly as I thought it should be.

Let’s Talk About Trans Fats

2008-02-17T06:43:00.000-08:00

Concerns about trans fats, arising primarily from the use of partially hydrogenated oils, started arising as early as 1988. In 1992 the Center for Science in the Public Interest reversed its position (it was encouraging substituting trans fats to minimize saturated fat consumption) to one which cautioned their use; and by 1994 a flood of studies with adverse findings eventually led the American Journal of Public Health to estimate trans fats were causing 30,000 deaths annually in the U.S. (a more recent study by Harvard nutritionists has upped this to 100,000). A real public relations problem for the food industry – it turns out trans fats are exceptionally profitable and convenient for food manufacturers. They can be made from cheaper, near inedible plants such as cotton to basically duplicate the effects and mouthfeel of expensive butter or lard and possess other significant characteristics. For one, since the created fat molecules are only distantly related to anything organic they last a long time, far longer than anything occurring naturally. And longer shelf life means less spoilage. For many years partially hydrogenated oils exhibited much greater durability when used as shortening in deep frying because of less susceptibility to rancidity. Their use even has cultural benefits since they're based on vegetable oils, a fact which avoids any conflict with animal fat dietary restrictions observed by such major religions as the Jewish Kashrut (kosher), the Muslim Halal, vegetarianism in Buddhism, and Hindu’s Adhimsa. You can see the food manufacturers' dilemma. Here they have this wonder product which creates food which customers’ love to eat at considerable savings but it has this one teensy weensy little problem – it sorta poisons them. What should they do?

Well they did what industry does when market and profitability is threatened. They fought tooth and nail against any restrictions on their use. Even so by the turn of the twenty first century public awareness of the hazard posed by partially hydrogenated oils had grown to unmanageable proportions. In September 2002 McDonald’s announced it would eliminate trans fats from its menu but then almost immediately recanted citing the need to ensure continued quality in taste. It may have just been a cynical public relations play - and they were forced to pay seven million dollars to the American Heart Association in 2005 for misleading advertising. Since trans fats have nothing to do with taste the about face was probably more a result of learning how much money changing away from partially hydrogenated oil was going to cost. There are some fast food burger chains like California’s highly successful In-N-Out who have never used them. Yet despite the economic penalties more and more food companies started switching away from trans fats. Even worse, legislation to restrict trans fat in manufactured food was growing. In 2003 Denmark became the first country to legislate restrictions on trans fat use, prohibiting trans fat content in excess of 2%. Canada, after an aborted effort in 2004 because of an election, passed its own legislation in January 2005. In the United States New York City became the first jurisdiction in the country when on December 5, 2006 it banned trans fats in all city restaurants effective July 1, 2007. KFC announced in October 2006 it would be switching over to trans fat free oil in all its Canadian and American outlets by mid-2007, and so joined Wendy’s and its 6,300 stores who had announced earlier their switch would be complete by August 2006. In face of such pressure even the behemoth McDonald's had to capitulate. On January 30, 2007 it announced it had finally selected its new deep fry formula and would gradually introduce it across the country with full implementation expected before the end of 2007 (now pushed back to early 2008). Jeez guys, hope it doesn’t affect your bonuses too much.

But if you’re breathing a sigh of relief your favorite restaurant has stopped poisoning you you can stop. Recently there have been accusations Wendy’s trans fats levels aren’t what they’re claimed to be. And, of course, there are all those foods sold in the supermarket. Since January 1, 2006 the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has mandated packaged foods must include trans fat content on their Nutrition Fact labels. The FDA had proposed to put an asterisk in the % Daily Value column with a note that "intake of trans fats should be as low as possible” but under pressure compromised by leaving the space blank. It's true, take a look at a label the next time you’re shopping. Another major concession was allowing manufacturers to claim zero trans fat when the amount in a single serving is less than half a gram (in Canada the threshold is one fifth of a gram). It’s even worse when you consider it’s the manufacturer who determines how large a single serving should be. For example I picked up some crackers marked with a large green flash declaring “Zero Trans Fats” but on inspection discovered partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil was the third most used ingredient. I have to think Christie’s assertion a pitiful seven crackers constituted a single serving was a major reason the trans fat content was below the magic threshold. So beware and vigilant when you’re out shopping.

However results from new studies keep on rolling in and none of them are good. If becoming one of the 100,000 who are dropping dead from a trans fat caused heart attack every year isn’t enough of an incentive perhaps this six year study¹ from Wake Forest University will help. Two groups of monkeys were fed identical amounts of calories at what was calculated as a subsistence level.

She fed one group of monkeys a diet where 8% of their daily calories came from trans-fats and another 27% came from other fats. This is comparable to people who eat a lot of fried food, says Kavanagh. A different group of monkeys was fed the same diet, but the trans-fats were substituted for mono-unsaturated fats, found in olive oil, for example. After six years on the diet, the trans-fat-fed monkeys had gained 7.2% of their body weight, compared to just 1.8% in the unsaturated group. CT scans also revealed that the trans-fat monkeys carried 30% more abdominal fat, which is risk factor for diabetes and heart disease. “We were shocked. Despite all our enormous efforts to make sure they didn’t gain weight, they still did. And most of that weight ended up on their tummies,” says Kavanagh, who presented her findings at the American Diabetes Association meeting in Washington DC, on Monday. “This is walking them straight down the path to diabetes.” This is the first study to show such a dramatic result on abdominal fat, adds Dariush Mozaffarian at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, US. “The days of thinking about fats just as calories are over,” he says.²

If your health doesn’t do it for you perhaps your appearance will.

¹Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center (2006, June 19). Trans Fat Leads To Weight Gain Even On Same Total Calories, Animal Study Shows. ScienceDaily. Retrieved February 16, 2008, from www.sciencedaily.com

²Why Fast Foods are Bad, Even in Moderation, NewScientist.com, 12 June 2006

Two excellent sources of information about trans fats (and which provided the bulk of the facts used in this post) were Wikipedia’s article on trans fats and the website of BanTransFats.com.

Disagreeing with BBC News

2008-02-14T12:08:00.000-08:00

Every morning I get up, turn on BBC News, and put in a few minutes of much needed back stretches and abdominal crunches. A couple of days ago I was rewarded with a short blurb on Michael Phelps and the possibility of him beating Mark Spitz’s record in Beijing. That’s what she said. Obviously she was talking about Phelps bettering the seven gold medals Mark Spitz won in Munich and towards the end of the piece she finally came out and said this, but her opening remark was limited to the topic of Michael Phelps breaking Mark Spitz’s record. I immediately took issue with this. Not only is Phelps faster, much faster, in every one of Mark Spitz’s seven gold medal, world record setting events but his competition today would also leave Spitz behind in their wake. A couple of prominent swimmers have publicly questioned the possibility of Phelps achieving eight gold medals at Beijing and with very good reasons: Stefan Nystrand and Pieter Van den Hoogenband in the 100 free, Peter Vanderkay and Grant Hackett in the 200 free, Tae-Hwan Park, Larsen Jensen, and Grant Hackett again in the 400; Ryan Lochte in the 200 and 400 IM; Aaron Peirsol along with a host of swimmers in the 100 back, and Lochte and Peirsol together in the 200; and last but not least Ian Crocker in the 100 fly. In reserve there are several more men from all parts of the globe close enough to know that with a breakthrough swim they too could be standing atop the podium at Beijing. Beyond the fact both Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz are men, American, dominate the sport, and will be competing in several Olympic swimming events there’s nothing comparable between them at all.

I did appreciate, however, the clip they used to open the report. It was a half-torso shot showing Phelps slicing through the water on his stomach with his arms held in a streamlined position. He was kicking and clearly moving fast. I’m rapidly coming to the belief swimming’s biggest change over the past forty or so years is not so much in stroke or turn techniques as in the much heavier emphasis on kicking to provide more propulsive force. When I swam as a child the generally accepted rule-of-thumb had kicking limited to contributing up to a maximum of around 15% of a swimmer’s forward motion – and that was for the sprint events. Kicking's primary purpose was only to maintain a correct body position to minimize drag. Now we’re using better kicking for better speed. At least that’s what I believe, and to put theory into practice I’ve made kicking, especially dolphin kicking, a much higher priority in my training. I understand this will take time. Bob Bowman has talked about the fact he and Michael decided to work on his turns after reviewing his Athens performance and it took three years before those turns stunned the swimming world at last year’s FINA World Championships (OK, officially it was only the Australians’ who publicly announced the need to ‘catch up’ but I’m sure the rest of the world were thinking the very same thing). Jonathan Miller, a Canadian backstroker who reached national contender status and who has articles in both the USMS and the MSC websites, has said it took him six years to transition his kick from being one of the weakest areas of his stroke to his most competitive. I’ve only been working on my kick for three months so there’s still a long way to go but I’ve already seen measurable improvement. Not a whole lot certainly: during one recent kick set Ian caught up and passed me so quickly I checked to see if he was wearing fins. He wasn’t. Lots and lots of work to do.

A “Unique” Breaststroke

2008-02-11T23:20:00.000-08:00

At practice tonight we had as our main set a bunch of 100 IMs. Coach pointed out a couple of errors in my breaststroke pull during the set and then after I’d finished gave me a more detailed and broader critique. It appears between my new pull and admittedly still decidedly wonky kick Brad can tell me with a big smile that I’ve developed a rather unique style of breaststroke. It must be really bad. That’s what comes when you try to make several changes all at the same time without any significant feedback. To counter this I had hoped to have attended a couple of stroke clinics, see where I’m making my mistakes and how to make the necessary corrections. Unfortunately what with the shortfall in pool time and expanded membership our parent swim club is experiencing this year we masters have only had one stroke clinic this season – and I just had to be away on business for that one. Hopefully sometime in the near future we lowly seniors will be able to pry the underwater camera away from the other groups long enough for me and the rest of my teammates to get a look at what we’re doing.

You’ve Gotta Be Kidding Me!

2008-01-31T06:13:00.000-08:00

A while back 17thman’s thumbs started to stick out instead of keeping with the rest of his hands, and he wondered if drilling more with hand paddles would correct the problem. I took the opportunity to point out this typically was symptomatic of a bad back and suggested paddles probably wouldn't help. Sure enough he was having a difficult time breaking in a new chair at work and his back was hurting. Sometimes it’s impressive how much minutiae one learns from years of physiotherapy.

Course learning never stops. A month ago I told my Alexander teacher about a problem in my right big toe I was experiencing: a sharp, burning sensation much like sciatica but much more localized and particularly evident doing kicking drills with fins. She immediately questioned whether I had my toes right. “You’re sure it’s the right and not the left?” she asked as she bent down to check how I stand on my feet. Yea I was sure. “Did you know tight back muscles can cause your thumbs and big toes to stick out from their normal resting position?” she said conversationally while manipulating my right ankle. Well I knew about thumbs but I didn’t know about the big toes. “The thumbs are caused by upper back problems and the big toes from lower back and hip difficulties”, she explained, “ ...causing your big toe to rub up against the fin”. “You’re sure it’s not the left that’s the problem?” she persisted. Well readers, it doesn’t take a detective to know which side of my body she thought most of my problems stem from. But after a couple more minutes she left off inspecting my feet and ankle positioning and returned to our regular lesson. In Alexander Technique trying to correct specific problems is known as end-gaining, something particularly frowned upon because the process ends up only adding still more corrections to an already overburdened musculature instead of addressing the originating problems. And that, friends, is how our postures deteriorate in the first place. A week later I was giving the same explanation to one of my massage therapists. “But if it can bother you even when you’re not swimming with fins it has to be more than that”, he said out loud as he puzzled it out. “You must have pulled your ____ muscle, that one travels all the way from the big toe to your hip”, he concluded. Well that made sense to me, and even if it didn’t stop the pain it was good to know as I pounded up and down the pool with my fins hurting all the time. But yesterday I had a session with my second massage therapist (I use the two of them because of their contrasting styles) and of course told him about my troubled right big toe. “Aahh”, he immediately responded when I’d finished, “you have a metatarsalphalangeal joint sprain – you’ll have to stop using your fins for a month or two”. See, that’s why I have two massage therapists. What’s a metatarsalphalangeal joint sprain you ask? Turf toe. I’ve gotten turf toe from swimming! You’ve gotta be kidding me!

In Terms of Quality Swims Our Masters Women Leave the Men Far Behind

2008-01-26T19:07:00.000-08:00

This past Wednesday practice our main set was an 8 x 50 or 100 choice best average on 3:00; meaning we were to go as fast as we could while maintaining the same pace for all eight reps. Of course because we’re masters we don’t put in the necessary kilometrage to properly gauge such efforts: for fifties I aim for a 95% effort the first couple and then go as fast as I can for the rest; and with hundreds I try to stick to a 90% effort throughout. Unfortunately since I was the only one in my lane who wanted to go hundreds we went fifties, and not being a sprinter at the best of times I really struggled throughout with some depressingly slow times. Shocked I was not. Since the start of January I’ve moved to my next stage of training intended to better develop my aerobic conditioning by adding a kilometer to each of my workouts while continuing efforts to revamp my stroke techniques. I’ve also radically increased the number and distance of my kick sets, and have made enough progress out of the pool in my physiotherapy to necessitate wholesale changes in the way I use my body. I’m tired and sore. If Phelps, Coughlin, Lochte et al can be compared to mountaineers perched high on the mountainside then I find myself so deep down in a valley well I have to bend my neck back merely to sight the sky. While some day in the future I will see my times improve to respectability right now any progress I’m likely to see will be minor and hard fought for.

What is a good time, a quality time, for a master swimmer? What sort of times can we reasonably shoot for? We can’t compare ourselves to the elite, but assessing performance upon existing masters world records has enormous pitfalls. Many are notorious for being ‘soft’ – slow times known not to be representative of the relevant age group’s true capabilities; and this number increases dramatically as we travel up and down the age groups either towards old age or youth. But then again, are the supposedly ‘hard’ records really that good either? To decide what constitutes great in masters swimming I ended up using as my benchmark something I saw being cited as proof of Karlyn Pipes-Neilsen’s bona fides: that she’d raced fast enough in masters to qualify for the U.S. Olympic Trials. To me this appears like a good basis to judge performance. The qualification times are derived directly from the real world of elite swimming yet are still within reach of our very best masters swimmers.

Two further questions and some particular aspects of this analysis need to be answered and clarified before I present my findings. The first question is at what age exactly does an athlete become a master? FINA recognizes eligibility at the age of twenty five while most countries set as their minimum age at nineteen (clearly for participative inclusiveness only). Also the reality only times from sanctioned masters event are eligible for masters consideration needs to be included in the equation. Times from the open circuit, even in FINA sanctioned events, are not counted and consequently there are several well known international swimming stars who are excluded by this technicality. To minimize this effect I’ve arbitrarily determined ‘true’ masters competition only commences at thirty for women and thirty five for men. While I’ve tried to include all those eligible swimmers both past and present who were still swimming in open competitions I’m certainly going to miss some of them. I apologize in advance. Let me know of any possible candidates and I’ll check to see if they should be added to the list. The second question is what Olympic Trials should be used as the benchmark. Not what country, that’s by default the U.S. (hats off to USA Swimming and its historical data base), but what year. The last Trials where short course times were accepted for qualifying purposes and thus listed were the 2000 Trials; and since most masters events are short course I’m only using this year’s Trials as a comparative for those who qualified swimming long course. As my primary benchmark I’ve settled on using the 1992 Trials. Interestingly I didn’t find the time differences between 1992 and 2008 particularly significant, something I’ll have to study and write about later on. Accordingly my list shows qualifying times by event, age group, the qualifying swimmer, his or her country, whether the qualification was long or short course, open or masters sanctioned event, and (if long course) whether the time also qualifies for the 2008 U.S. Olympic Trials. The times are arranged fastest to slowest. So here you are – the world’s Greatest Masters Swimmers so far.

Three observations. One, the list is completely dominated by ex-Olympians. Two, you don’t see many qualifying here in the distance events do you? And three, just look at all the women!

Of course noting the domination of ex-Olympians in a list of the great masters swimmers is not particularly enlightening so I’ll not discuss that any further. The lack of anything over 200 meters is to be expected too. Aerobic metabolism, which starts to become a significant factor after some twenty seconds of effort, passes the initial boost received from ATP-PCr metabolism within a few more seconds and eventually overhauls glycolysis, which takes over from ATP-PCr as the body’s primary source of energy, at around the two minute mark. The ascendancy of aerobic metabolism, not coincidentally, marks the end of the sprint events. Aerobic capabilities decline with age – precipitously if the individual stops the activity for any length of time. Building it back up even partially takes years of effort typically not available to adults with other, more pressing concerns. So the domination of the sprint 50 free here is expected. I’m most impressed by the swimmers who qualified in the 200, the longest sprint distance. To be successful in the 200 after retiring from open competition means continuing to soldier on in the pool putting in lots of kilometers.

The real stunner is the ratio of great female master swimmers to the male equivalent, women qualifying 37 events to 6, an amazing 6:1. Even if you exclude Dara Torres who has qualified in an unbelievable eight events in three different age groups, the women still lap the men with ease. I speculate the difference comes from a vastly greater participation rate by elite women, which continuing with my conjecture, may rest upon how differently the two sexes view the notion of swimming as a team sport. In this hypothesis the two sexes approach the team concept in such different ways it affects the way they view swimming after retirement and, ultimately, the number who reenter the sport. I propose males only give lip service to the idea of belonging to a team, at least in so far as swimming is concerned, reserving this to games such as football, volleyball, and car racing amongst other endeavors. No man would seriously deny belonging to a team is essential for achieving elite status – but he'll rationalize in the end only he's going to be standing on the starting block. Being driven as much by the competition as by success they simply move on and don’t return once they become uncompetitive. On the other hand I suspect women truly buy into the concept of team swimming: finding deep satisfaction in the personal relationships developed in pursuit of shared dreams. So while like men the elite women don’t return to masters for the competition they can and do return for the sociability they associate with the sport. More elite women equals more quality performances - and the women win going away. Sound reasonable?

Update: Floswimming has an interesting video with Jimmy Tierney, coach of Northwestern's womens swimming, who contrasts the differences between coaching men and women and the often divergent methods used to motivate them.

Discovering Yet Another Technique I Need to Learn

2008-01-20T07:50:00.000-08:00

Not a swimming technique but rather a method of teaching proper posture and movement, the Alexander Technique has been around for over a hundred years. Named after the technique’s innovator F. Mathias Alexander, who developed it from purely empirical observations of his own body and his own problems, the technique is aimed at allowing an individual to recognize and change habits which interfere with well integrated skeletal and muscular functioning. It was Alexander’s belief the daily stress and repetition inherent in modern daily life causes the body to compensate in ways which create still further problems. Eventually the body begins to work against itself, pitting muscle group against muscle group, until free flowing and efficient movement becomes in varying degrees impaired or, under certain conditions, impossible. It’s a difficult concept to grasp but you can try this simple posture to gain a better understanding of the problem. First attempt to stand on one leg with both your arms held outstretched from your sides for fifteen seconds. Most readers of this blog should be able to do this – it’s a basic test for inadequate musculature given to senior citizens. It might take two or three tries but no real problem right? Now try to do the same posture but with eyes closed. I’m betting 99% of my readers won’t be able to stand more than a couple of seconds, much less the full fifteen. Welcome to the teeming masses. The reason why we fail is our dependency on visual inputs to provide the constant stream of corrections we need to remain standing. Without them our non symmetrical and conflicting muscles overwhelm our sense of balance and we fall out of the posture.

If you’re an athlete this clearly isn’t a good thing, but for many these problems can develop into actual physical deformity. Alas this has been the result for me. I exhibit an observable curve in my lower back, a significantly higher left shoulder than my right, a backward canted head, and hips which for all intents and purposes could be considered completely fused. For the morbidly inclined you can view my pictures from November here. When I started rehabilitation only the need to eliminate my back pain preceded the desire to correct my crookedness. Yet despite three years of extensive physiotherapy, chiropractics, yoga, stretching, some weight lifting, and two years swimming I’ve seen no apparent change in my posture. I’ve lost weight, gained muscle, and now enjoy better overall conditioning; but still no improvement in the way I hold my back. So late November I finally decided to go ahead and see if Alexander Technique could solve my problems.

Now Alexander Technique works by providing the body with new references for holding itself rather than continuing along the well trodden path established by the harmful habits and demands of everyday life: and it relies heavily upon a teacher’s efforts to guide the student through touch and words. Sometimes knowing I’m in the proper position is easy – because I feel a definite floating sensation as muscles which have been working for years finally get a few seconds of relaxation. Then there's the times she's effusive in her praise when I hadn't realized I'd even moved. And at still other moments the position I’ve been guided into requires considerable concentration and effort. The process is unlike any other physiotherapy I have known. Overall the training works on simple movement to begin with, such as sitting in a chair or walking up and down stairs, and progresses as the teacher determines he or she has seen enough progress to move on to other areas. I’ve spent much of the past two months limited to learning how to properly stand up and sit down but there have been lessons which were directly applicable to my swimming. In one lesson my teacher commented on the significant difference in the way I hold my shoulders and asked me to demonstrate how I use my arms and shoulders swimming freestyle. A couple of simulated strokes later she was apologizing for criticizing something she knew little about but then proceeded to explain why my stroke was all wrong from an Alexander viewpoint. Instead of initiating my stroke from the shoulder (i.e. starting my overhead recovery from my deltoids) and then by still more shoulder rotation propelling my arm reach forward she explained how my recovery stroke should only incidentally impact the shoulder. What she recommended to increase my stroke's efficiency was instead to allow my arms to follow my elbows up and then extend through the finger tips in an effortless manner rather than trying to muscle my arms from the shoulders. Does any of this sound familiar? We never did get to discuss the reasons for my shoulder differences but at that point I didn’t care, so pleased was I that the Alexander Technique could correctly point out defects in my stroke.

Even better, and to my agreeable surprise as I had little real expectations from these lessons, I believe I can see improvements in my back and shoulders after only a couple months. I’m looking forward to the end of season in March when I’ll retake my pictures and actually can compare the changes over the past few months. I’m also sure my hip flexibility has significantly increased for another encouraging development. As a counter point, however, all these structural changes going on have affected the way I use many of my muscles - necessitating not only the retraining of several key muscle groups but also demanding further stroke changes. I can take solace, however, that all this seems to be leading eventually to a new and better foundation for my swimming. Things are looking up.

Another Question for Dara

2008-01-11T16:37:00.000-08:00

I know at least some of you out there are reading my blog. In October I wrote “When Less Doesn’t Mean More” about how Dara Torres’ reported training regime didn’t jibe with any recognized training approach for sprinting; observing she was neither spending the hours in the pool typically associated with Olympian-level sprinters nor apparently relying on the innovative theories of Mike Bottom and his “Less is More” training style. Only three weeks later the New York Times came out with the story “Torres is Getting Older, But Swimming Faster”, which addressed almost every one of my questions. I’m sure it was just a coincidence and fortuitous timing on Torres’ part the article came out when it did.

While I’m firmly ensconced among those who believe Dara Torres is using some performance enhancing drug to achieve her spectacular results in the pool there remain many others, coming from the same population who buy lottery tickets and think Diebold voting machines produce reliable vote counts I’m sure, who believe without a failed test we necessarily must consider her ‘clean’. Despite the many instances of proven, long-time cheats who passed their drug tests for years this lack of definitive proof is admittedly a significant obstacle to overcome. One source for the circumstantial evidence I use to bolster my case is from comparing her recent performances to other recognizably more accomplished swimmers. So I’m always on the look out for details and facts about great swimmers both past and present to compare against Torres’ own career.

Yesterday I discovered a treasure trove of comparable facts in this month’s Outdoor Magazine. In his excellent article “The Big Chill” Christopher Solomon reveals several previously unknown facts about the incomparable Michael Phelps. All excellent fodder intended for later posts except for the one I’m going to discuss and compare to Torres here and now, which reveals he put on fourteen pounds (6⅓ kgs) of muscle in the three years prior to his phenomenal performance at last year’s World Championships in Melbourne. Now this isn’t a particularly noteworthy accomplishment for a twenty two year old male even if those pounds are being added to an already well developed Olympian frame. As one of Torres’ defenders stated in response to an observation I made about her muscle gains prior to the 2000 Sydney Games, “How often have I read this about a kid going to the NBA? Are they all taking steroids?” The answer is of course not. Young men engaged in strenuous activities or physical exercise can in most cases add the necessary sinew to handle pretty well anything. Yet it does take considerable effort and time to do so. Phelps' coach Bob Bowman had to institute a dry land program of one to two hours strength training three times a week on top of the 70,000 or so meters Phelps swims every week to give him his extra muscle. And he started the new regime right after the 2004 Athens Games when Michael was nineteen years old. Dara Torres, on the other hand, is noteworthy for taking only one year to add seventeen pounds of muscle as she prepared for her Sydney Olympics - and that was at the advanced age of 32. I think it needs to be noted she's a woman and not a man. After all she gave birth to her daughter only a little over a year and a half ago. I wonder how she managed it? The muscle gain I mean, not the child.

Now the ‘Torre-bles’ will invariably want to point out Dara’s muscle gain was then and this is now, and she’s currently racing ten pounds lighter than her Sydney Games days. Not a particularly convincing argument for me. Times change and as WADA identifies new ways of cheating and shuts some doors pharmacology continues to open new ones, always keeping a step or two ahead. Torres is certainly using something better and less detectable now than eight years ago because she’s swimming even faster at the age of forty. But perhaps Torres has some other explanation for her newfound speed and if so I’d be most interested in hearing it. Maybe past and present coaches Richard Quick and Michael Lohberg could even tape a couple of videos for Floswimming and share with everybody what they and Dara have learned about building power into her stroke over the past ten years. If not, and if she can’t arrange for the New York Times to get the details out, I suggest she use some other paper – Washington Post perhaps, or the Miami Herald, or even the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. I don’t really care. I’ll be watching all or them. Such is my fascination with Dara Torres.

Read my first article on Dara Torres (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)

Welcome Back Isis!

2008-01-11T10:28:00.000-08:00

Isis keeps a blog called “The Secrets of Isis” where masters swimming ranks high among her many varied interests. Now swimming is known for being a sport with minimal injury risk, but when we do have serious problems it generally involves the shoulder. Unfortunately 2007 saw Isis’s shoulder go under the knife twice trying to correct a chronic injury, initially restricting her to endless kicking sets but eventually forcing her out of the pool altogether. Now she’s back in and needs some cheering to complete her recovery! If you are curious about what rehabilitation from a shoulder injury entails for a swimmer this is a great blog to encourage you to correct those technique problems now or give your shoulder a rest; with neat surgical pictures and some graphic descriptions of the complications which arise from post-operative infection. A well written blog: one which you will find especially appealing if your interests also include literature and/or a fondness for knitting.

School Time Nightmares

2008-01-08T15:39:00.000-08:00

Monday night was the first practice after a two week Christmas break and finishing a few minutes of announcements Coach warned before the workout commenced that he hoped we had been doing ‘homework’ over the holidays and kept up with our swimming. That caused me to immediately flashback to my boarding school days – where not having one’s homework done brought disastrous consequences. Caning students was still in vogue back then. Actually, I realized with a sigh of relief, I had been doing my ‘homework’; at least I’d done a little over 20,000 meters in the two weeks we were away. Not enough of course but still a lot more than all but a handful of my teammates. And almost immediately after that thought I groaned because I had done some ‘homework’, 2,700 meters of it, the night before – including 6x100 back on 1:50, 600 meters kicking without flippers, and a combined 600 meters of fly and breast – and was still feeling it. At the time I figured our first night back would bring with it a fairly easy practice, and so wrote out what turned out to be a more difficult than usual practice set for Sunday (doesn’t it always seem easier to write a workout than actually swim it?). And here Brad was insinuating tonight’s workout would be tough. In the end it was hard but not crushingly so, though some in Lanes Five and Six would probably disagree on this particular day. Coach, clearly in a sadistic mood, released the workout in dribs and drabs to keep anxiety high:

12x50 free warm-up done in three sets of four (3 @ 0:50 + 1 @ 0:45)

4x100 free @ 1:50
4x100 kick (w/fins) @ 2:00
4x100 IM @ 2:00
1x100 free @ 2:00
3x100 IM @ 1:50

After finishing the last 400 meters both Doug and I figured at almost the very same instant we’d be seeing more declining IMs such as 1x100 free @ 2:00 and a 2x100 IM @ 1:40, and then 1x100 free @ 2:00 followed by a 1x100 IM @ 1:30; but Brad tripped us up and instead went:

4x100 free: first @ 1:50
second @ 1:35
third @ 1:30
fourth @ 1:25

Brad did give Lane Six the option of doing the set with the intervals ten seconds faster which we declined, but I did notice Doug pushing to finish the last hundred under 1:15. I was happy just to make the interval.

Choice of warm down (I did an easy 100 back)

Since we had a short hour to swim the 2,600 plus warm down the workout had a fair amount of meters in it. I know when we finished I was feeling pretty ‘wobbly’ in the legs. So it turned out I ended up rather roughed up despite the fact I had done my homework. Life really can be unfair.

Swimming is Harder Than It Looks

2008-01-04T07:26:00.000-08:00

When I first joined the Hyacks it was with the idea I’d give it a shot for three months and at least learn how to swim fly and perform a decent backstroke rollover turn. A year and four months later not only have I failed to master either fly or turn but I'm also entangled in correcting the many other flaws this old body depends on. Take simple, straightforward freestyle. I’ve succeeded in changing my stroke’s old style underwater s-curve to today’s more accepted straight arm but now struggle with a strong tendency for my left hand to enter well over my centre line, giving me a pronounced loping style of swimming. Almost certainly an idiosyncrasy developed to allow me to bring my face clear of the water to breathe. In a sport which revolves around a swimmer’s core and maintaining the body’s horizontal axis both are serious flaws. Correcting them will be a long and uncomfortable process. In backstroke I’m experiencing problems holding a correct body position and completing my stroke. After mentally reviewing past races I’ve traced part of my breathing difficulties in back to poor body position, with too deep hips resulting in an overly upright body position and consequently an increased susceptibility to inhaling water. I now realize this is why most of my water swallowing episodes come after emerging from a turn: I get hit by the backwash my poor turn technique creates at a particularly vulnerable point of time. As my dragging hips come from a combination of an ineffective kick, weak body rotation, and a badly fading finishing stroke - problems stemming from my flexibility and overall strength issues - any resolution is equally far away. This desperate need for more strength shows up in dramatic fashion in fly, where I still struggle to swim a complete hundred in good form. On the plus side my technique is showing slow but steady progress, enough to still nurse hopes I can put together a decent race before season’s end. That’s good, because the less said about my breaststroke the better. The technical and strength requirements of breast unfortunately highlight my personal deficiencies which will take years, if ever, to correct. So while every practice on my own I try to spend at least one set doing the stroke and related drills frankly I strongly doubt I’ll ever be any good at it. Then on top of all else my ongoing struggle with endurance and aerobic conditioning throws its shadow over everything I do in the pool. Progress in these two key facets of swimming has been both meager and fleeting – apparent improvement one day seems to dissipate like a mirage the following workout.

I expected to find obstacles between where I am now and peak performance. It is, however, a little frustrating. I understand you can’t just turn on a switch and become an elite swimmer. It takes years of effort for even the supremely talented, so I understood it would take considerable effort at my advanced age to develop enough conditioning and technique to start putting in decent races. Yet it’s only in the past few months that I’ve slowly awakened to the sobering fact the road is longer, and the work harder, than my initial calculations. Still, this is good. To paraphrase Prospero a prize too easily obtained is a prize too easily dismissed. The desire to swim faster also doesn’t consider the real reason I’m swimming is for my health and well being, the pursuit of which necessarily should be a lifelong endeavor. I might not be competing in a couple years time but I’ll probably still be swimming. It seems there’s really no rush at all ... there's plenty of time to perfect my strokes.

Looking Forward to a Better New Year

2008-01-01T10:52:00.000-08:00

After taking virtually all of December off I thought I’d put in at least an appearance to show I’m still around. This past month has been consumed by work, primarily two divorce cases I’ve taken on a contingency basis (which in these cases pretty well means pro bono) – one getting close to the end, and the other most unfortunately just beginning. Both are incredibly vicious, cut-throat battles where the men, both marked as multimillionaires, are arguing they’re effectively bankrupt and challenging their ex-spouses to prove otherwise: a difficult and costly challenge in their particular cases. The first is getting quite famous, at least in local legal circles. It’s been going on since 1999, when the Respondent claimed he couldn’t afford the less than $1,000/month in child support for his three young children anymore and simply stopped paying. Going into its ninth year (thankfully I only became involved in 2003) the case is still before the court, with combined legal expenses of both parties which (if I extrapolate the other side's litigation costs on the basis of our own billable hours and disbursements) must be getting close to a million dollars. The Defendant is on his third set of lawyers and the case itself is now being tried by our second judge. All over a few tens of thousand dollars in missed child support because of the Respondent’s claim of insolvency! Frankly everyone associated with this case is desperately searching for someway out of this mess. Such is the absurdity of our court system and human irrationality.

Enough of my whining. I have a lot of articles either in various stages of completion or planned for the coming year, and here I’m referring to my opinion pieces rather than the various and sundry posts I also write marking my efforts to establish myself as a ‘serious’ competitive swimmer. It’s a fairly easy process to dash off some commentary concerning a particular workout, or write about the myriads of problems presented by my poor swimming technique or about race results, but much more difficult and time consuming to write opinions on what are often controversial subjects. Regardless I believe these opinions are the heart of my blog, and have been rewarded in turn by learning a great deal in writing them. For example I’ve had an article on trans fats sitting around for some time, my problem getting it into print is a desire to change it’s emphasis from merely disclosing the undeniable hazards of trans fats into a critique of the food industry’s trans fats disclosure rules, something which is being manipulated and exploited to an outrageous degree. Of course I haven't forgotten about Dara Torres, having several works-in-progress concerned with or related to her. In a piece with the rather long title, “Viva La Différence: The Impact of Aging on Female Athletes (Or Why Medical Science Says Dara Torres Can’t Be for Real) I go about showing why the rule-of-thumb decline for female performance of 3% per decade applies even to Ms. Torres. In another post titled, “Dara Torres v. The IOC”, an article not particularly flattering to the IOC either, I discuss the devastation Dara Torres would bring to the Olympic movement and amateur sport in general should she actually individually medal at Beijing and consequently the IOC’s obvious but belated desperation to stop her and her ilk. In a similar bit of writing with the title, “Dara Torres: All Alone and Leading the Way” I draw comparisons between Torres and other ‘great’ athletes who were subsequently found to have cheated, placing particular emphasis on baseball icon Roger Clemens, whom Americans have often held up as an example of why Torres is for real. I find the irony I can now also use Mr. Clemens as one of my own examples to be absolutely delicious. I'd roll in it if I could. Other posts concerning her have titles such as “Money, Money, Money”, “The Ethics of Cheating”, and “A Woman’s Prerogative: Dara Torres and Her Ever Changing Training Regime”. Self explanatory no? But there are many more subjects I’d like to cover, especially since this is an Olympic year. With titles ranging from “Competitive Swimming: The Best Sport on Earth for Children”, through “A Case in Point: Britain’s Search for Olympic Swimming Success”, and “An Open Letter About the Unfairness in the Way Canada Goes About Selecting It’s Olympic Athletes”, to “In Praise of ‘Doc’ Councilman”, “The Great Arthur Lydiard”, and “The Psychology of Sprinters” I have a plethora of topics to choose from. Hopefully 2008 will allow me to tackle at least these and some of the many, many others I've jotted down over the past year. I hope you’ll stick around to read them. Happy New Year!

Good Pool, Lousy Swimmer

2007-12-02T10:37:00.000-08:00

The Nanaimo Ebbtides host an excellent swim meet even if their city is a little off the beaten path. It’s a fast, modern pool kept at the right temperature for competitive swimming, has plenty of warm up/cool down lanes, and other than a slight hiccup at the start of the meet with their timing system this year, is always very smoothly run. Of course to really enjoy a meet I have to swim well too. As Hamlet would say, “Ay, there’s the rub”. The less said about my 200 back the better. I started out at a good pace but had some problems with shortness of breath early on, choked on some water at about the sixty meter mark, and then struggled to recover any sort of breathing pattern thereafter – my race pretty well finished at that point. Going into the turn at the hundred mark I discovered I couldn’t (wouldn’t) duck my head under at the wall (remember my hesitation about not wanting to make proper flip turns at the UBC meet two weeks ago?) and consequently coasted in on my stomach and was disqualified. In my 100 free I went out much too slowly and then merely continued the same pace the last fifty rather than accelerating. I felt good with my stroke staying reasonably intact, to the point of thinking right afterwards I had had a decent race but my final result said otherwise: less than two seconds faster than the time I swam a year ago at this same meet; and that time was with only three months training. In my all important 100 back, where I was trying to qualify for my AAA time (even going so far as to scratch my fifty free to provide more rest) I once again went out much too slowly. I think I was still in shock over my 100 free and had already resigned myself to a substandard time. I touched outside even a personal ‘best’, finishing about two tenths off that mark, in a race where anything less than a two second improvement would have been disappointing. Oh well. It’s not as if improvements come in steady, predictable increments. The only real bother is the limited number of master races gives only a few opportunities to test oneself each year; and with this meet a washout it means I’ll have to reswim my backstroke events at Duncan to reestablish my confidence rather than try out a couple other, less swum events such as the 200 free. Much of my problem stems from my expectations for improvement, where I’m looking to tear chunks of time off rather than improve a mere second or two. To my disgust I still struggle in the 200 back with a time quality-wise the equivalent to my 100 free, causing me to consciously punish myself by immediately scheduling another 200 back for the very next meet (I suffer a lot in the 200 back). Ultimately I’ll start swimming the race properly but until it happens I’m building quite a phobia about it, especially the pain of the last fifty since my suffering starts to build as soon as I push off on the second hundred. And I’m completely frustrated with the lack of progress in my 100 free since I’ve definitely improved all aspects of the stroke and should be swimming much faster. My fly and breast, on the other hand, have been from day one works-in-progress so expectations here are low anyways; nor do I have any real hopes in the near future for a decent 200 individual medley because of those same two strokes. Ignoring the 50 sprints as novelties better suited to test all out speed rather than legitimate events in their own right leaves my 100 back standing alone as my sole competitive event at this time. And even this needs some improvement before I can call myself a real backstroker. Two more months until my next meet. I’ll find out then just what sort of talent I truly do possess.

2007 UBC Masters Swim Meet Observations

2007-11-24T21:30:00.000-08:00

While I could make a few quick observations about the goings on at the 2007 UBC Masters Swim Meet I’m instead going to comment at length on only two subjects: the first about one particular competitor at the meet, and the second ... well actually the second also ends up being about another swimmer I saw at the meet.

In my 50 meter back sprint I was seeded Lane Two with the heat’s only woman seeded next to me in Lane One. I had actually raced beside her in the 100 back at last year’s Provincials where she had had a disappointing swim. Well this time was different because when the water settled she had wupped me by a full second. As I toweled off afterwards I heard her telling a friend standing close by she’d just done a ‘best’ and resolved to watch her remaining backstroke events to see if her good 50 carried over. In the 100 she finished in a time I’d be pleased to take home myself as it would have given me my longed for AAA qualification. There were whispers about it being a record and when I checked our provincial masters website yesterday for this write up I discovered her time was in fact a new Canadian masters record. No wonder she looked pleased. I also discovered she already held an earlier provincial backstroke record in the 30-34 age group which no doubt explains why, while we’ve roughly comparable times in the fifty and one hundred (well not so much now in the 100) she’s at a different level in the 200 where I struggle with my endurance. I watched her 200 back from behind the blocks waiting to swim my 100 fly and once again she went several seconds under her listed psyche time, setting what turned out to be a provincial masters record. It was a great afternoon for Cindy. As an added plus I learned something about the near legendary Karlyn Pipes-Neilsen after she came up during my fact checking holding all the 35-39 women's backstroke records plus literally dozens of other world masters records spread over fifteen years of competition. If you think she’s fast now Pipes-Neilsen was seriously fast back then. Her world masters 200 backstroke record, an amazing 2:14.10 for 35-39 year olds, was achieved almost ten years ago and is less than eight seconds off Krisztina Egerszegi’s current world record. As I said, Pipes-Neilsen is seriously fast!

My second observation of the day comes from a game pretty well all men play when they’re out at a large public function – the “Spot the Prettiest Girl Here” contest. Saying all men maybe an exaggeration, but if not all men play it or its equivalent then at least it’s a very, very popular game among us guys. My first exposure to the game was as a young boy car pooling to a swim practice one morning when two older boys started a discussion about the prettiest girl in my school. I remember thinking both their choices were good when my father, who was driving, interjected to remind us as we matured and became more experienced we would discover a woman’s true beauty lies within. His comment was received with rolling eyes by all three of us because, while I pretty well ignored girls entirely at the age of eight or so, I certainly knew a good looking girl when I saw one. Of course time proved my father right; and now older, wiser, and infinitely more experienced I find it necessary to utilize multiple categories to fit in my ever expanding definition of even physical beauty when playing the game. The first both in age for the girl and in game experience for the boy (think novice level) is ‘Most Sexy’. For boys just gaining their first introduction to a world having sexes the category is all encompassing. If you’re a female and walk up right on two legs then you’re in the running, regardless if you’re thirteen or in your late forties, and sexy has the further advantage of being loosely defined by adolescent boys (which in my case at least was pretty well determined by availability). Yet Most Sexy is limited with its strong ties to youth and the biological imperative. Invariably as the male matures a second category is added which boils down to the category of ‘Most Beautiful’. The candidates are generally found somewhere between their middle twenties to late thirties, a time when Nature turns a woman’s attractiveness up in intensity to incandescent. You’ll find most of our entertainment industry’s stars here. Then comes my long time favorite – the ‘Mature Beauty’ – a carryover without doubt from ‘Most Beautiful’ but with more experience they also project a good deal of their character via their face and mannerisms: the laugh lines around the mouth and those wrinkles at the corners of the eyes reflecting an understanding of the world gained with some sacrifice: but more than compensated for overall by possessing a sureness of their place in the world exceeding that held by their younger selves. To me they are like a favorite sweater, comfortable and cozy, as opposed to the dressier business suit of more youthful beauty, something I wear to make a good impression and never quite at ease in. As I entered my thirties I added still more categories. One of the rarest is ‘Elegant Beauty’ – a face having certain features perhaps a touch too strong or too aquiline for universal acceptance as beautiful – but with a character that dazzles and dominates all around her. A woman who confirms the high status of her man by the very fact she has chosen him; as an equal rather than a possession to be flaunted she's the Bentley or Aston Martin of the feminine world. Definitely a world apart from the typical trophy wife, a girl who with dull regularity is recruited from the youngest, flashiest category and a choice comparable to aspiring to a Chevrolet Corvette: a neophyte’s idea of success. Rarer still, and the objective of this long winded lead in, is spotting an ‘Older Beauty’, a woman who is still considered beautiful even though she qualifies for senior citizen discounts. Good examples today would be Sophia Loren or Rachel Welch, exceptionally rare flowers indeed. Excluding these two famous examples and their kin I’ve only actually known or seen two other such women after forty years of watching. But this Sunday I spotted my third. Even more unusual it was not her face which first called my attention to her, it was her body. Her face while pleasant and attractive wasn’t noteworthy enough to be singled out from a crowd, but her body was phenomenal, a figure which would have been striking even if she was in her early twenties. Don’t get me wrong, in all my categories a good, trim body is an absolute must but hers was superb. Now when I meet up with a woman whom I find striking; be it for a beautiful smile, a wonderful outfit, or simply being particularly radiant on that day, I try to compliment her if I can do so without being obtrusive, and this was definitely one such occasion. But you can see my dilemma here. I certainly couldn’t go up to a strange woman and compliment her on a great body, especially with her in a bathing suit at the time. I decided instead to try to find out her identity and then locate her coach and give to him (or her) the compliment of looking wonderful to pass along in a less threatening way. Alas I didn’t discover her identity so her compliment has gone undelivered. Perhaps in some future meet I’ll see her again and be successful in passing along my approval of whatever she’s done over the past twenty or thirty years. I rather doubt she attends many meets though as I’d surely have noticed her before now. On the bright side, however, it’s nice to know as I get older there are still prizes out there worth shooting for.

2007 UBC Results

2007-11-20T09:51:00.000-08:00

Those who read my blog know there were some misgivings about what I’d be able to achieve this swim meet because of my inability to get up to speed the past few weeks. I cheated a bit last week and cut back on training to rest up but it seems I was right to be apprehensive. Not that I had a bad meet, I just didn’t have any good races. Take my first race of the afternoon – the 50 back sprint. This was almost a gimme for a personal best. Not only am I swimming backstroke faster than back in April but I haven’t put together a good sprint yet, so I had two ways of improving – pure speed and/or better technique. Unfortunately this weekend’s sprint was also the first one where I cared about the result, and that was enough for me to tense up and swim a really horrible race. By the last ten meters my breathing was so out of whack (along with pretty well everything else about my stroke) I gave up and just held my breath until the end for fear of breathing out of turn and choking on some water. As a small consolation, however, the time was only a couple of tenths off last season’s best so I know the speed will be there sometime, just I have to figure out a way to get it done in a race. My second time out was the dreaded 200 IM, dreaded because I’ve already bonked twice in this event, the only times it’s happened to me swimming. Starting out with a decent opening fly I held it together on back, struggled with my breast, and then brought it home, albeit very slowly, with a cautious free. I had real problems with my turns, likely because by the time my backstroke rolled around I had decided I really didn’t want to make any more turns (i.e. would rather make an open turn instead of putting my head under in a flip) and each time the momentary delay as I considered what to do meant I was flipping far too close to the wall. Worse, in my haste to surface to resume breathing that beautiful, oxygenated air, I was pushing off without regard to my body position. Combined with the pool’s slippery walls I was popping up everywhere except the middle of the lane, including one time I almost swerved underwater into a neighbouring lane. So bouncing from lane line to lane line I made my way through the medley, finally finishing with a time a few tenths slower than my personal best, tired but on a slightly upbeat note not totally exhausted. Really nothing to be pleased about except for a strong belief it surely will be impossible to swim as badly the next time. Finishing my individual medley meant I was left with two more events – the 100 breast and 100 fly, neither one close to my heart. On the contrary, if breastroke had a throat I’d gleefully knife it. Of course if my race events really did come to life then I’d have to flee for my life when 100 fly came looking for me! Bizarrely I was seeded lane five in the second to last heat; a great example of how few people can swim proper breastroke and I cannot express how strange it was to lead in a breastroke race knowing I wasn’t swimming well. Of course this is, after all, just masters where anything can happen. Once again my time was a little off my personal best, and breast finished I was left with 100 fly as my last event of the day. Now I have really poor fly technique that has always spelled my doom when trying to race. For me judgment comes like clockwork just a little after my first fifty, when the effort to get out of the water finally grinds me down to a spastic lurch followed only a few meters afterwards by my dolphin kick reverting to a child's single beat, and then my rear goes down and I’m trying to finish the final few meters from a seemingly vertical position. Brad says I’m working far too hard and getting too high out of the water. I can’t agree more about the working too hard part, but my clearly unnatural mania for breathing seems to be working against me in perfecting my fly. I suppose more practice is called for.

Update on the Dara Torres Post “When Less Doesn’t Mean More”

2007-11-19T19:42:00.000-08:00

On November 18, 2007, three weeks after my post titled “When Less Doesn’t Mean More” came out, the New York Times published an article “Torres Is Getting Older, but Swimming Faster” interviewing Dara Torres and her coach Michael Lohberg among others. The piece goes into some detail about her current training practices and there are some differences from what I had disclosed in my post. She's training only ninety minutes a practice, not the normal two hour workouts I had assumed based on her statements about averaging between five to six thousand meters a workout. In addition the article makes it clear in the opening paragraph Torres is training differently from the rest of the elite swimmers at Coral Springs Swim Club, one much more in keeping with the needs of a pure sprinter, and accordingly she’s putting in considerably less kilometrage than originally reported. It now appears Torres may be swimming a third or even less the kilometers an Olympian would typically swim, but at least she's training as a sprinter. The article also delves into the uniqueness of her accomplishments and the rumours and accusations of doping being leveled at her. Not surprisingly it does not concern itself about any changes to her training regime in the past few months. Consequently this new information may reflect recent changes to her program rather than provide a better description of her training from the beginning of her comeback in late 2005. Though the New York Times archives their articles after only a few days (available subsequently for a small fee) to read the article please go here.

The Race Program for UBC

2007-11-17T12:47:00.000-08:00

I’m down for four races at UBC: the 50 back, the 200 IM, the 100 breast and the 100 fly. Maybe some relays. None are particularly important as I’ve deferred those races which really do count (i.e. my back and free events) to the Nanaimo meet (another fast pool) in December. Every extra week counts right now. I've scheduled breast and fly only to provide benchmarks for evaluating future progress and, as I’m not ready to seriously swim the 200 IM at this stage in training, the sole focus for UBC is my 50 back. Now I’m not a sprinter and normally wouldn’t be overly concerned with this race either if it wasn’t for the importance of my upcoming 100 back in two short weeks. I’m seeking a ‘good’ time in the back sprint to buoy my confidence about achieving a more tangible result later on. All this angst because I’d like to attend an open seniors long course meet in February to prep for our season’s only long course masters swim meet in Victoria and need an AAA time to be eligible. My AAA qualifying was supposed to come from attending the 2007 USMS Long Course Championships but other obligations in August regrettably ruled that out. Frankly right now my only real chance at qualification is in 100 back, something I felt was well within my capabilities in August but recent training has allowed a certain uncertainty to creep in about achieving even this rather common target, a level all serious competitive swimmers pass early on in their careers. So I’ve hedged and tapered a little to try to get some oomph back in my swims, doing things this week such as reducing the amount of kicking in my workouts as well as cutting back on my kilometrage, all in an effort to give my muscles some extra recovery time. Whether this abbreviated taper works or is even the right thing to do for my overall program is questionable but it seems prudent form me to make the attempt. I’ll find out either way, won’t I?

Long Time Coming

2007-11-15T12:47:00.000-08:00

With the UBC meet closing in fast Wednesday’s workout became a test for how well I can expect to do this weekend. All in all it went OK – my times in a 6 x 50 test set were middling fair; Coach Brad mistakenly adding five seconds to my times because Ian had changed our normal ten second interval to seven so he could swim breast last and not get run over by Damon who had chosen free/fly to lead our lane. I didn’t bother to correct Brad’s mistake. I did confirm my top speed is definitely compromised however, as when I start increasing my stroke turnover my tired muscles tighten up: a reality which not only slows turnover but also impedes stroke efficiency. Nothing unexpected here of course as my training aims for March ‘08, not November ‘07, and made worse by the fact my overall progress hasn’t been what I envisioned over a year ago. Back then I figured it would take around six years to complete a transformation from Joe Average to swimming guru, calculating it would take six months to get into enough shape to begin proper low kilometer training and then another year before I could race off the admittedly minuscule training base so created. A year and a half before being race ready. Actual experience has shown I was considerably off the mark – it’s taken me a full year just to get fit enough to tackle low kilometer training, and at present only two months into the low kilometer phase I’m thinking trying to base a proper race program on several months of 20,000 meter weeks isn’t really feasible. I now believe a further step of a year’s worth of mid-kilometrage training (around 30,000 + a week) is needed to provide the necessary technique, strength and endurance necessary to race up to 200 meters. At least race at a consistency and quality which would allow proper evaluation of my performance. That’s three years of training; two if I want to cut corners and compromise, before I can reasonably extrapolate my race results ahead a further three or four years to find out what six years of hard work would likely achieve. Why six years? Well the average muscle cell lives for around seven years, so to completely rebuild a body would take something close to the same amount of time. Then studies have shown aerobic performance as measured by an individual’s VO² max can be improved upon with strenuous exercise for up to five years. That leads to a six year compromise. It may well be low. For instance Bill Sweetenham considers ten years of training as an appropriate base to race off – though admittedly we’re talking racing at the elite level where Sweetenham is concerned. I’ll have to be very, very good to race for six years. Forget about training for ten – that’s something for the young or the clinically obsessed to explore.

Preparing For the First Meet of the Season

2007-11-11T10:47:00.000-08:00

Next Sunday is our first swim meet of the season, held as always at the University of British Columbia’s Aquatic Centre. Although this year it may be sparsely attended as the Canadian Football League’s Western Final is playing at the same time and the BC Lions, our local team, are in it. The scheduling conflict between game and meet wasn’t known early on and there were quite a few changed plans when Joe announced in the locker room he had obtained tickets to the game and so wouldn’t be racing at UBC after all. Tough luck for the swim meet’s organizers because ordinarily this isn’t something you’d plan around: the present level of interest almost entirely due to the Lions’ participation. Originally my own plans placed little importance on this meet and Nanaimo’s as I will be training right through these months aiming for Victoria’s long course meet in March. Unfortunately missing the U.S. Long Course Championships in August has meant most of my times this year are pretty stale; it would be nice to record in 2007 something more reflective of my present abilities. Now I’d like to do well at UBC, and even more so at Nanaimo two weeks later when I swim my free and back events (trying to have my cake and eat it too I know).

This might be hard to do as I’m pretty well bogged down smack in the middle of training. It hasn’t helped Coach Brad has been handing out some crippling fast workouts recently. Take this past Friday’s practice. He started out with a warm up consisting of:
200 free @ 4:00
4 x 50 breast @ 1:00
12 x 25 fly @ 0:45 (4 single arm drill/8 swim which we swam @ 0:40)
4 x 50 breast @ 0:55

There are those damn breast ‘sprints’ in a warm up again! True, Brad has slowed the first four fifties down a full ten seconds from the disastrous night I experienced a month ago, but then he compromises on the second round and reduces the required splits by five seconds; and you should note they follow after 300 fly. I was so perturbed I actually openly questioned the warm up, noting the beginning pace for breast was the same as our opening free – an observation which Brad dismissed as something which would only trouble those who had difficulties with breaststroke. Fully recognizing my inadequacies as a swimmer I can honestly say his rationale is distressingly correct and unfortunately applicable to me. That's why I was complaining. Well I survived the warm up but success there only meant having to deal with our main set – an absolute killer:
300 back @ 5:30
2 x 50 free @ 0:35
200 back @ 4:00
4 x 50 free @ 0:40
100 back @ 2:30
6 x 50 free @ 0:40

This is not a backstroke set, it’s an anaerobic free set with some back thrown in as filler. But it’s still way too fast for most masters despite being short course meters. A 0:35 interval means swimming thirty flat unless you touch-n-go, a practice which pretty well defeats calling for fifties. Even a 0:40 interval means swimming 0:34 or 0:35, still too fast for me over an extended number at least – and the set calls for ten of them. Looks like Brad’s been dipping into the Hyack Senior Nationals and National 2:30’s workouts again (the National 2:30’s being Hyacks’ elite group) and didn’t adjust enough. Regardless of the extensive backstroke I didn’t want anything to do with this set so I said I’d start the 300 back after Damon but afterwards would drop behind everyone and boy, did I call it right. To make this truly the set from hell Damon then jumped the gun and started our 2 x 50 free a full minute early on 4:30. This is the second or third time he’s gone early; perhaps because only recently retired from competition he’s just not used to our middle of set rests and when doubts creep in about when to leave he naturally goes at an interval more in keeping with his old workouts. No big deal of course but unfortunately it’s hard on the rest of us old geezers. I do the old touch-n-go for the two fifties, and no sooner than I finish my hundred, take three breaths, and get my feet on the ledge that the clock shows I’m a second late leaving for the 200 and have to push off. I arrive back in time to hear Ian complaining we had left a minute early after the 300, add my bleating whine to his for a few seconds, and then save my breath for the 4 x 50 free coming up. Practically speaking for me it’s a 200 free on 2:40 and a 300 free on 4:00 because I’m not going to come close to those intervals. In fact, no one met them in Lane Six as everyone went touch-n-go by the end. Unlike the rest of my teammates, however, I had to skip a couple of fifties to finish the set, which is a miserable feeling. It’s far better to swim in a slower lane and do the set properly than punish yourself and fail by trying to swim in a lane beyond your capabilities. To close out the workout we had a 100 choice easy and then 6 x 50 kicks on 1:10. The way things were going for me it was inevitable I suppose – the leg cramps started on the first fifty kick and by the fourth fifty I had to get out of the pool to deal with them, generally disgusted with the world and everything in it. Trying to do workouts like this now at my current conditioning level is just too much. If they continue to be this tough I’ll have to seriously consider moving down a lane or two.

News Flash!

2007-11-08T17:23:00.000-08:00

FINA has announced on Monday they've dropped the investigation into Ian Thorpe's possible use of performance enhancing drugs due to lack of evidence. Swimming can give a big sigh of relief as a doping conviction of one of our greatest athletes would have been a disaster. Timed Finals has the story on FINA's press statement and the possibility Thorpe may sue L'Equipe for damages from their releasing the confidential information that he was under investigation. In completely unrelated news (other than the fact it was also reported by Timed Finals and involves another great swimmer) Michael Phelps has had a pin inserted into his wrist after breaking it when he slipped getting out of a car. Phelps freely admits to being a fish out of water and a little clumsy on land. Here's an idea - maybe Michael should just stay safe and not get out of the pool until Beijing rolls around?

The Long, Slow Road Ahead

2007-11-07T19:35:00.000-08:00

Even pulling back from scheduled training – dropping my weight program entirely and holding my meters to between fifteen and eighteen thousand a week, my sense of fatigue has only moderated rather than abated. I’m still always physically aware, especially when I move, but my muscle soreness has slowly changed into one of heaviness and lethargy. Rather like that comfortable feeling you discover waking up in the morning after a well deserved night’s sleep. But other than the need for longer and slower warm ups the overall quality of my swimming hasn’t deteriorated much. That is until a couple weeks ago when my top end speed seemed to disappear. I was trying to do 10 x 50 back on 0:50 at a pace matching my best 200 back and then follow it up with 3 x 200 easy backstrokes concentrating on technique and turns. Given my 200 back at the end of last season didn’t exactly set the world on fire I thought it was a reasonable speed + endurance set to build on. Yet I had to increase my interval up to a full minute after only the fourth rep, and switched over to the 200s a couple of fifties early as I was finding the effort far harder than anticipated. And from that date I’ve not been able to refind that zone where I can raise my stroke rate without putting in an inordinate amount of effort. It hasn’t helped I’ve had a low grade cold for the last three weeks, a sure sign of being over trained. In another classic sign Brad has had to correct flaws which should never need correction, and every time I was taking the ‘easy’ way in my stroke or kick. That gets embarrassing. My first swim meet of the season is in less than two weeks and I want to start off with some good times. I’m not admitting defeat in this, my third attempt to scale 30,000 meters a week, but I’m now setting up base camp at 18,000 before pushing on.

Let’s Get This Over With

2007-11-03T09:11:00.000-07:00

Right at the start of my adventure in rehabilitation and return to competitive swimming I took pictures and measurements to create a pictorial history of my progress back to being an athlete again. Initially this was done every month but, as my physical development lagged behind optimistic hopes and I started running out of different ways to say no change each month, the pictures eventually stopped. Well this November I’ve returned to documenting my rehabilitation’s progress despite the fact nothing significant has occurred since my last post on this subject.

Overall I feel stronger, fitter, and think my lower back and hip flexibility continue to show real improvement – just they don’t seem to translate into visible evidence. No matter. Accordingly my intentions are by the end of this season (March) to reduce my body fat percentage down to 12% from its present 17-19%. I’ve been loath up to this point to start a formal reduced calorie diet as for most of my life I’ve always struggled to put on weight. Years of effort had me close to 90 kg (198 lbs) for a time, but that was when I was younger and the extra kilos were all muscle. The image I present now at 84½ kilos is completely different and discouraging and it must change.

Practically speaking I’m now aiming for the body I had when I ran rather than the much heavier and more muscular body I possessed in my mid-thirties – a very bitter pill to accept. So my primary goal these next four months is to lose a further five or six kilos (between ten and fifteen pounds) of fat and finally come up with some pictures which will show some noticeable improvement. Hopefully I’ll add a little muscle which will complement the visual impact of a trimmer body, but the weight must come off regardless. I might even give myself take some lessons in Alexander Technique for a Christmas present and try to improve my absolutely atrocious posture. Where did that come from?

Trick!

2007-10-30T13:35:00.000-07:00

Our Halloween practice this upcoming Wednesday is normally a ‘fun’ practice so I wasn’t particularly surprised when Coach Brad scheduled our first fly main set of the season Monday night. After a five hundred warm up we went into a dolphin kick drill:
2 x 50 fly kick on back @ 1:10
2 x 50 fly kick on side @ 1:10
2 x 25 Pablo drill @ 0:45
4 x 25 heads up free with fly kick @ 0:45; all repeated twice.

Seeing where this was leading (Brad likes to hide the upcoming sets from us until the last moment) I used my fins the entire set. I can’t do Pablo but normally I make it a contest to see how quickly I can master new drills. The heads up free pull with fly kick was a new one to me and I thought I had it down in three 25s (decent) but then Brad told me I was forcing my stroke, so when we repeated the drill the second time I eased up a bit and finally got into the groove on the sixth 25 (not good) but at least I was both smooth and fast with minimal effort at the end.

The next set was our fly (surprise!):
4 x 50 fly @ 1:00
8 x 25 fly @ 0:30
100 fly (neg. split)
I kept my fins on which isn’t kosher I know, rationalizing I would concentrate on maintaining the little technique I possess throughout the set. Besides, with close to thirty individuals trying to swim fly in a small pool it got rough out there. A couple of times I caught myself laughing as I battled through waves which would make an open water swimmer comment. By the time my 100 rolled around I was pretty well shot and did it single arm drill. Warm down was a simple 8 x 100s @1:30, with the fourth and eighth 100s supposed to be choice on 2:00. Damon, who was leading my lane, went ahead and did fly for his choice but decided to leave on 1:30 anyways, which meant the rest of us were dragged along at the shorter interval. Coming in on my first backstroke I immediately started questioning my speed when I saw teammates launching themselves past me on the next rep before I even hit the wall. All said a tiring night’s practice and the normal regrets from not completing the fly set properly. Maybe I’ll be able to do a better job the next time fly rolls around.

When Less Doesn’t Mean More

2007-10-27T07:34:00.000-07:00

When I openly declared Dara Torres, the forty year old American swimming phenom, a cheat there was a strong and angry reaction. Much of it was directed at what was perceived to be my obvious ignorance of all things swimming. Apparently there are many who hold there is nothing more natural than an ex-Olympian who never medaled in an individual event until her second comeback at thirty three to return from retirement yet again, this time after recent motherhood and several more years away from the pool, to go even faster than before and rank as one of the world’s top female sprinters while nearly twice the age of the rest of the competition in less than two years. And yes I agree, that last statement’s a mouthful. One justification I gave for thinking she’s doping is the fact she trains less than thirty kilometers a week, half that usually seen by a swimmer at the Olympian level. This was jumped upon by several as proof I didn’t understand the training of a sprinter where the saying, “less is more” is often used to describe their regime. Well they have a point, not that I don’t understand the training of a sprinter, just that I should have made my reference to the time Torres spends in the pool instead of her kilometrage. Because the more time we spend in water the more we become used to moving about in it, and a better feel for the water translates into faster times. For most Olympians this means lots and lots of meters, thousands of kilometers of the stuff, where not only their strength, endurance and technical skills are honed to perfection, but stroke technique is imprinted to the point where little or no degradation occurs with fatigue. All this applies to sprinters too, though obviously with significant differences in emphasis: endurance needs are minimal and imprinting is not to counter the effects of fatigue but rather to mitigate the adverse affects of their high stroke rates. So their training rightfully incorporates a higher tempo to enable speeds which will bring their stroke rate closer to the actual turnover they’ll see in a race. Shorter distances, harder swims (which also better trains their fast twitch muscles) requires longer rest periods in between reps and consequently less overall kilometers swum, but certainly no less effort or time expended in training. And the expression ‘less is more’ is born. This knowledge isn’t some recent innovation; it was well appreciated by track sprinters back in the early part of the twentieth century. Since then we’ve continually refined and improved upon that knowledge and so can now better tailor a scientifically based program for swimming around a specific individual, but the basic understanding to race fast you must train fast is still unchanged. For example Bill Sweetenham, one of the most highly regarded swimming coaches in the world, incorporates this into his own programs by having his sprinters train up to a quarter less kilometrage than the rest of his charges. He's Australian, however, hailing from a country which has traditionally placed a huge premium on high kilometrage so he may well have a bias towards distance training. There are other internationally respected coaches who believe going even higher tempo with still less meters is the way to go. It will take some years to sort all the empirical data out to find out who’s closer to the mark and why. The really interesting thing about Dara Torres’ training is her approach doesn’t fit into either philosophy. It’s well documented she trains only five times a week, swimming between five and six thousand meters in the two hour long sessions which constitute her workouts. With less than half the number of practices normally seen by our elites everyone can see she’s got the less part down pat; I’m just having problems finding the more part. I say this because a workout between five to six thousand meters is standard training for non-sprint events, not the sort of minimal distance practice reflecting the speed the ‘less is more’ crowd considers appropriate. Once you rule out any possible advantage from her training, factor in her less than dominating performances at her first three Olympics, consider her age and the remarkable short time she's taken to make her comeback ... and I think there's only one rational explanation. Is there another?

Update: On November 18, 2007, three weeks after the above article was posted, the New York Times published an article interviewing Dara Torres and her coach Michael Lohberg among others which goes into some detail about her current training practices. There are some differences from what had been previously disclosed about her training as described above. She's training only ninety minutes a practice, not the normal two hour workouts I had assumed based on her statements about averaging between five to six thousand meters a workout. In addition the article makes it clear in the opening paragraph Torres is working a different program than the rest of the elite sprinters of the Coral Springs Swim Club, something much more in keeping with the needs of a pure sprinter and therefore considerably less kilometrage than would be the case for just shorter practices. So it appears Torres may be swimming only a third or less of the mileage of a typical Olympian, but at least she's training as a sprinter. The article, not surprisingly, does not go into detail about the changes her training regime has seen in the past few months. Consequently this new information may reflect a recently new program rather than provide a better description of her training from the beginning of 2006.

Paddling About

2007-10-24T06:54:00.001-07:00

I’ve my problems kicking. It was never one of my strengths even when I swam competitively as a child and subsequently my years of athletics developed the good, strong ankles of a runner: great for running cross country but a huge impediment for swimming as my feet stubbornly refuse to taper backwards and instead stick out like anchors. While there are specific exercises to increase ankle flexibility another more popular way is to use flippers. Fins, of course, also help move you through the water faster; an inestimable value to those of us who are already kick deficient in meeting those interval times. As a result their use can rapidly become habit forming, something I freely admit has happened to me. I’ve belatedly decided to follow Bill Sweetenham’s lead from his training guide “Championship Swim Training”, reading while he occasionally employs flippers in training normally he requires kick drills to be carried out without fins. So this last Saturday I steeled myself and went to my local pool with a workout of Coach Brad’s in hand but without fins in my bag to get me through. A rather courageous decision if I may say so as I’d modified the workout to add an extra three hundred kicking despite knowing it also contained a fly set, something which normally sends me reaching for my flippers without a second thought. My sole compromise – the workout was heavily into reps of 25s. If I had to bail I wanted to be sure the wall was somewhere close by. Imagine my chagrin when standing on the bulkhead I look out and, despite blinking several times, my eyes insisted on seeing a fifty meter pool where a twenty five meter pool was supposed to be. On this day of all days the second bulkhead was stuck in place with a broken motor – and there I stood without my fins! I managed to muddle through learning in the process my kicking has a long way to go: a long, long way. And wouldn’t you know it for Monday’s practice Brad decided to emphasize kicking without fins. His timing is eerie. Hopefully all this bother will result in some quick improvement.

What? There Are Some Out There Who Don’t Love Backstroke?

2007-10-21T10:11:00.000-07:00

Last Monday Hyacks Burnaby had our first backstroke themed workout and Coach Brad followed up with a backstroke based warm up Wednesday – their postings on the board drawing forth a chorus of moans and complaints from my teammates. A backstroker myself I was surprised by the number who said it was their worst stroke. Surprised because we’re all masters swimmers, not the most technical bunch around, and after freestyle our abilities generally take a precipitous dive somewhat akin to our endurance beyond a hundred meters. Still, when I'm on my back swimming yet another 200 I frequently console myself with the fact I could be trying to swim the distance breaststroke or butterfly instead. And those are the only alternatives once you rule out crawl. Perhaps the complaints come from the fact most masters will never see, or more precisely stated, never want to see a workout based on fly or breast. I could well imagine the facial expressions if Brad announced an eight hundred fly set. I can well imagine my own face if he did that! Fly is clearly more difficult to swim than backstroke: so much so most of us older folk have mentally blocked our doing anything significant in butterfly from our thoughts. That leaves the choice between back and breast, and breast is an absolute bitch to swim fast. I admit masters swimming and the concept of fast aren’t exactly synonymous but we masters take the concept of fast to new lows every time we swim breast. Amongst true competitive swimmers breaststroke surely must be the leading contender as least favorite: certainly the coaching community considers it the most technically demanding (knowing my own difficulties with fly I had problems accepting this until I wanted a 'respectable' 100 breaststroke time). Of course there are a few Masters to whom these limitations don't apply. In my lane Doug, Damon and Ian are flyers by choice but they are more than competent in the others. For just one example Ian's much declared hatred for backstroke belies the fact he would be comfortably ranked Top Ten nationally if he ever did swam a backstroke race; his distaste probably stems more from the fact his teenage son can now beat him in the stroke. In Masters merely stating butterfly is your favorite is to declare oneself one of the 'elite'; the stuff of dreams for nearly every serious swimmer older than twenty four. So with two competing strokes like that how can most not love easy and friendly backstroke? Not appreciate the gentle caress of waves flowing overhead, to watch the inverse catenary curve of water trailing from a recovering arm, and performing the simple elegance of a submerged dolphin kick. Makes me think it's time to head off and get some more backstroke practice in. Admittedly I hope I'll do better than last practice when I messed up a turn and took a shot of water up my sinuses. And there was that workout just before when I was inundated by three freakish waves in a row and left half drowned. You know, when I start thinking about it...

Would you seriously consider swimming this instead?

Establishing Priorities

2007-10-17T06:37:00.000-07:00

I had the above title, or at least something along those lines, in mind for the post announcing I had spent enough time trying to find what I could do in the pool and had decided to move on with my life. Some day that post will come but not right now, as I’m going to write instead about my beginning to understand my training priorities: the things I need to concentrate on to swim fast. I guess the most obvious will be to spend more time in the water. It seems the general consensus amongst our elite master swimmers that twenty thousand meters a week is necessary with more (much more) being better. The few programs I’m privy to are all closer to thirty thousand every week. As I’m right now treading water at something less than twenty klicks I’ve a ways to go but the plan is to work my way up to thirty over the next three to four months. This is going to be my third attempt at dealing with the physical exhaustion coming from training several times a week; but with each attempt I’ve gotten a little stronger and with a year’s training behind me I’m sure this time I’ll prevail. Time in the pool is essential for learning and perfecting the various stroke techniques, building aerobic and anaerobic conditioning, technically mastering the various starts and turns, gaining an understanding of pacing, race experience, as well as building specific muscle strength and acquiring a better feel for the water. Clearly it’s really important. After studying all the various drill progressions for each stroke, the training cycles, and test sets an Olympian needs to incorporate into training I can understand why they need to do upwards of sixty thousand a week to do it all. Looking at it from this perspective thirty thousand a week becomes the minimum commitment required to discover my personal limits. Anything less would leave open the question, “could I have swum faster if I’d trained harder?” Another important aspect of my training will be rebuilding my strength back up from injury and a general lack of serious exercise in recent years. Unfortunately I’m going to have to rely primarily on all those meters plowing up and down the pool lane to rebuild myself back to something close to where I was in my mid-thirties. A weight program was intended to supplement this and so accelerate the process, and to that end I completed the first out of this year's planned three cycles by September’s end; but I’ve come to realize I’m not physically capable of sustaining both a serious weight program and a significant increase in meters at the same time. Just too much likely, but the limitations posed by my age need to be seriously considered. Consequently, to avoid overtraining and the downtime which happened last season, I’m deferring all weight training other than simple maintenance to another year. And lastly I need to continue my progress in overall flexibility. The more I study the technical side of swimming the more evident the need to acquire a better feel for the water becomes and flexibility is crucial to that end. While I pat myself on the back for a body which is naturally stronger and better in the water than most I’ve no qualms whatsoever in saying my flexibility has always been inferior than average and has only grown worse as I’ve gotten older. Yoga classes and some daily stretching exercises are my intended route to remedy this deficiency, and since I’ve only scheduled two classes a week they have become my ‘must do’ workouts. It’ll be interesting to see how my new training schedule translates into actual times in a couple of months, at which time I’ll undoubtedly have learned a little more about swimming, technique and my body which will require further changes to my program. Self-improvement should be a never ending search and without a doubt this will be the case for me and swimming.

A Bad Night In the Pool

2007-10-12T08:33:00.000-07:00

When Coach Brad wrote Wednesday’s warm up on the board I inwardly cringed. Not that it was a bad warm up – just it was a warm up for someone who could swim better than I can. It comprised 10 x 50s on 0:50 swum in pairs of free, breast, free, 25 fly/25 back, and free. OK, the free wasn’t a problem, and the fly/back while a trifle fast for so early on was acceptable; but that breast. I have my problems with breaststroke. To give myself a minimal five second rest on 0:50 means a 0:45 fifty and that’s not far off my 100 meter personal ‘best’ pace. I suppose at another time I could have dealt with it but right now in my training my muscles ache all the time and I start every practice already tired – and that’s in spite of the fact I didn’t do any weight lifting this past week as it was a recovery week. Somehow my muscles don’t seem to realize they were supposed to have recovered by now. I’m sure we weren’t swimming this fast last year, but then we have some new, faster swimmers with us now in Doug, Dan and Damon; more than enough to encourage Coach to drop our intervals just a little closer to the ones real swimmers use. Anyways in I go trailing Damon, Ian, and Doug (who with his asthma didn’t appear too thrilled with this opening set either). The first two frees go alright despite my thinking along the way my idea of a warm up isn’t cranking out mid-thirty fifties, and then comes the breaststroke fifties. First one I accomplished at the intended pace; the second I swam a couple of seconds slower by concentrating on my glide but still needing to work perilously close to all out to do it. I hit the wall with three seconds to spare, figure #!%* it, might as well use the time to swim my next free that much slower, and went straight into the freestyle. I was starting to struggle now and by the sixth fifty the dreaded ‘tightness’ appeared around my chest. Now I’ve had years of experience dealing with my heart’s fibrillation problem, which first appeared when I ran middle distance competitively in my twenties. It’s just that the observable symptoms for an attack when running as opposed to swimming are very different, so the first time it occurred swimming I dismissed the problem as being out of shape and therefore badly out of breath. I didn’t realize at the time I wasn’t out of breath: I couldn’t breathe at all. No surprise my second attack occurred in the very next race, unfortunately this time in the middle of a 200 IM. That was impossible to ignore. The race was an absolute disaster and I finished swimming the free portion backstroke just so I could breathe whatever little I could. And then a few months later on I suffered yet another attack which caused me to abandon my first ever practice. After this I had pretty well identified the new telltales, the pain and discomfort being marvelous incentives to learn, and now knew what that ‘tightness’ meant: my heart was telling me in unmistakable terms, “BACK OFF!”. I figured, however, with the next two fifties featuring backstroke I could slow down and still keep to the interval with enough left over to handle the last two fifties. Hey, I’m a type-A male; we’re supposed to die from a heart attack. Besides Coach had pointed out a couple of weeks prior how I started bobbing when tired so I figured this would be a good way to concentrate on both my fly and back techniques while under race equivalent conditions. So I swam the next two fifties working on my butterfly’s undulation, timing my kick with my hands entering and leaving the water, and pulling all the way back to my hips; and in backstroke keeping my head steady while rotating around my axis, starting my catch earlier, and coordinating my hip slide with my six-beat kick. They went pretty well too, except that my last twenty five backstroke felt just like the last twenty five in one of my 200 back races. This gave me a little more than ten seconds rest before heading out on the set's final two reps.

Actually the symptoms of an attack are really rather benign. The atrial (upper) chambers of the heart go into fibrillation, fluttering at a rate of something close to 300 beats a minute, which stops the heart from circulating blood in anything close to an effective manner. This manifests itself (for me at least) in what feels like a bubble lodged in my windpipe – the reduced flow of blood to my lungs preventing any significant oxygen exchange and quite possibly interfering with their actual physical functioning. I stop being able to breath in any measurable way. I’m pretty sure it was holding my breath on the turn which set it off because when I came up afterwards I couldn’t take any air in, and two strokes and a second abortive attempt at breathing later swimming became secondary to breathing. That was pretty well it for the rest of the practice. I tried again after about ten minutes rest to finish out the practice but unsurprisingly had to abandon the attempt after just three hundred more meters. I’ve now had four episodes in a little more than a year which isn’t good. Before I started swimming I had only three experiences in my entire life, two when I ran competitively and the third several years later. There have been a couple of other times when an attack was impending but in those cases I merely stopped running at the first sign of trouble and quit for the day. Obviously I have to start doing the same for swimming. The trend is disturbing however – I’ll have to do something about this.

Of course the sprinters like Joe thought this practice was pretty cool.

Troubling News

2007-10-08T12:24:00.000-07:00

I had a different subject in mind for this post, one which veered away from what is fast becoming a major theme of my blog, the problem of doping in sports. Unfortunately I drafted the intended post on a borrowed computer while traveling and now can’t open the copy I had emailed to myself. So until I can find another means to reacquire my missing work I’m stuck with using a preexisting draft of another piece which once again deals with performance enhancing drugs. I unfortunately have lots of those.

This past week multiple gold medalist Marion Jones was forced to confess her guilt and return her Olympic medals in the face of overwhelming evidence produced by the continuing BALCO investigation. This shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone except the naïve. She had been implicated in the scandal back in 2005 and her stellar performances in the Sydney Games where she destroyed her competition should have raised at least pragmatic skepticism. We need to accept the millions which can be earned from endorsements and the fame which comes with such performances are major corrupting influences. The problem is not going away and consequently every evaluation of extraordinary athletic performance nowadays must consider the possibility of performance enhancing drugs. But Marion Jones isn’t the focus today. This particular article is about my reliance upon what I think is an admittedly crude but fairly effective way to identify possible cheats through analysis of historical performance, something I used in my previous post. My premise is simple: an athlete generally won’t start doping until they realize their performance will not reach the level of a world champion. I rely on the boundless enthusiasm of youth, still confident in their ability to continue improving, to hold off doping until their limitations are pretty well conclusively proven. This delay invariably shows up as a performance plateau extending well into their peak performance years, often beyond it, until a dramatic improvement usually attributed to a change in attitude or new training/coaching methods then belatedly raises the individual to the highest levels in the sport. Likewise I depend on already established stars not to commence doping to extend their competitive careers because they or their advisers understand any possible gains would be dwarfed by the costs and ignominy of being caught. As with most generalizations, however, my premise has some inherent weaknesses. Firstly I cannot preclude there will be the rare individual who will legitimately be a late developer at the world class level, just that the odds against this happening are prohibitive. Out of all those in sport who have shown such eyebrow raising improvement late in their career there might be one whose improvement didn’t come about because of drugs. Doubtful, but the possibility does exist and my method will not allow for this. Secondly state sponsored or program doping won’t wait for a child to discover their real potential. Knowing full well the probabilities against one of their charges actually being a world champion they typically start doping soon after the onset of puberty, a practice which has the effect of obliterating any historical evidence. But here at least evidence of their crimes often shows up in other ways. Their women are invariably much more successful than their men, phenomenally so to the point where their male counterparts often don't exist (doping is considerably more effective for women than men in swimming); and because they didn’t know the true abilities of their subjects they tend to use excessive amounts, which can cause significant and noticeable changes in appearance. Then there’s my hope established stars will act rationally in their own best interest, but that isn’t necessarily true either. There is a case pending where an established superstar is under investigation for doping. A horrible, mind boggling error in judgment if true, but it can and probably will happen even if the individual is cleared in this particular case. Yet as troubling as all this is even more disturbing to my mind is the recent confession by a Canadian cyclist admitting to her long time use of Erythropoietin (EPO), the hormone used to boost red blood cell production. Genevieve Jeanson, formerly a world junior road champion, started doping when she was fifteen on the instructions of her coach. Such an admission, the fact a fifteen year old can be cajoled into doping (and the fact there are coaches out there willing to do this to one of their charges) means my methodology will increasingly become more and more obsolete as sport continues down a path where participation becomes a career move rather than athletic endeavor. It seems inevitable a few more years will see doping for performance become as acceptable to teenagers as it now is for American youth to use steroids to ‘bulk up’ for social reasons¹. Today in Canada ethics courses are required for our certified coaches but such bureaucratic approaches will ultimately prove useless in stopping those who believe doping benefits the athlete. The money and allure of success seem just too strong.

¹Doping in Sports and Its Spread To At-Risk Populations: An International Review: World Psychiatry June 2007 issue

Postscript:
In my meanderings I came across the following interview with Genevieve Jeanson from the official site of the Hamilton 2003 Road World Championships. I thought it made interesting reading:

Q: Hi Genevieve, you are quite a petite athlete, how do you train hard enough to be as competitive as you are, yet not be injured all the time? Do you ride with some aches or pains most of the season? Also, how do you achieve that explosive power that allows you to break away from your competitors? (Reggie Dunbar, Calgary, AB)

GJ: I have a reputation for training harder than everybody else, but I don't believe it's true. Actually my coach Andre Aubut is very careful to prevent me from overtraining. We focus not so much on the volume of work, but more on the quality of the program. In other words, I don't think I train more than everybody else, but I do think, that, thanks to Andre, I train better than most. I think that the trick is to be very systematic, to do a lot of very specific training, on and off the bike. It requires careful planning, disciplined execution, yet flexibility (because I try and listen to my aches and pains, when I have some). As for the power, well, that's one of the specifics that Andre and I have worked on for several years. A mixture of power rides on the bike, and weight training in the gym. It pays off after a while...

A Different Way of Looking at Aging In Women’s Elite Swimming

2007-10-02T06:51:00.000-07:00

When I decided to actually try to quantify how much swimming techniques and training have actually advanced in the past fifteen or so years, instead of just accepting we've made significant advances, I had a difficult time coming up with a reasonable way of doing so. I finally settled on using as my benchmark the improvement since 1988 in women’s world records (1988 chosen because I figure that was the last Olympics Dara Torres ever participated in without an assist from doping). Obviously not the best measure of just technique and training as it incorporates several other contributing factors including the biggest and most obvious: the current record holders aren’t the same; but at least it does set an absolute upper limit on what we can attribute to technique and training. After spending the better part of an afternoon creating a database to obtain the desired number I started thinking about some other way of using it. It didn’t take long for me to decide to see if there was an age related pattern to female world record holders. So that’s what I did, and not particularly surprising there is a relation between the athletes and the age at which they set the current world record. But what is truly important are the stories behind the ladies involved.

Hypothesis: On the assumption a swimmer must necessarily be at his or her best in order to break an existing world record, and of those historical few who have broken their own world record an overwhelming majority did so within a period spanning less than two years, that there is a strong correlation between the age of the current world record holders when they swam their races and their physical peak.

If the hypothesis is true we should find world records clustered together within a range of two to no more than four years given normal human development patterns (i.e. the four year Olympic cycle was correctly chosen to include every participant’s period of peak performance). There are seventeen events recognized by FINA, and with world records granted for both long and short course it makes for a total of 34 world records for women. I’ve limited my analysis to Olympic long course or half of these – and in so far as their ages when they set their records they range from seventeen to twenty seven, a far greater range called for by my hypothesis. So let us look more closely.

The youngest current world record holder is Krisztina Egerszegi, setting the 200 back record only one week after her seventeenth birthday. Two others also made the list at seventeen: Janet Evans just one week shy of her eighteenth birthday in the 800 and Katie Hoff taking home the 400 IM record with a couple of months to spare. Most surprisingly we only have one woman whose world record was set when she was eighteen – Kate Zeigler, giving herself a birthday present just ten days before her nineteenth. I’ll return to discuss the lack of eighteen year olds later on. The greatest cluster of records occurs in the twentieth year with five; counting in Therese Alshammar, Jessicah Schipper, Yanyan Wu, and Laure Manoudou with two. And lastly Leisel Jones’ two breastroke records were set six and seven months after she turned twenty. These eleven records then are contained by the bounds set out in my hypothesis. Of the eleven only three have ever had any doping associations to my knowledge. The Chinese swimmer Yanyan Wu was caught three years after her record taking anabolic steroids for a rather conclusive ‘positive’ association (Katie Hoff has stated it is her singular goal in swimming to take the 200 IM record away from Wu to which we can only say our hopes go with her). I actually debated whether or not to mention the other swimmer as they were only rumors, but in the interests of full disclosure I will reveal there were whispers when Leisel Jones showed up at a major Australian swim meet with considerable muscle gain a few months after she had set her records. But this is the only instance where the name Leisel Jones and doping come up in a sentence together. It seems there’s only one probable doping in this group, and even this case can be linked to a state sponsored doping program where the athlete is often an unwilling or unknowing participant in the fraud.

And now there are six. American Leila Vaziri is the next oldest with a world record at twenty one years and seven months. But her story veers away from the pattern of unbroken successes shown by her younger counterparts. We pick up Vaziri’s relatively undistinguished career as an Indiana University sophomore where she finished 7th in the NCAA 100 back. At the start of the summer break her father was diagnosed with cancer and died shortly thereafter and obviously she was grief stricken. Her swimming fell off in her junior year and she ended the season with a 10th place finish at the 2006 NCAA finals. After taking some time off from swimming she returned in 2006 for her senior year “with a renewed focus and drive. Mental strength, she says, is more important now than physical strength.”¹ She almost immediately won her first and only national title at the ConocoPhillips National Championships to explode onto the world scene, and ended up chopping 2.5 seconds off her 100 back in less than a year. Her world record in the 50 back came as a complete surprise to everybody – it was the first time she had competed in the event internationally. She graduated from Indiana U this past May and is now training with the Coral Springs Swim Club, the same club the ageless Dara Torres belongs to and trains with.

With a world record at twenty two years nine months German Britta Steffen was another surprise. A phenom at fifteen with a 55.66 100 free at the 1999 European Junior Championships it would be another seven years before she recorded a new personal best. She was a substitute on Germany’s 2004 Olympic 4x100 free relay team and afterwards took a break from the sport; not swimming at all in 2005. She came back with a bang though, finally breaking through with a new PB 100 free time of 54.82 March 2006 and then five months later at the European Championships raced to a new world record in the 100 free with a 53.30. From nowhere close to the world’s top rankings to world record holder in a few short months her late career improvement has been attributed to a change in coaching and extensive psychological counseling; enough for her to deal with an eating disorder and see a dramatic turnaround in both motivation and attitude. Shortly thereafter Germany’s swimming federation announced a “blood passport” program in conjunction with WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) to protect German swimming against accusations of doping.

Australian Jade Edmistone, world record holder in the 50 breastroke, is quite the enigma. Her career path is remarkably similar to our teenage world record holders except for one striking difference – her international career started about four years later than everybody else mentioned here except for Vaziri. She only appears on Australia’s national stage in 2002 at the advanced age of twenty, reaching the 50 breast finals at the Long Course Australian Championships and taking silver and fifth in the 50 and 100 breast respectively at the Short Course Australian Championships. Prior to 2002 it appears she didn’t even qualify to swim at her country’s national championships. Even her own website gives no information about her history in age group swimming. But once on the scene Edmistone showed steady progress. She set the 50 meter short course breaststroke world record in September 2004, broke her first long course record (50 breastroke again) ten months later at twenty three years and five months of age, and then went on to break that record again a week before her twenty fourth birthday.

Next oldest on the list is of all people American Natalie Coughlin. I would think after reading about some of the backgrounds of the older world record holders a few of my readers may be getting a little uneasy, but Natalie Coughlin has such a well documented history of continued excellence over the past several years I won’t spend anytime detailing her career here. I can and do point out her first long course world record (in her best event the 100 backstroke) was set a couple of weeks before her twentieth birthday which fits in nicely with my hypothesis. Her recent improvement on that time by the scant margin of 14 hundredths of a second at twenty four years and seven months of age I believe can be rationally explained as her not significantly slowing over the past 4½ years rather than getting faster. Whatever the explanation swimming a world record at such a late age represents an exceptional achievement accomplished by only very few in history.

Finally the oldest female world record holder is Netherlands’ Inge de Bruijn with two world records in the 50 free and 100 fly, both logged a month into her twenty eighth year. Her story makes for especially good reading. She appeared on the world stage at the VI FINA World Championships at seventeen in 1991, and the following year at the 1992 Barcelona Games finished 8th in the 100 free and ninth in the 100 fly. Questions went unanswered over her ejection from the Dutch Olympic Team preparing for the 1996 Atlanta Games for ostensibly a “poor attitude”, but her times had already started to falter the year before after three years of competing at a consistently high, though not spectacular, level of performance (satisfyingly the performance curve shown in her early career conforms exactly to my hypothetical ‘classic’ years of peak performance). Apparently no longer welcome in the Netherlands she began training with well regarded Paul Bergen in Oregon and by 1997 saw a return to her past form. Thus started a period of four years of continually faster times which culminated at the 2000 Sydney Games winning four medals (three gold and one relay silver) and three world records, including the two which still exist today. Her improvement over those years was nothing short of phenomenal: three and a half seconds off her 100 fly, three seconds off her 100 free, and over one and a half seconds off her 50 free. Suspicions her times were aided by doping were rampant and openly discussed, but she never failed a test. Until recently it was my opinion Inge de Bruijn represented what has been the most egregious case of successful doping in swimming; that is until Dara Torres assumed the crown.

So what happened to those eighteen year olds? We should be seeing something very close to a normal distribution (aka a bell curve) when charting the ages of our current world record holders and obviously it doesn’t come close. You can understand the odds against being a world record holder can be likened to those encountered to win a major lottery: the odds of even one of them also physically maturing at a markedly different rate than normal would multiply those odds several fold. We have four or five here. Of course there’s another explanation – the individual is so much better than the rest of the human population they have the ability to continue swimming past their peak performance years and still break world records – but the odds against that are quite incredible too. Nevertheless that is exactly what I’m ascribing to Coughlin’s latest world record. She’s long dominated the 100 back, and without a serious challenge I believe she was never pushed enough to test her true limits, or for that matter has ever known them. Only recently has the rest of the world caught up with her and unsurprisingly she responded with a new personal best. I’m of the opinion her recent record shows she had a mid to low 58 in her during her peak years. As for the rest forget it, and if you disagree with me just read their stories again. That means we have five world records that belong somewhere else. So where did the eighteen year olds’ records go? Simple – they were stolen.

¹Leila Vaziri: Peaking at the Perfect Time – USA Swimming Mar.22, 2007

Getting Into It

2007-09-28T06:12:00.000-07:00

It meaning my flip turns. Coach Brad pointed out I still wasn’t entering my turns properly, reminding me to commence the turn in conjunction with my final stroke at the wall and to make sure I tucked my head tightly. Now you might think this is all pretty elementary but I actually had to go through the motions a few times before I understood the whys behind the instruction. You see before now when I went to make a turn I’d take my final stroke, look up to make sure the wall hadn’t moved, then duck my head and with a convulsive heave throw my legs over. Actually given my age and flexibility the best I can do is get my legs to flop most way out of the water rather more to the side than overhead. Once around I’d line myself up with the wall again (quite literally) and then push off. Really it’s true. Aside from knowing I have incredibly bad turns for some reason this fact didn’t bother me over much until now – I think my mind was rationalizing the pause at the wall with the logic reversing directions must result in my forward velocity at some point dropping to zero. The difference in carrying momentum through the turn when I do a proper approach is quite profound. I’m actually moving away from the wall even before I push off so I’m accelerating much faster than before. Even better the shorter time spent making the actual turn means extra time and air for my submerged dolphin kick, something which if I ever learn to do properly will mean still better times. Try as I might I haven’t made much progress in correcting a bad habit of blowing half my air out to prevent water coming up my nose during mid-flip so the shorter duration means less of a ‘snort’. Of course running out of sufficient air to keep my sinuses clear still happens on a distressingly regular basis, but now at least it’s occurring over a meter farther down the pool. It’s progress, slow and painful, but progress. A couple of new difficulties have arisen from the changes though which I’ll have to work through. The first is my new rotation speed has meant I’ve a tendency to over rotate and pop up like a whale breaching the surface only a couple of meters away; and secondly no longer coasting into the turn has me initiating a fair number of them too early. Both problems, however, should be easily correctable given a little practice and time. I figure my turns may end up at a half to a full second faster, which translates into a serious improvement in my back and free times. Isn’t it wonderful how such small improvements in something completely irrelevant to one’s life can provide such a deep sense of accomplishment and satisfaction? Quite absurd really.

P.S. I’ve discovered coming out of the tumble too late is eminently preferable to doing the opposite and finding oneself still two meters deep when the air runs out! Luckily in my pool it’s easy at that depth to find the bottom to push off from, but embarrassing to be gasping for air whilst bobbing up and down in the water like a cork with the rest of the lane trying to avoid running over me.

Massage Week

2007-09-25T05:51:00.001-07:00

I’ve always had a tendency towards muscle cramps in the early stages of training and that tendency certainly hasn’t abated as I’ve gotten older. This month is the first of three planned months of ever heavier workouts intended to take me to a level of training capable of supporting true competitive swimming (at least for Masters) and the accumulated wear and tear of the past three weeks combined with Coach Brad’s emphasis on speed work has set off some bad cramping in my feet and legs. It’s always worth the effort to try to swim through the problem and typically this will succeed about a third of the time, but last Wednesday when I tried to do this during a short set it backfired on me, especially after I ‘tweaked’ my left hamstring starting the set. The cramp fully blossomed shortly thereafter on the second rep when I felt the hamstring start to tighten and, in the effort of trying to relax the muscle threw my left calf into spasm, quickly followed by my left foot, and then to completely screw me, my suffering hamstring joined the protest. I believe that’s the first time in my life all three of those muscles have cramped at the same time. Part of my problem probably lies with the fact I haven’t scheduled a massage in over three months since I lost my therapist to marriage and a move this past spring. But perhaps, and on a more hopeful note, another contributing factor may be yoga related back realignment and increased hip flexibility is causing my muscles to recast themselves to their subtly changed roles. In any event I’ve decided to kill two birds with one stone by scheduling three massages over this week by three different therapists. The idea is to work on all my muscles rather than target one specific problem while at the same time determining which therapist will be best for me. One thing is for certain – I can’t take these muscles cramps for much longer. They’re really starting to hurt.

A Freakishly Good Write at Timed Finals

2007-09-24T09:19:00.000-07:00

A few days back I wrote a post about how the highest echelons of sport are invariably being occupied by individuals who not only work hard but are also phenomenally gifted. Now I've come across the same subject written by Mike Gustafson over at the Timed Finals website whom I believe has done a much better job in communicating the concept of 'freaks' in an entertaining and informative way. I recommend you read it; and if you're up to it, a couple of my earlier posts which also touched on talent (Talent: God's Gift) and what for most of us sport is truly about (My First Coach Archie McKinnon).

Gary Hall Jr. Has Great Big Ones

2007-09-21T09:02:00.000-07:00

In studying how sprint training relates to swimming for some upcoming posts I looked over The Race Club’s website – the Club itself a training facility for sprint excellence founded by the Olympian father and son swimming duo of Gary Hall and Gary Hall Junior. While I haven’t acquired any information about sprint training techniques (not surprising as The Race Club charges fees for its camps and clinics) I’ve learned Gary Hall Jr. and I share similar backgrounds, some similar beliefs, and even better that he and his father are pretty good writers. Consequently you’ll now find The Race Club listed in my Swimming Links section. A recent post of his, though, took me a little aback with its outspokenness; and no, it’s not a case of the kettle calling someone black. Gary Hall Jr. simply goes after a lot bigger fish. He’s questioned the phenomenal achievements of a “really nice guy” (RNG) by raising the possibility of him being guilty of doping, something I admit is fair enough because I’ve also talked about this possibility with a couple of friends. But Hall’s actually gone charging on in and named him before a doping incident linked to him is closed. Those who know or have read about Junior won’t be surprised by this of course. You don’t win the number of Olympic gold sprint medals Gary Hall Jr. has by being tentative now do you? It should be noted for the record that RNG (who has not yet been officially identified) failed a drug test indicating the presence of banned drugs but was excused by ASADA (Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority) for unknown reasons. This decision was challenged by FINA, requiring ASADA to conduct a just recently completed review of the case which saw the original decision upheld. So now FINA’s appealing the case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). There’s plenty of room for speculation. Junior proposes RNG has been doping over a long period of time, perhaps even for most of his career, to a level just under the point which would call for sanction, only to be caught out after returning from an extended absence due to injury and illness by a recent change in the acceptable levels of testosterone. He complains the allowable limit for testosterone was set far too high at 6:1, this being the ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone more commonly known as the T/E ratio; arguing if a normal healthy young individual’s ratio is only 1:1 then a 6:1 or 4:1 ratio allows unscrupulous individuals to tailor their doping regimes to keep under the legal limit (the T/E ratio does not discriminate between sexes but females typically possess only a fifth of the absolute amount of testosterone possessed by males).

The problem here keys on the use of normal, because when you get into the elite ranks of swimming normal starts to become less and less relevant. There are some who have natural testosterone ratios of 4:1 or even higher – it’s one of the reasons they’re as competitive as they are. Throw in the fact there are several known ways to naturally boost testosterone levels, ranging from alcohol consumption to the use of birth control pills and recent sex, then add in the inherent variability of the tests themselves, and determining just who is doping and who isn’t becomes considerably more blurry. For these reasons when testing was first instituted the ratio was established at 10:1. After studies showed the methods were sufficiently rigorous it was dropped to 6:1, and then in 2005 it was reduced still further to the current 4:1. Contrary to popular belief, while this ratio is considered in determining a positive result, it is used more as a screen for more complex and conclusive tests. Experience has shown a sample with a T/E ratio of 20:1 or ‘better’ will reveal doping more than 95% of the time¹ but the confirmation rate drops as the ratio declines. A 10:1 T/E ratio sees only 31% confirmed positive and the recent reduction in the threshold ratio from 6:1 to 4:1 has resulted in only an additional 0.3% increase in adverse findings (3 out of 1,000). Having the first sample fail doesn’t mean a positive test but it does, however, prompt the testing of the athlete’s “B” sample to verify the initial finding. Only if the second test confirms a higher than allowable amount of T does a positive test officially result. Still no reason to panic, especially if the test results from the two samples are only a little over the allowable 4:1 ratio because you’ll remember we can expect many in this particular population will have naturally high T/E ratios and there are a lot of ways the level can be boosted naturally. A confirmatory second test should therefore be carried out which examines the carbon isotope ratios of the byproducts of testosterone metabolism, known as metabolites, to determine whether the testosterone was made by the body ('endogenous T') or came from a man-made source ('exogenous T'). Four different metabolites are tested and an abnormal result in just one of them will confirm the positive result (i.e. the sample contains manufactured testosterone). It’s the finding of man-made testosterone in the sample which provides the actual evidence of doping. If there’s no evidence of exogenous testosterone then regardless of how high the T/E ratio the athlete will have an excellent chance to be cleared on review – despite a confirmed positive result of testosterone in excess of allowable limits.

So you see while Gary Hall Jr.’s hypothesis of how RNG could have been cheating has merit it is also quite possible to have a positive result and see it reversed by the responsible authority. In fact, rather than saying the ratio is too lax, many are arguing it is far too narrow knowing what we do about the natural variability in human testosterone levels. Dissenters believe, beyond just being a waste of money, that the constant stream of false positives resulting from the current 4:1 T/E ratio will eventually cause the general public to lose confidence in the testing system. Perhaps the way to go is to jump directly to carbon isotope testing in certain random situations to prevent ‘doping to limit’, but practically speaking the present standard is already pretty close to that. RNG didn’t need his medical team to screw up and not adjust his doping program to the new standards (a very doubtful hypothesis); at his hypothetical elevated levels a slight unforeseen fluctuation in his testosterone, maybe too much beef for dinner, could have been enough to get him flagged for carbon isotope testing. Nowadays the margin for error is much too tight for somebody to hope get away with boosting testosterone levels over a long period of time without eventually raising some flags. But if RNG was cheating and caught as Junior suggests his medical ‘advisors’ may still be responsible for the mess: more knowledgeable cheats are now believed to be using animal based testosterone preparations because of the similarities their carbon isotope ratios have to endogenous T. Oy vey.

¹I have to point out this means upwards of five percent of those tested actually had naturally occurring T/E ratios of 20:1 or more – an amazing ratio which prompts the obvious question – just how do we get invited to their parties? On a more serious note the T/E ratio is known to be also affected by ethnicity; age; circadian rhythm; training and competition; diet; nutritional supplementation; environmental factors; enzyme deficiencies; decreased epitestosterone excretion; menstruation; pregnancy; other hormonal therapy; consumption of meat from animals supplemented with anabolic steroids; polycystic ovary syndrome (a common endocrine disorder); and other pathologic medical conditions (source: Inferences About Testosterone Abuse Among Athletes).

A Little Irritated

2007-09-17T22:59:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I was struggling in a yoga class and getting more irritated by the minute, made more so because our session’s instructor was a very perky, cheerful girl who continually had us holding positions longer than required (I count strokes so why wouldn’t I count off the time?). But my irritation really wasn’t her fault. Right now I’m back into what I euphemistically call ‘Full Training’ trying to ramp my swimming all the way up to 30k (12 hours) a week while doing four weight sessions and two yoga classes at the same time. I find it very hard work – last spring when I tried to do this over training ended up costing me three weeks off to recuperate – and the workload leaves me in a perpetual state of fatigue and soreness (hence my irritability). Weight training especially has a hugely negative impact on my swimming performance, but this is expected and the reason why strength building is always restricted to the off season. My real problem is my swimming is suffering so much I’m having trouble even handling practices. I guess this is what comes from getting old.

My club, the Hyack Swim Club, schedules ten workouts a week for Master swimmers using three pools. Unfortunately the program is split between four groups and scheduling conflicts/group demarcations means the most anyone can swim is three times a week. Obviously three hours a week isn’t enough to compete on so I schedule practices on my own at the Hyacks' main pool where I can train both long course and short course. For my first year I was quite content to just put in some meters for general conditioning purposes and so would dash off a workout on paper in a few minutes before heading off to the pool. Now that I’m looking for better times I figure a little more attention should be paid to the composition of my workouts and perforce have had to teach myself some up to date theory and training practices. I finally settled on Bill Sweetenham’s book ‘Championship Swim Training’ as my training guide and so far (this being my first month) I think I’ve made an excellent choice. I admit my first encounter with this book left me wondering if perhaps it's aimed at too high a caliber of swimmer for me to use, but since he does make regular references to masters I figure where it gets too much I can just slow it down and stretch it out. In his preface (yes, I’m the sort of guy who reads prefaces) he writes about the amount of work which is necessary for best results in swimming:

Swimming 8 Hours a Week
This level offers participation, fun, involvement, and significant health benefits, but it is not competition swimming and never produces a competitive result.

Swimming 10 to 12 Hours a Week
This amount of swimming is too much training to be fun but not enough to produce a competitive result. The swimmers in this middle ground never feel good, and in time they become frustrated. We call this the competitive swimming twilight zone.

Swimming 18 to 24 Hours a Week
This level can be termed competitive swimming. Athletes in this program are committed and gain satisfaction by attaining improved competitive results.

Son-of-a-bitch! That pretty well takes care of us masters. Thankfully I don’t need to be competitive as I would be absolutely delighted to just settle for holding one or two Masters world records, but still his suggested minimum hours for ‘competitive swimming’ floored me when I first read this. Remember this is only the time spent actually in the pool. Start adding in travel, dry land training, physiotherapy, and all the rest and you’re looking at effectively a full-time job equivalent. Seems he’s referring to world-class when he writes about being ‘competitive’. Regardless his attitude indicates how important and necessary training is to swimming your best. I’d love to know what he thinks of Dara Torres’ success, coming as it does from only ten hours in the pool a week.

Update: New information from a New York Times article dated November 18, 2007 about Torres' training program reveals she is only training ninety minutes a workout, making for an average of just 7½ hours training a week.

Michael Phelps and the Rest of the Freaks

2007-09-14T06:22:00.000-07:00

COME RIGHT IN FOLKS! SEE THE FREAKS! SEE LITTLE KATIE ZEIGLER SMASH SIXTEEN MINUTES! WATCH IN AMAZEMENT AS MICHAEL PHELPS REACHES SPEEDS NEVER BEFORE SEEN! MARVEL AT LIESEL JONES, A LADY SO FAST SHE'D HAVE WON ‘72 OLYMPIC GAMES GOLD EVEN IF SHE HAD SWUM AS A MAN!

I’m pretty sure the average person has no idea just how freakish, how special, a world record holder in swimming now is. They certainly don’t have the foggiest concept of what makes a great athlete. On our blogs we talk about and compare world record performances as if we were kids trading baseball cards, but like children we have little real comprehension of the true magnitude of the achievements. Forget about the world record holders – one has to be a very, very special individual to even qualify for the Olympics, and it isn’t just due to hard work. In preparing my last post about Jim Sorensen I came across where he had to explain to his school’s principal his American record in the 800 meters was a Master’s record, not ‘the’ American record; and how his students asked him if he was going to run at the Beijing Olympics. I have my own experience with this. I still remember watching an East German touched out for the gold in the 1980 Moscow Games by a couple of hundredths of a second and remarking how devastating it must be for the swimmer – only to hear an Aunt, an exceptionally bright and knowledgeable woman, remark “he should have worked harder”. How else can I explain why nearly six out of ten believe a forty year old mother coming back with less than two years training can be one of best sprinters in the world? That they accept she can continue to improve twenty years past her peak? In the movie Good Will Hunting the protagonist is a mathematical prodigy promoted by Fields Medalist Gerard Lambeau, an individual who recognizes Hunting’s talent outstrips even his own prodigious genius. In Amadeus the accomplished composer Salieri similarly shares Lambeau’s shock and dismay when he listens to the genius of Mozart’s music. Is there any one who believes all the two had to do to reach the same level of achievement was work harder and better? Of course not. But why then do the majority of people believe ultimate success at sport can be determined by training methods and learned techniques?

As world records continue to be pushed lower and lower swimming’s pinnacle is increasingly being occupied by the statistical anomalies, the outliers, those one in a hundred million individuals whose physical makeup and biochemistry are best suited to competing in the water. Michael Phelps is a great example of such a freak. At 193 cm (6’4”) and 86½ kgs (195 lbs.) a quick glance would see the typical heavyweight Olympian swimmer. A second and closer look would belie that as his leg inseam is only 81 cm. (32”), a length of leg more befitting a six foot man. This actually helps as there’s less leg for drag but in the absolutely critical arm span category, where the greater the reach the better for propulsion, Phelps’ 201 cms (6’7”) wingspan corresponds more to his theoretical height had he possessed a more normally proportioned body. A great advantage. Sure his size 14 feet make for nice flippers but far higher on the ‘what makes a fast swimmer’ scale is his overall hyperflexibility. Mark Spitz has hyperflexible knees, the ability not only to flex more than usual but to also flex the opposite way, so his legs could operate rather like a dolphin’s tail. It's helpful. In Michael Phelps case all of his joints are hyperflexible, which makes him rather awkward out of the water and notable for an inability to safely perform many dry land exercises such as running and weight training. But in water he quite literally swims like a fish. His coach Bowman also hints at a superbly adapted metabolism by being quoted as saying, “He (Phelps) had been metabolically trained since the age of 7, which is a plus”. Another piece of Phelppian trivia is Phelps has never taken a test to measure his VO² max despite a high reading being almost a precondition for elite status. Perhaps Bowman and Phelps aren’t particularly interested in a test which wouldn’t directly contribute to improved performance – there would be few takers on a bet it isn’t somewhere between 'Wow!' and 'No Freaking Way!' Yet for all this if you talked to his coach he’d probably first mention Phelps’ ‘feel for the water’ as his biggest advantage, a feel which is extraordinary even among world class swimmers. His ability to streamline his body, to come out of a turn faster than anyone else, to have mastered every stroke, is famous in the swimming world. So Phelps has all the ingredients to become a great swimmer plus one other. He’s also noted for his work ethic. There’s a saying “Great athletes are born, and then made better”. Day in and day out Phelps has put in the hours, reportedly not missing a single day in his career, and regularly putting in 70,000 meter weeks. Trying to beat a Freak at his or her own game is pretty nigh unattainable, but for a Normal to beat a Freak when he or she is willing to work hard at their gift – that's simply impossible.

P.S. Technically Liesel would have been disqualified for what would have been an illegal breaststroke back in 1972.

Start of the Season for Hyack Masters

2007-09-11T15:26:00.000-07:00

Last night was our first practice and I was looking forward to seeing some new faces swimming ahead of me but was disappointed in this regard. Our best swimmer currently is Doug, who swam with us during the summer session and who had announced his intention to continue training with us over the winter, but tonight at least he didn’t show up. Neither did a rumored recent competitive swimmer only barely qualified to swim Masters yet apparently talented enough for Brad to say Doug will have to work to keep up with him. I was more disappointed, however, that the faster lanes seem to be becoming a men’s only club as Darcy, Kyra and Jodi, three of our best female swimmers, weren’t there. And as Jodi was married over the summer the betting line is overwhelming in favor of Hyack Masters not seeing her again. That’s a shame as there is nothing on this earth that provides the same incentive for hard work than having my ass kicked by some twenty something woman (actually having a fourteen year old girl do the ass-kicking would provide even more incentive but I think perhaps my fragile male ego would suffer a little too much). But the real subject of this post comes from the after practice hot tub soak where Ian talked about his son’s rapid improvement the last month of his summer swimming league. Turner saw his 100 back time drop seven seconds to place 2nd at the end-of-summer Provincial Championships; took ten seconds off his 200 IM for a 3rd; 1½ seconds from his 50 free for another 3rd; and finished the Provincials in style by taking the gold in the 100 free by swimming a full four seconds faster – every one improving on times he was swimming less than one month earlier. As a thirteen year old weighing in at 112 lbs. Ian’s absolutely right in pointing out he’s not winning races because he’s bigger than the rest. He’s winning because of improved technique and a better feel for the water, plus of course a generous portion of intestinal fortitude; the three of which makes for a winning combination in swimming. A big assist obviously comes from inheriting some of his father’s natural talent. Ian’s now moaning next summer he can only count on bettering Turner in fly and even in that, his favorite stroke, he wonders for how long. A good lesson to us all on the importance of technique and body position to swimming fast times and what we should be emphasizing in practice. Turner will be joining our team later on in the year after hockey season winds down to carry out his allowable winter conditioning. Hopefully somebody will step up such as Doug so we don’t have to ask Turner to lead Lane Six, our fastest lane. There would be something fundamentally wrong with a Masters swim team having a fourteen year old as its best swimmer wouldn’t you agree?

Jim Sorensen: Master Miler

2007-09-08T08:40:00.000-07:00

My recent blogging subject has been rather depressing so to get more upbeat let me introduce you to a true icon in the making, forty year old American Jim Sorensen. One of the great marks in Sport has been the sub four minute mile and it remains the definitive measure for an elite middle distance runner. Only one man has run the mile under four minutes as a forty year old or older: the four time Olympian, World Championship gold medalist, and former indoor mile world record holder Eamonn Coghlan. Now Jim Sorensen has a real shot at being the second ever, and the first outdoor if he can do it on a regular track. This past June he ran a 1,500 in a new Masters world record time of 3:44.06, a pace which translates in 4:00 flat for the mile.

The mile (the 1,500 is sometimes called the metric mile) is a special event in athletics straddling both sprint and distance disciplines and so requires speed and endurance in almost equal measure. The formula for an over 40 sub-four minute miler is an elite runner who could run a sub-four mile with several seconds to spare at his peak and a willingness to continue training without a significant break long after his competitive days have passed. Jim Sorensen is just that man. The 1991 NCAA II 1500 champion and runner up in the 1996 U.S. Olympic Trials (he just narrowly missed making the qualifying time to actually participate in those Games) he has never left the sport he clearly loves. And boy he must love running. In an excellent interview by Masters News and Muse he describes his constant battle with injury, how he thought in 2000 a pelvic stress fracture had finished his competitive career, goes into some detail on how he trains (between 40 and 60 miles a week depending on the season), and his racing experiences. I strongly recommend you read it. As a former middle distance man myself it’s surreal listening to him talk about setting a Masters outdoor 800 meter American record in 1:51.57 a few days after his fortieth birthday and confessing the week before he ran a half marathon in 1:12:24 (“I ran too fast ... it shows that at 40 you can still do dumb things”). Absolutely incredible! Go Jim!

A funny thing happened to Sorensen along the way in life when he followed John Rembao, his coach, to Arizona. Sorensen – who doesn’t look or dress much like a runner (usually ran with a plaid shirt on and training pants with holes in them to go along with glasses he had taped together!) - was asked by the head coach of the U of A programme to actually get off the track one day when Sorensen was out warming up, with the coach saying something to the effect that the track was for athletes only (as opposed to everyday joggers). Taught one and all not to judge a book by its cover – not then, and certainly not 13 years later - Masterstrack.com

Come Join the Bandwagon!

2007-09-05T09:48:00.000-07:00

I’ve long been a strong proponent of weight training for overall physical fitness, and have made several posts about the importance of maintaining your musculature for later on in life. Posts such as Osteoporosis Isn’t Only A Concern For Women; and Losing It: The Difficulty Building and Keeping Muscle as We Age; and Free Weights & Home Gyms, all emphasize weight lifting. Last month the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association updated their physical activity guidelines and now encourage Americans to strength-train all of the major muscle groups at least twice a week on top of regular cardio activity. It’s important to note they’re calling for full workouts too – no ‘get a least twenty minutes a day’. They’re recommending adults perform eight to 12 reps of eight to 10 exercises on the chest, back, shoulders, upper legs, lower legs and arms, via either free weights, machines or weight-bearing activities. They also specifically single out adults 65 and older, whom they recommend should strength-train two to three times a week. I must say I think they’re being very optimistic prescribing such a ‘heavy’ exercise program but it might well prompt the sort of person who would read this blog to get out there and start lifting. Let’s hope you do!

Go to the ASCM Healthy Adults Manuscript
Go to the ASCM Older Adults Manuscript

Dara Torres Doping Poll Closed

2007-09-01T19:57:00.000-07:00

My posts asserting Dara Torres is without doubt cheating brought several ardent supporters to her defense, or more correctly, to attack my position as incredibly obtuse and disrespectful. The final tally saw 41% saying Torres definitely has never used drugs; 17% believe her performance possibly is the result of doping but on balance much more likely she is clean; 29% think she is doping but require actual physical evidence before taking any action against her; and bringing up the rear were the 12%, me included, who think there is enough circumstantial evidence to justify banning her outright, a la Michael Rasmussen. Yea OK, banning someone on purely circumstantial evidence is a little radical but there’s a lot of frustration in Torres’ case.

It should be obvious I have nothing personal to gain from questioning Torres’ achievements. It’s only my aggrieved sense of justice and empathy for what today’s elite female sprinters must be thinking when they line up beside her that led me to write my article. If our best aren’t to be forced into doping to remain competitive they’ll have to be protected. Still many readers took it personally. It also became manifestly clear many had no desire to seek the truth but rather only sought to have their own beliefs dominate, right or wrong - often aggressively attacking opposing viewpoints with false statements or employing ad hominem comments. This led to some head shaking posts. One individual thought he could counter my observation Torres had added nearly twenty pounds of muscle in just one year’s time (actually now known to have been seventeen pounds) by saying it wasn’t unusual to see this in kids headed for the NBA. It’s difficult to anticipate these arguments - to my knowledge there hasn’t been a single woman to play in the NBA, much less one who started in her early thirties. Am I wrong that they have all been young males? The same individual, incensed by my certainty Torres is doping, then proceeded to slur Mark Spitz’s comeback attempt by stating he “just did this for attention” ignoring my very careful explanation why Spitz had every incentive to take it very seriously indeed. He actually cited the fact Spitz’s best comeback time was slower than the current Masters 100 fly world record as proof the attempt was treated as a lark (Mark Spitz would rank fifth fastest all time for males 40-44 if his best time had been achieved at a Masters sanctioned meet). This bizarre logic would label the majority of swimming's past greats, such as the likes of Don Schollander¹ and Dawn Fraser² among many, many others, as out right slackers for not being faster. It also avoids dealing with my point his time is about the best you can expect from two years training when coming back after years of retirement. More readers gave arguments which clearly showed they hadn’t read preceding responses where their issues had already been addressed. Several argued points which weren’t salient to my central hypothesis. Some even took exception to me taking exception. When I dismissed the opinions of those who voted Torres had definitely never taken drugs as clearly flawed (in that her extraordinary performance and today’s reality made it impossible not to call at least into question the possibility of her doping) a reader wrote what was the literary equivalent of spitting in my face. When I responded with a figurative punch he actually complained, going so far as to point out my comment about ad hominem attacks. Apparently he thought that while he could stoop to personal attacks my ethics would prevent a like response. He was wrong. Later another reader, evidently thinking attacking me directly wouldn’t be worth the trouble, decided to instead ridicule a blogger supporting my position. Unsurprisingly his justification rests on deliberately misrepresenting the blogger's argument “that training hasn't changed or technique hasn't changed” when Damien actually wrote “The argument that technology has improved and better training methods have caused this to happen is nonsense since it was not that long ago and technology hasn't progressed that much”. Clearly Damien is arguing the amount of improvement Torres has shown in her thirties and forties isn’t supported by an equivalent improvement in swimming technique and training practices; not there haven’t been significant improvements over the past couple decades. And he’s right. Overall world records in women’s swimming are 1.91% faster than those existing in 1988, yet during this same span Dara has seen her 50 meter free time improve by 5.30%³ and her 100 free improve by 1.97%. Improved technique and training alone cannot explain her late rise to greatness even if you ignore entirely the fact she’s fifteen years older, has put in only minimal training, and that for the most part the current records are held by new swimmers – not the same 1980’s record holders simply swimming faster.

I’ll have some more posts about Dara Torres later on. For now I’ll end with another one of my “dumb quotes” from a Lane Nine News August 1, 2007 article on Torres winning the U.S. 50 and 100 free titles at Indianapolis, setting a new American 50 free record in the process.

Evan Morgenstein, Torres' agent, was justifiably "thrilled that she did what she did - she focuses on a demographic in which there is no competition. She didn't make any money today - she didn't make a dime. She came because she wanted to win a national championship."

Wow, what a woman. Imagine swimming at the National Championships for nothing. Perhaps when the Church finishes canonizing Mother Teresa they’ll take a look at Dara Torres.

¹Schollander’s 1968 200 free world record and PB was 1:53.3; in Masters men’s 35-39 age group the world record is 1:52.84 held by Vlad Pyshnenko
² Dawn Fraser’s 1964 100 free world record and PB was 58.9 and remained a world record until Jan/72; in Masters women’s 35-39 age group the world record is 58.87 held by S. Neilson-Bell
³Measured from her 1988 Olympic Trials 25.83. Her personal best in 1988 (as can be determined at the time of writing) was 25.61 achieved four years earlier on July 21, 1984.

P.S. The last line is I believe my very first triple entendre – a rather rare word play I’ve only encountered twice outside of Shakespeare. I’ll give a bottle of scotch to the first person who can tell me the three ‘meanings’ contained therein and so prove I’m right.

Dropping By to Say Hello

2007-08-29T15:35:00.000-07:00

I’ve been taught it’s important not to neglect things in one’s care – the old “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” thing, but sometimes you have to make choices. Unfortunately my blog was one of the first things I had to cast adrift in recent weeks as work demands have (incredibly) increased over the past couple of months. So apologies for not posting at least something this month but, since a posting typically takes an hour of my time (considerably more if it’s an editorial) and considering I’ve only been able to swim a half dozen times this month, there was simply not the time to write anything.

In a couple of weeks the new 2007/08 season starts and I’ll be there. Though behind in my intended preseason training I’ll adjust my training program to salvage what I can and soldier on. With a year’s experience behind me and having learned considerably about current advancements in stroke technique I’m now expecting better times all around. I’m especially targeting a couple of races for improvement. My 100 meter freestyle PB hasn’t really budged since early last December after only a couple of months training and as the premier event (and general benchmark for speed) my present best is embarrassing. I intend to improve it to at least something more competitive. My 100 backstroke on the other hand isn’t bad, even if I believe it to be a least a couple of seconds slower than what I could do given proper rest and preparation. I bought Aaron Peirsol’s ‘Go Swim’ DVD and the basic pointers he gives combined with overall better conditioning, a little better technique and, hopefully, continued progress in my rollover turns, should result in significant improvement. That’s the theory at least. Improvement in the rest of my events, especially my 200 IM and 200 back, will need to rely primarily on improved conditioning to bring about the necessary breakthroughs. I have in my office a spreadsheet showing the qualifying times beginning with my province’s 15&O AAA age group through to my country’s Senior Nationals: the intention being to cross off each time as I make it and see how far I can go. As I write this I don’t have a single time crossed off. Some interesting observations: in Canada our highest quality bracket is triple A but in the States we actually have quadruple A – and my those times are fast! Time progression is fairly steady between the age groups until you try to make the leap to Senior Nationals from Western Nationals (the interim level between Age Group Nationals and Senior Nationals in Canada) where typically a swimmer needs to cut a full three seconds off their 100 times to qualify. At one time I also had the Olympic ‘B’ and ‘A’ times on my spreadsheet (only for completeness sake!) and the gap between those two and between them and Canada’s Senior National times are equally imposing. It will be interesting to see what sort of progress I can make against the 15 and 16 year olds this season.

I have plenty planned for this blog too. My article about Dara Torres raised a couple of arguments as to why her times are legitimate, both of which I’ll address over the next couple of weeks or so, plus some further observations on the remarkable Torres. Beyond that I have a long list of topics to write about when I’m not posting about my own training program and swimming progress. Topics to be covered include diets, tributes to ‘Doc’ Councilman and Arthur Lydiard, why swimming is the best sport for children, distance events, the 1980 Olympic boycott, and many other topics of interest. Hope you stay around to read them.