Team Practice at Canada Games Pool

For most the season Hyack Masters (Burnaby) trains at Bonsor Pool. It’s a rather old six lane 25m pool but for us Master swimmers it’s plenty adequate unless too many of us show up for practice. But this long Easter weekend showing up became a problem because we weren’t booked for our normal Friday and Monday evenings – some sort of scheduling glitch apparently. Coach Brad was very apologetic about it, though obviously there was little he could do. He did, however, promise to see if he could arrange for us to swim instead at the Hyack’s main training facility at the Canada Games Pool. Friday evening I checked my email and discovered Brad had indeed succeeded in arranging a Saturday morning practice, and so the next morning about a half dozen of us showed up to put in some laps. Both Joe and Damien were there so we bloggers were well represented. Practice started out with a warm up and supplementary set:

Warm up: 12 x 25 reverse IM in sets of four split 2 sw/2 dr @ 0:45
200 K
First set (x 2): 4 x 100 fr @ 1:40
200 fr pull @ 3:10
50 choice sw @ 1:30

Joe was in good form swimming beside me in the next lane. On the 200 pulls we swam side-by-side, except that on each turn he’d pull a third to a half body length ahead. For the first 200 I closed the gap each time and finished just behind, but for the second 200 I decided to conserve my energies for the next set and ended seeing Joe finish a full two body lengths ahead. Reflecting on this I think my biggest problem is a tendency to flop over side-wise, rather than bringing my legs straight over a proper turn calls for, and consequently I lose a lot of momentum going into the wall (not to mention the problems with setting up for the push off). It’s a combination of laziness and a certain lack of flexibility. Damien noted the problem he’s had with turns was keeping hold of his pull buoy during the pull sets, which sounds as if he’s doing exactly the same thing as me and was experiencing the effects of his less-than-vertical flip forcing the buoy loose. After an easy 100 to rest for the main set we had a choice between a sprint or middle distance set. Damien and I went for doing the middle distance set in backstroke, while Joe went for the sprint set. No big surprise there. For me and Damien our choice meant our practice finished with:

Main set: 7 x 50 on 200m PB pace +2,+1, 0,-1,+2,+1, 0 @ 1:20
100 @ 2:30
3 x 50 on 200m PB pace +4,+2, 0 @ 1:00

Warm down: 200 fr (br 3/5 by 50) @ 4:00
200 non fr @ 4:00
200 choice

I started out well but found myself tiring towards the end of the main set. The shorter recovery at the end also had an impact, so by the time it came to swimming the 200 free breathing drill I was completely knackered and had to let Damien go ahead midway through. I finished up with a 200 back and left out the last 200 for a total distance of 3,000 meters. Damien finished the full practice – I'm going to be churlish and credit his efforts to the benefits of youth. All-in-all a pretty good work out, one I’d grade a 7.

Coaching Courtesy of Semiahmoo Swim Club

Because of my dismal Friday practice I decided to go for a make up workout Sunday morning. After completing my warm up I opened practice with a backstroke set, only to be interrupted midway through by a gentleman offering advice on my rollover turns. He said he didn’t see any glaring deficiencies in my backstroke but thought my turns really, really needed improvement. Well join the rest of the swimming community! Turns out he was Dennis Caldwell, coach of the Semiahmoo Swim Club, and he proceeded to spend the next forty minutes going over my various stroke techniques. No sooner did I thank him for all his help critiquing a stroke and switch over to my next set than he would be back with pointers on how to correct the most egregious of the new stroke’s defects. Whether it was my back turn or breaststroke or fly, my flawed technique proved to be an irresistible lure to him. By now I’m sure every coach who watches me swim thinks, “there someone who could really swim well if only he got some coaching!” This isn’t a negative reflection on the coaching I receive from Hyack Masters, far from it – just with so many bad habits carried over from my youth and with less than seven months training in hand an experienced eye can pick out the flaws in my technique without even concentrating. It will take time for me to deal with them all, if indeed I ever do.

Coach Caldwell pointed out if I could just get out to the flags on my rollover turns I’d save ¾ a second every lap or, if my races typically include a turn like the one he saw me blow just before hastening to my aid (for when I truly butcher a turn it is absolutely cringe worthy), he’d up his estimate to a full three seconds for my 100. He demonstrated the turn (Dennis is also a nationally ranked Masters swimmer himself) and over the course of about twenty minutes identified my distance to turn, tumble initiation, foot placement, dolphin kick, body posture, exhale, and breakout as problem areas for me. That, I believe, is the entire turn. The gist of his coaching was for the time being not to concern myself with trying to swim faster but instead to focus my efforts entirely on improving my turns. He does seem to have a point. We also discussed my pacing and he even recommended I consider easing up a second or so my first outward leg in the 100 and so be sufficiently rested enough to ensure at least a decent last turn. When I think of missing Victoria’s long course swim meet with those one turn 100s and three turn 200s! For the rest of my impromptu clinic the breast and butterfly errors he picked up on had for the most part already been identified, but his critiques were still very much appreciated as they confirmed others’ stroke assessments and pinpointed where I continue to be technically weak. One important observation I wasn’t aware of and therefore found to be a real added bonus was the need to narrow my breast kick, which should not only improve my kick’s power but make me easier to swim with during practice. So it turned out to be a much more productive practice than I ever had the right to expect when I left home.

First Quarter’s Results

Aaah, the cherry trees are in blossom, the daffodils are out, hay season is here, and 2007’s first quarter of training is complete. Armed with tape measure and scale I can reveal to a completely indifferent world nothing has changed (let the trumpets sound!). March has seen me add half a kilo of which 300 grams is muscle. The quarter to quarter results, however, are a little more negative. The more accurate measure of the past three months have seen a net gain of 100 grams (virtually no change given the inherent measurement error involved) and only a 200 gram increase in muscle mass (less than half a pound). Not only am I treading water literally but figuratively too! I can’t say I’m surprised at these results seeing what’s happening to me in the pool and am taking the pause in stride as something to be expected. It will take my body a while to get used to the idea I’m actually serious about wanting to swim fast. I can only hope my slump is short and I come out of it in time for the Provincials. In another decision I’ve decided not to publish my monthly pictures (yes I know, sighs of relief all around) but rather will keep them around for future comparisons. Instead I’ll go to quarterly pictures which will hopefully show more improvement from one set to the other and thus give me something to write about.

Leaving Practice Early

Last night I did something I’ve never done before – I quit my first practice. I’m becoming a little frustrated with how long my recovery is taking. It has been three weeks now since I’ve dropped my training efforts to a bare minimum after seeing my performance collapse and I’m not seeing any improvement in my endurance and overall speed. There are bright spots however. My swimming technique this past month continues its slow but steady progress as does my overall feel for the water. I’ve also been working on my flip turns which seems to be laying in a good foundation for further continued improvement later on. Unfortunately my endurance has disappeared and doesn't appear to be returning for the foreseeable future. Wednesday's practice went reasonably well, good enough for me to actually sprint the workout’s last 50 as called for, but the result was over a second slower than what I feel it should have been, even after making allowances for my conditioning. Overall though my technique, especially for backstroke, has been feeling good lately so I had some expectations for this Friday’s workout. I used our warm up last night to continue working on my back, the warm up comprising 3x25 @ 0:40 plus a single 25 @ 0:20, all repeated five times (free in the sprint portion). Right now I’ve been using these short distances to improve my backstroke’s turnover rate and so avoid running into the endurance problem the more typical distances presently pose. Even so warm up turned out to be quite the effort for me towards the end. By the time I had finished the next short set of 100 IMs I knew it wasn’t going to be a good night, and midway through the first rep in the main set I hit the ‘wall’ endurance-wise. I swam for another 700 meters, having Ian lap me twice and sitting out a 50, but when it came to completing a 400 free breathing every five strokes I called it a day. No sense in beating a dead horse. On Sunday I do my body fat measurements and calculate my muscle gain for the quarter, something I’ve been very curious about every since my collapse in the beginning of March. Just what is the impact of all this on my overall conditioning? Stay tuned for the upcoming results.

Just How Fast is Fast Enough? Part 2

Since Part 1 touched upon Olympic ‘C’ qualifying it would seem only right to discuss the more traditional way of gaining entry into the Olympics – that of earning it. The second level of qualification is achieved by meeting the ‘B’ standard as set out by the IOC. For example the upcoming 2008 Beijing Games has set the ‘B’ qualification time for the men’s 100 free at 0:50.95. I don’t know exactly how this standard is calculated but normally in major competitions it’s arrived at by adding some percentage to prior finals averages. More importantly these ‘B’ standards appear to limit the field to roughly the top 100 in the world (admittedly based upon the very small sample I've checked). The catch to ‘B’ qualification is the qualification only allows countries one athlete per event. Much better is to meet ‘A’ standards which enable a country to enter two competitors. This third and highest level of qualification requires both potential Olympians to achieve a time which lies roughly in the world’s top 25. For the men’s 100 free in Beijing this translates to a rather quick 0:49.23. Some may remember in the past a country could qualify three for an event (medal sweeps did occur on a few occasions) but no longer. The rule change has unfortunately meant some unfairness for any sport superpowers who can qualify three or more ‘A’ athletes (read USA for swimming). Because of this every Olympics now sees some not in attendance who are significantly better than most of those actually participating in the Games. It just makes all those frivolous ‘C’ category swimmers even harder to take.

Apparently I’m not alone in condemning the lack of at least some sort of qualification standards for these 12th FINA World Championships. The numerous complaints have caused FINA’s executive director Cornel Marculescu to announce FINA will analyze this question when they return to Switzerland, though he defends the current open door policy as he feels the participation from typically non-swimming nations shows the international “strength” of the sport. Personally I think his stance is profoundly racist, coming as it surely must from a belief the citizens of countries with only ‘C’ qualifying swimmers will be encouraged by the mere presence of one of their own at these championships and will overlook their actual performance. But maybe I’m saying this because my country has gone the exact opposite route with its Olympic athletes. Not for Canada to use national rankings or even IOC’s qualification standards to select its athletes. No, my country instead requires its athletes to be ranked top 12 in the world before being allowed to compete internationally. While in main this policy has come about because of long standing budget constraints I think there’s little doubt it continues in part to avoid having to report Canadian athletes placing in the thirties or forties. It’s grossly unfair to our athletes and a topic to which I’ll return at some later date to deal with in depth.

If you're interested I’ve located a video clip on Youtube showing 'C' qualifier Eric Moussambani’s 2000 Sydney Games race which Damien referred to in his comments on Part 1. Interestingly the Youtube viewers are more indignant over the audience's hilarity than Mr. Moussambani’s performance. If they can’t see the humour this swim occurred in the Olympics (and the fact he was swimming alone as the two other ‘C’ qualifiers were DQ’d for false starts) they really shouldn’t go into Youtube’s comedy section.

Just How Fast is Fast Enough? Part 1

Today in Melbourne is the start of swimming in the 12th FINA World Championships. I was curious about the qualifying times needed to swim in such an august event and how they compared to the Olympics and looked for them on FINA’s website. Found it difficult to find them, mostly because they don’t have any. That’s right, anybody can swim at swimming’s world championships – no different from your local masters swimming meet. OK that’s not exactly true, because you do have to be sponsored by your country and if your country is any sort of power in swimming being selected becomes problematical¹. But apparently there are plenty of countries where actual competition for the available spots isn’t a concern. Take the men’s 100 meter free – the premier event in swimming. The Olympics next year will see a little over sixty swimming the event. In this year’s world championships an amazing one hundred seventy six are entered. The first heat is populated entirely by swimmers with no times. Yes no joke, take a look for yourselves. Apparently they’ve never raced a 100 meter free before now. And not just this event, this is happening across the board for both men and women's events. To me the concept of starting out one's competitive swimming career by competing in a FINA world championship borders on the absurd but it’s true. The first appearance by a swimmer who can at least swim a hundred meters under a minute is the third heat. The Canadian men’s senior national qualifying time is 0:53.05 which would see you seeded no worse than the twelfth heat. Why is this happening? If anything shows just how important the Olympic Games are to our sport it’s the reason behind all this. For the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have made attending these world championships a requirement to be eligible for ‘C’ qualifying time consideration. You see every country wants to have Olympians but there just aren't enough Olympic calibre athletes to go around. So, because the Olympic Games is all about participation, the IOC has created a special category for athletes whose performance would never, ever allow them to see the insides of the Olympic Village but are the best their countries can send. The ‘C’ qualifier. I remember watching what I recall was either the 1988 Seoul Games or the 1992 Barcelona Games, whichever one was the first Games to have them, when CBC showed a ‘C’ qualifying swimmer almost not finishing the race. One of those, “hey guess what happened at the Games today?” spots. The TV announcers were laughing during the race, what with spectators crowding the pool side watching the man’s struggles and a dozen or so swimmers taking off their sweats just in case they needed to go in, that we might be witnessing the first Olympic swimmer requiring a lifeguard to save him. It was not, however, amusing to me when I thought of all those swimmers who worked so hard for so many years only to fall short of achieving their dream to swim in the Olympics. Clearly the IOC thought so too because they’ve made it much more difficult to qualify even under the ‘C’ category. I think, though, they have a ways to go.

¹Unless you’re Eric Shanteau, who finding Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte blocking his way in his favorites the 200 and 400 IM decided to concentrate instead on the 200 breast. Three weeks ago he qualified for these world championships in that event, even beating out world record holder Brendan Hansen in the process. You can read more about his remarkable accomplishment here.

Inspiration

Recently Joe and I have been discussing whether Ian is aware of our blogs and what we write about him. For those who may have only recently, obviously very recently, started reading either of our two blogs Ian is our club’s best active swimmer. Even with a gimpy shoulder. The Hyack Masters do have a couple of still better swimmers in the persons of Vladimir and Doug but they don’t practice with the club (our hour-long practices being too short and slow for them) so for the purposes of this post Ian stands alone. Joe is curious about Ian’s thoughts on what we blog about him. From what little I know of him I don’t think he’s particularly interested in what we say assuming he even bothers to read our blogs. My opinion. But every swim club, whether masters, competitive, or triathlon, should have someone, someone like Ian, who has real swimming talent because they provide the inspiration for the rest of us to try harder and to swim better. Watching an individual in the pool next to you who has not only swims faster but works harder in practice leaves little excuse for personal indulgences. So often in life we see where one extraordinary talent leads others soon follow and swimming is no different. Having that person in the pool allows us to measure ourselves and discover we’re not all that different, which in turn provides the motivation to work harder to make ourselves into the person we’re capable of becoming. Now Joe, just how do we get Vlad to swim with us?

A New Swimming Blog

The 17thman discovered another swimming blog titled Southern California Aquatics and linked to it. After a week reading it I can definitely say I find it excellent. The posting is maintained by Tony and he’s given me a lot more topics to write about (unfortunately no time to do anything about it right now). Tony also has linked to still another swimming blog by the name of Timed Finals. Both spend extensive time on current goings on in the swimming world with particular emphasis on the international elites and the American NCAA (there’s obviously some overlap there). What I really like about Southern California Aquatics is Tony puts in a lot of information about what he’s being coached on and his swim club (from which the name of his blog was taken) has excellent coaching headed by Clay Evans and Bonnie Adair. I’ve already taken some of the coaching he’s received about his turns and started trying to apply them to my own swimming. Next time I’m in LA I must see if I can arrange a private turn lesson from Bonnie Adair because wow, her girls can really turn! Take a look at this backstroke race on Youtube.

The day before yesterday Timed Finals published an article about the retirement of 33 year old Inge De Bruijn, the Dutch four time Olympic gold medalist and multiple world record holder which you can find here. The issue was raised about some believing her times were drug assisted and not wanting to be left out I added my own two cents to the discussion. Commentary is now closed but I’d be interested in finding out what opinions any readers might have about De Bruijn. Please note there are two Scotts commenting but I’m the one without an Olympic medal (I don’t want people to be confused).

Clearly I Need to Go on a Diet

Getting rid of these handles of mine is becoming something of a bother. Beyond ensuring I eat a proper balanced diet and studiously avoiding junk food and soft drinks I haven’t actually set out to lose weight, preferring to rely on my exercise regime to do it for me. This has worked up to recently but with the decrease in my activity my fat loss seems to have stalled. Now having been chronically underweight for my entire childhood the idea of going on a proper restricted calorie diet is very hard to accept,
though it’s becoming more and more likely I’m going to have to at least restrict the size of my serving portions if I’m to reach my target 30” waist. I’ll first try to start by eliminating my late evening snacks and see what that does. If it doesn’t have any appreciable impact I’ll move on to harsher methods. On a positive note getting away from my middle aged spread I think this month has seen improvement in my upper back deportment as exhibited in the leveling of my shoulders from prior months.

Perhaps the soreness in my neck and shoulders is not entirely due to poor fly technique? Of course my lower back is as twisted as ever but one must stay hopeful.

It’s Time to Ease Up

Last night’s practice was tailor-made for me, a workout devoted to prepping for a 200 race and I don’t think it was a coincidence either. I’m very flattered Coach has been giving me my own specialized sets in the middle of regular training, but designing a full practice around me is going way beyond what I deserve. Unfortunately I could provide little payback as a reward for Brad’s efforts. The workout was planned to be:

3 x [200 (100 fr & 100 ch) @ 3:30 + 4 x 25 K @ 0:30]
100 ch easy
5 x 200 ch @ PB 200 + 0:26 declining 0:04 (negative 100 splits)
2 x 400 free;

but we never got to the 400s as we started out a little late and then dawdled around for several minutes before beginning the main set. To substitute for the 400s Coach had us do 8 x 25 instead, with the choice of doing them either as sprints or as tiger sprints (number of breaths declining 3/2/1/0 per lap). We in Lane Six went with the tiger sprints and so finished what seemed like a dismal night’s performance for pretty well everyone.

Personally in the main set I only achieved the required splits and declines for just the first two reps, failing to continue the decline in the third and subsequent repeats. I was simply dead in the water, my arms and legs heavy and weak by the end of the first lap with the feeling only getting worse each progressive 25. Nothing better exemplifies the degree of my lethargy than my heart rate, which peaked at a pathetic 120 beats per minute. Clearly I’m over trained. This doesn’t really come as a surprise with a training schedule virtually guaranteeing I hit the wall at some point, having decided when I first started out it would be better in the long run to over train as opposed to under in the beginning. Consequently I went with a full weight program running parallel with my training (an absolute no-no during racing season) while seeing my weekly kilometrage increase threefold (more than fivefold for a short while) at the same time. Logically there was no way I could avoid reaching the point where my body would say enough. Still I did entertain hopes I might be able to slip past and continue training in a way which would allow at least some progression. Endeavoring to continue both strength and endurance training I gradually cut back as overall fatigue mounted but, alas, this has proven to be insufficient. As a result I’m pulling out of the Victoria swim meet. I won’t be able to swim the 200 back anyways and any times I can achieve in my other races wouldn’t be anywhere close to reflecting my ‘true’ state. It’s not worth the time and effort to spend a day in Victoria for a couple of poor races. Most regrettable. So what do I do now? Well I’m going to skip my final weight cycle, the preseason phase, which was scheduled for the rest of March and the beginning of April and after taking a week off go straight into the much easier maintenance program. I also intend to increase my swimming back up to four sessions, or about 10,000 meters a week, for the next month but will restrict myself to working on technique and aerobic endurance. This means dropping down a couple of lanes in Hyack practices which will leave a bitter taste; it also means I’ll be going into our Provincial Championships with little or no speed work. With only a month of proper practice before the Canadian Masters National Championships the following month my entire 2006 – 2007 season is going to have to rest on my results at the U.S. Masters LC Championships in August. Since this provides the starting point for next season, where my real racing will occur, there’s little slack to take up. It’s coming down to just one meet.

More Miscellaneous Ramblings

I’m supposed to be working on my next post regarding free weights and home gyms but find myself at the stage where the various pros and cons concerning the subject matter need to be discussed and its construction too taxing in my present mental state. Neither is there much desire to write about the extraordinary talent of Michael Phelps’ and his ilk given my present swimming struggles. This normally means I simply go on to start writing about the next planned topic, my sister American Sis and her particular athletic talent, but here again the subject’s a touch too similar to Phelps’ situation so she’s not going to be written about either right now. I’ll just ramble on a bit instead. The past couple of practices Coach Brad has given me some individually timed distances at race pace and followed up with some pointers on my technique which has helped a lot. I’ve developed a psychological block about my swimming because of the real uncertainty regarding my speed and endurance and these timed runs are helping establish a reference point for better pacing and thereby faster times while still (most importantly) leaving enough to finish. For certain my present endurance is clearly not ready for racing beyond 100 meters. Unfortunately equally certain is my swimming the 200 back this weekend in Victoria as this meet is the first of only two opportunities to swim long course this entire season. After observing my sprints Brad has instructed me to put more shoulder roll into my backstroke while reminding me at the same time to take a shallower stroke and concentrate on my pull technique, all things I haven’t been working on because of the precipitous drop in my swimming kilometrage. Wanting to put his coaching into practice I showed up at the Canada Games Pool this Saturday and put in a short workout, my first weekend practice in a month. In addition to doing a backstroke ladder for my main set I threw in a quick set of 6 x 50 fly to try out Ian’s advice to stop breathing every stroke. The shoulders are still sore. I think there must be something about swimming fly flatter which impedes a body’s undulation and consequently creates additional stress on the shoulder, but perhaps it’s just my body mechanics which are off. Regardless a lot more practice is going to be required to better integrate the single breath/double pull into my fly. Despite the gloom there are some good things happening. I’m finding my wind is coming back however slowly, as is my ‘feel’ for the water. Together the two are like a warm, well-worn blanket I can hold on to. Like the “Little Engine that Could” I have to keep on saying to myself, “I think I can, I think I can” and maybe one of these days it’ll come true.

Nothing! Nada! Zip!

I’ve always known during tax season my life goes on hold, but it seems fitness also goes on hold too. Weighed and measured myself this morning and pretty well drew blanks across the board. No change in weight and no net change in my measurements make for a pretty dull month’s results. Actually I added half an inch around my waist but this was offset by an equal increase around my neck, which by the body fat measurement system I use, gets deducted from my waist measurement before consulting the tables for my height to determine my body fat percentage. This is a very poor return on the considerable effort I expended over the last month to continue at least some training despite the increase in my working hours. The past couple of months’ evidence points to being over trained, something which calls for a break and reduction in training to get out of the slump. But I can’t really see how I can do that given I’ve already reduced my exercising to a bare minimum - virtually a maintenance level of training. I hypothesize my problem isn’t too much exercise but rather too little sleep, averaging as I am about five hours a night for the past couple of months. The hours actually aren’t bad for this time of year but apparently not enough to support a strenuous swimming program. I’ll wait and see what my March results are before deciding on whether I need to further reduce my training levels.

This was a Good Practice

I swore to myself for the next three or four months I’d only spend time on this blog writing ‘editorials’ such as my ‘Living in the Past’ post instead of frivolous posts merely recounting my day-to-day swimming experiences. But Friday’s practice was a milestone of sorts for me so I’m indulging myself. Our practice was 2,700 meters and started out with 4 x 400s @ 7:00 composed of a free swim, a kick, a pull, and an IM. I won’t speak for the rest of my teammates but I was a little shocked seeing that IM on the board. With my recent difficulties swimming in Lane Six, however, I felt obliged to prove I belonged so when the IM came around I set out to swim it instead of, say, taking the opening fly as a drill. I eased my way through fly, recovered on the back leg, and then simply kept swimming through the breast and free. By doing so I actually finished what was my first 400 IM ever as I quit swimming before swimming the event as a youth. And because I’ve only recently begun to swim the 100 fly with fins you could even say this was my first 100 fly as well. Two more pieces of noteworthy news came this same night. I always try to work in as many back rollover turns into practice as possible now and tonight for the first time I found myself able to stop water from coming up my nose in the turn. It is difficult to convey the deep pleasure this gives me, even if I can only do it for a couple of kicks. Progress and no choking burn – could life get any better? Secondly I finally talked to Coach about needing to get some race specific training for my 200 back and he’s going to incorporate some mid-practice timed drills for me. This goes way beyond what I was expecting, which was something more along the lines of timed runs before or after the workout; but obviously to get reasonably accurate times I need to be warmed up (precluding start of practice) and not too tired (precluding end of practice). I love Hyack coaching!

Living in the Past

With what measure ye mete, it shall be
measured to you again.
And why beholdest thou the mote that is
in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the
beam that is in thine eye. Matthew 7.2-3

There’s a huge emphasis on times in masters swimming. Recent race times, personal best times, existing record times, and workout interval times all figure prominently in how we view our own swimming and that of our teammates and fellow competitors. It’s because we invariably come from competitive swimming backgrounds where a person was entirely valued by how fast they swam - speed being the be all and end all of the sport. There’s some logic to this attitude but I’m going to argue once we get to masters how fast you swim becomes completely irrelevant. Winning a race where there’s less than half a dozen competitors in your age bracket should render the glory of winning moot. Even the concept of records in masters is highly questionable for several reasons. One of them is the effort which must go into racing at one’s physical best. I’ve done some calculations and, taking maximum VO² as the baseline for performance, you would need to swim a minimum of 12,000 to 15,000 meters a week at 80% of max heart rate or better for five years. And that’s assuming very high quality (and harsh) training – likely it would take averaging well above 20,000 meters a week to accumulate the proper kilometrage if you allow for an average pain threshold. When you’re thirteen you have both the time and incentive (the Olympics and university scholarships spring to mind) to pursue such an effort; but as an adult those incentives have passed and life has other more pressing commitments. One may conceivably train to peak conditioning but for how long? Officially masters swimming goes from age 25 to death; is anybody going to train that hard for fifty or more years? Point one: in masters only a handful of swimmers will be racing at their physical peak in any one year and those who do so won’t sustain the effort beyond a few years. A second argument against recognizing masters records relates to the overall numbers who participate in masters swimming. In any sport the level a country’s elite athletes reach directly correlates to the number of its citizens who participate. A broad participation base provides the statistical probability of uncovering those rare individuals who can compete on an international level and only a small percentage from that small pool become world champions. Given the very low participation rate in masters swimming it can be conclusively said those few who swim masters will not reflect the true potential of the sport. Point two: low participation drastically reduces the probability any existing (and future) record will come close to approaching the maximum performance ceilings for masters swimming. A third, and in my opinion the most powerful argument, is the world’s Olympic elite don’t participate in masters swimming. Yes, there are past Olympic games participants who swim in masters, but they do so for only a short period of time before realizing 1) the effort to regain their past conditioning is doomed from the start which invariably leads to frustration; and 2) there’s no glory to be had in masters. The more successful the athlete the less likely they are to reenter swimming – as a case in point there’s not one world masters record now held by a former world record holder. Point three: the fact the proven elite in the sport eschew Masters reduces masters swimming to a minor league level and therefore ill qualified to set benchmarks in the sport.

FINA, the international swimming body, implicitly recognizes this by referring to masters swimming as ‘age group’ swimming, effectively equating our advanced years with those swimmers disabled by physical infirmities (i.e. swimmers with an age disability). It appears all the national bodies also recognize masters swimming isn’t a proper competitive sport: for example Masters Swimming Canada’s tagline is “Fun, Fitness, Friendship, and Participation”; U.S. Masters Swimming’s tagline is “Swimming for Life”. And this is how it should be. Given the huge disparities between the sport’s participants and the number of variables involved it simply isn’t possible to compare times between two swimmers and come to any rational conclusion. I’ve tried to recognize this by purposefully not using my swimming times in my posts, only to be frustrated on occasion by others who announce my times as a benchmark of their own success or failure, or even as a compliment to me. This, if understandable given the competitive paradigm we all came from, is wrong. I don’t say one’s times are not relevant, but rather they only have personal meaning as a measure of one’s own fitness and progress and nothing more. Perhaps an analogy would explain my position better. After a practice a teammate who also trains with a running club (the same running club, incidentally, as Joe belongs to) regaled us with a story about a fellow runner training for triathlons. My teammate, curious about his swimming ability, asked for his time in the 50 meter free. This was something he didn’t know but the very next run came back and told him he could swim the distance in 55 seconds. “Fifty five seconds”, responded this teammate of mine, “why we have swimmers on our team who can swim more than twice that fast!” The story was received with much amusement in the locker room. Apparently I was the singular exception, for I well know we could take that 0:26+ fifty into a proper swim club and get the very same reaction. The runner was not a competitive swimmer, even less a sprinter, and judging him to his face on such a basis was uncalled for. And this from a swimmer, a good swimmer, who’s quit attending swim meets because of a particularly bad race a couple of years before. We simply have to face the reality we no longer compete on an equal basis and to stop evaluating or comparing ourselves against times others swim. By all means judge yourself, for you know best what you’re both capable of, and more importantly, what you’re seeking from masters swimming. I will say, however, that if someone is looking to recapture or redeem their youth I think their efforts are misplaced. There is no glory in masters swimming - health, camaraderie, and perhaps accomplishment, but no glory. That opportunity past by long ago.

P.S. On a lighter note I came across this video of S6 swimmer Igor Plotnikov setting a new SWAD world record of 0:32.52 in the 50 fly… without arms. After watching this (beyond being impressed to no end and wondering if it hurt when his head hit the end of the pool) I definitely felt the need to spend more time in the pool and work on my kick!

And Now For Something Completely Different

Well at last night’s practice I dutifully trotted out the backstroke flags to get ready to request my first timed 200 before practice but when Coach Brad showed up a little later than usual I deferred making the request until afterwards. That turned out to be a mistake as when practice ended I was just glad I could walk off the pool deck. Telling us in our start-of-practice briefing we were “going to do something different tonight” he toted up on the board a warm up which would comprise practically the night’s entire workout. Now I’m absolutely convinced Brad’s stealing sets from our ‘Senior 2:30’ group! Still I’m forced to admit not only does it appear to my inexpert eye to be a good warm up for national level swimmers but it also makes for an excellent one shot training session for us lesser beings. The warm up was a two thousand meter IM set broken out as follows:

2 x 100 fr pl @ 2:00
4 x 25 sw @ 0:50/0:50/0:25/0:55
100 fr sw/pl @ 1:15
4 x 25 sw @ 0:50/0:50/0:25/0:55

The 500 meters are repeated four times swimming the 25s in IM order (eg. in the first subset all the 25s are fly, in the second they’re back, and so on). Ian requested we be allowed to swim in reverse IM order which Coach allowed. I didn’t understand Ian’s rationale so asked him why we wouldn’t want to swim the fly 25s while we were still fresh. His response he wasn’t ready to swim fly plus the 100 free right off the bat was met with murmurs of approval all around so that’s what we did despite my deep reservations about leaving that fly to the end. Reservations clearly justified as it turned out. There’s a reason why I dread trying to race 200 meters – with only six months training under my belt I just don’t have any endurance and flaming out is painful. In fact I’ve learned to my chagrin, as opposed to my youth when I could simply accept the pain and soldier on, nowadays my body simply shuts down. Pain with results makes for a rational decision, but pain and no results is a very bitter pill indeed. Anyways we proceeded with the set. Even doing breaststroke the 25s weren’t difficult, there being only the one 0:25 interval which needed to be taken hard but we had plenty of rest from the following 25. The joker in the pack was that damn 100 free on 1:15. It meant swimming under 1:10 to properly prepare for the next group of 25s. Essentially the set was a 4 x 100 free @ 1:15 with a bunch of meters in between to keep one occupied until the next 100 rolled around. The free and breast went OK, but by the time back came up I wasn’t looking forward to the next 100. I managed to finish it on about 1:11, thanking the gods profusely for having backstroke to recover with, but knew I was finished for the last 100. So after the first four flys I told Darci (the third of our Lane 6 triumvirate) I was only swimming a fifty instead of the 100 and recommended she go ahead. Both Coach and Ian though encouraged me not to give up and try the 100 and so chastened I made the attempt. Struggling through the first 25 I even made a tumble turn and made it back on a reasonable pace but I was completely drained by the effort, and at the 60 meter mark fell off the tempo to such an extent Darci overtook me at the wall. After about a ten second breather I finished off the 100 and then did the next two 25 fly as one-armed drills before finishing the set off with a couple of proper swims. We ended the workout with a 4 x 50 kick @ 1:10 warm down. A really good workout – just a little beyond my capabilities at this time.

English Bay Swim Meet

Yesterday was the fourth swim meet in our province’s race calendar. I entered last month into three events: the 50 free, the 200 back, and the 100 fly. Now racing the fly was a problem – I haven’t reached the point where I’m comfortable with the concept of racing 100 meters fly and had pretty well decided to scratch from the event when the choice was taken out of my hands. I needed to put in a half day’s work that same afternoon, which precluded me from staying around for the event anyways. In so far as the 50 free I had really wanted to swim the 100 but scheduling conflicts didn’t allowed it. So a throw away race because I'm not a sprinter. My 200 back race, however, very much wasn't. First up was the 50 free and I just wasn’t in a good mood at all. Stepping up on the blocks I was wishing to be anywhere else but getting ready to race. Had one of my typical starts and was moderately slow off the blocks, remembered to get a couple of kicks in before surfacing (Coach Brad would appreciate that) and then promptly blew it by taking a breath. I don’t know why I take a breath every time I surface after a dive but it seems to be pretty well ingrained and I’m having difficulty breaking the habit. It didn’t help my mind wasn’t properly focused on the matter at hand either. I also failed to concentrate on getting a powerful stroke and keeping my head down rather than relying on mere turnover; made a marginal turn (not the desired quick and tight tumble I’ve been practicing), and then proceeded to breath every cycle on the way back all the while mentally noting I shouldn’t be doing so and not really caring. I suppose I should take the fact the end result was in the upper range of my target time and be thankful. Yet when you know you should have done better it’s difficult to be satisfied. For someone who lives by the mantra, “always do your very best” it’s particularly irritating. I wasn’t the only one ticked off at my performance. Coach Brad very diplomatically only shook his head while pointing out I took that first breath, but at an elite level an error that egregious would almost certainly result in a talk about whether I was serious at competing and even possibly being placed on probation. If I was coach I’d be absolutely furious.

This was, of course, not the best lead in to my 200 back race. If I was in a delicate mental state before the sprint then my mind was absolutely toast getting into the water for the start. It didn’t take long for me to implode. Half a length into the race I passed under the false start rope and mistaking it for the backstroke flags started into my rollover turn two strokes later. DQ’d before the first turn has to be record somewhere! I actually don’t take the crushing ignominy of it all that badly. There were some mitigating circumstances. The first was I had missed the warm up as I had left my bathing suit at home (I’ll leave the obvious commentary to the amateur psychologists out there) and so didn’t practiced my turns in the competition pool. Instead I had to use the warm up pool which didn’t have any flags. Combining this with UBC’s ‘infinity’ style gutter system providing no visible wall above the water’s surface my practice turns were accordingly exceedingly tentative. This tentativeness naturally carried over into my race and with my paranoia on hair-trigger all it took was the false start rope, the first time I had seen it that day, to set me off. So I was now in a race that wasn’t a race for me. But for whatever reason I couldn’t get going and struggled through out the race, having difficulty maintaining a proper breathing pattern and stroke in addition to the expected difficulty with my turns. My poor swimming performance far, far eclipsed my error with the rope. I’m not sure what I’m to do about my now large mental block in swimming the event. I think I’ll have to actually do several timed swims before my next race in March and so build up some solid experience I can fall back on. At least I hope that’ll work. I’ll talk to Brad and see what he thinks.

Valentine’s Day Practice

As I expected it was a small turn out last night given it was Valentine’s Day, something Coach Brad turned to his advantage by making available three options for our workout’s main set: a sprint set, an IM set, and a ‘distance’ set (which for Hyack Masters means anything 200 and over). Most of Lane 6 swam the IM set (Ian is actually racing the 400 IM this Sunday), while I chose the distance set to work on my backstroke. If you’re curious about the sprint set you can go to my teammate Joe’s blog and read about his adventures there. The distance set was broken into two parts – some dual purpose speed work comprising of 12 x 50 on 1:00 and then straight into 3 x 200. Pace for the fifties was determined by dividing your 200 PB time by four and then adjusting each by the following rotation: first fifty +2, second fifty +1, third fifty +0, and fourth fifty -1; repeating the cycle three times. Once properly fatigued you then carried on into the 200s swimming intervals of 3:30. Not having a PB for 200 back I went with my new low target time for the race and proceeded to fail miserably at achieving any sort of decline in my times. In fact my second and third to last fifties saw me hitting +3 until a sterling effort on my last fifty hauled in a +2 on my final try. This was a minor victory in itself as I was seriously considering by the midway point in taking a minute breather, or even skipping a fifty entirely. Not surprisingly my first 200 was dismal (though my turns have seen considerable improvement recently) and in a move to preserve some semblance of technique I upped the interval to a full 4:00 (a Lane 3/4 interval). The extra thirty seconds clearly helped as I took nearly ten seconds off my first attempt’s time the second go around, and then another ten seconds on the third to ultimately obtain something which could be characterized as ‘not completely sucking’. At least I achieved the desired decline for my 200s though a cynic would wonder, given the eye-brow raising time of my first 200, if it was possible not to. That’s a rather noteworthy event for me even if I did hedge a bit on my interval times.

A quick note on my target times for my race mentioned briefly earlier. Since I’m racing many of my events for the first or second time I don’t have any proper ‘personal bests’ to gauge my real progress. So early in my training logically I should be setting best times every time I swim. Consequently I give myself a range of times within which I expect I should be able to swim on race day. If I do better than that I consider it to be the equivalent of a ‘PB’, worse and I consider it to be a setback. For 100 meter races I allow a two second range, a span that translates into a second for any fifties and four seconds for 200 meters. So when I write of a time being in the “low range of my target” that would mean a swim which did marginally better than hoped, whereas something in the “high end” would be marginally worse. I’m very uncertain about my 200 distances as I don’t feel ready conditioning-wise to race them, my backstroke especially as in a short course pool it means seven turns. Frankly it scares the bejezus out of me. I had set my target range for this upcoming Sunday’s English Bay swim meet’s 200 backstroke as far back as October and only recently have adjusted it (marginally) to the extent where my original upper limit is now my lower limit for this race. But as long as I get a decent race I’ll take it – just to get something on the board.

Struggling to Get Back

Today I went for my first non-Hyack practice since the middle of January, setting myself the scaled back goal of swimming 2,600 meters, including a 400 fly ladder (w/fins) and a main set of 6x100 back. It must have been last night’s Friday Hyack practice going surprisingly well which prompted me to do so. After missing close to two weeks swimming I’ve managed for the most part to at least attend the thrice-weekly Hyack practices with decidedly mixed results. But last night I finally swam some decent times over a few 50 backstrokes which gave me a little psychological boost for my upcoming 200 meter back race at this Sunday’s swim meet. Unfortunately fatigue quickly caught up with me this morning and I left the pool with only 2,000 meters tallied.

I feel like I’m in limbo. I’ve drawn up a very detailed schedule of what I need to be doing and when if I’m to keep to my two year plan, and I’m not adhering to it. Right now I’m supposed to be building up the conditioning which I’ll be using in next season’s races and accordingly the plan calls for me to be swimming 20,000 plus meters a week. I need the kilometrage to correct my various stroke techniques, build my strength and endurance, and expand my aerobic capacity. These last three weeks, however, have seen me averaging only around 3,500 meters – completely inadequate for my purposes. I’ve even been missing some weight sessions which can’t be made up as they’re tied to the swimming season. The limbo feeling comes from getting ready to race an event (my 200 back) for which I’m clearly not prepared. No pace setting, no trial races, no race specific workouts of my own at all this past month. I still don’t know what my target time should be for the race. This is having an eerie similarity to my first swim meet last September and that meet’s 200 IM race. Not the comparison I want to make.

Maybe the Camera Does Add Ten Pounds

Picture time. I look at these pictures and find they’re completely different from the image I get back when gazing in the mirror. I really mean completely different. I don’t see anything near the same degree of warp in my back when studying my posture in the mirror, and this body as portrayed in the pictures is much heavier looking than I feel is true (at least based on my own personal body image). I mean, a waist measurement of 34” isn’t that bad is it? Now considering myself a reasonably rational being I’ve given considerable thought to this disparity between captured image and actual viewing and I think I’ve come up with explanations. The first is when I view my torso in the mirror I typically do so from fairly close in (around a meter away) and looking slightly down. This gives a foreshortening effect on my body and tends to minimize my back’s horizontal deformity. My nephew who shoots these pictures is considerably shorter and takes the pictures from around two meters away which results in the different perspective.

To test this theory I viewed myself a similar distance from the mirror and voilá, my back’s kink was much more apparent. Score one for pictures. The second hypothesis is when we look at an image with our binocular vision we perceive depth whereas a camera with its single lens can’t, so a camera ‘sees’ only the widest aspects of face and body. I think the effect is like squishing yourself up against a pane of glass. Thus the well known saying ‘the camera adds ten pounds’. Score one for human sight. But I’ve never really thought before about this and its ramifications. To look as thin as those actors and models seen all the time on screen and print they would have to be really thin! The restrictions on model weight some fashion shows in Europe have been imposing recently are almost certainly justified when you think just how thin a model must be to get the ‘waif’ look in print. Clearly unhealthily so.

So now realizing this I’ve come to a new decision – I’ll make my target waist 30” instead of 32”. Doesn’t everyone want to look good in their pictures?

A Little Confusion

Today being the first of the month I carried out my official weighing and measurements and discovered I’ve lost only a half inch from my waist to go with losing a single kilo over the past month. Based on my method of body fat measurement this means a loss of 800 grams fat as well as 200 grams of muscle. That couldn’t be right could it? Personally I don’t think so. Though I haven’t been able to swim at all these past couple of weeks due to work demands I have mostly kept up with my physical therapy and weight program. Logically I should see continued progress in overall fitness and muscle mass. A more likely scenario is somewhere I’ve made a measurement error or errors which has effectively reduced this month’s loss around my waist by half an inch. Doubling my February waist reduction to a full inch would do the same for my fat loss and therefore leave me with around 600 grams of muscle gain. I find that a much more plausible result. We’ll see if February’s results confirm this hypothesis.