Races? There’s Small, Medium, and Large

1. SPRINTS: 50–100 YARDS/METERS

When once asked what wins sprint races, world record holder and Olympic champion Matt Biondi replied, “Four things: technique, technique, technique, and speed.” It doesn’t take much endurance to swim as fast as you can for twenty to ninety seconds. A deadly efficient stroke is what you need. Just make sure you can hold your stroke length when you’re going as fast as you possibly can, when your heart rate is crashing through the roof, and lactic acid is flooding into your hapless and hurting muscles.

Efficiency is so critical in short races because you’re probably going 20 percent to 25 percent faster in the 100 meters than the 1500, for example, and the difference in drag and the power needed to overcome it is enormous. Small inefficiencies become hugely magnified in a sprint.

But you can’t overlook the need to supply enough energy and oxygen to muscles that are gulping it down for all they’re worth, powering your body through this over-the-top effort. Your system also has to whisk away all that energy-sapping lactic acid as fast as your muscles produce it if they’re to keep going.

All that means anaerobic training, of course, and you can’t let your stroke get sloppy while pushing the practice pace.

Finally, you need the power that comes from training your neuromuscular system to fire up all available muscle motor units to overcome whatever drag your stroke efficiency hasn’t eliminated. That means swimming “power sets,” short reps at top effort. (See the appendix for some suggestions.)

2. MIDDLE DISTANCE: 200–400 YARDS/METERS

Sometimes called speed/endurance events because they take both, these are among the most difficult to train for. You don’t get a break. Speeds are fairly close to the sprint, but you’ve got to hold on for up to ten times as long. It’s not the higher stroke rate of the shorter sprints that will crack your technique and efficiency but the surprising amount of anaerobic work in these races, even though they’re longer and slower than sprints. It’s hard to stay fussy about your stroke over an entire quarter mile without enough air.

Of course, as your technique starts to come apart, the “energy cost” of holding your speed inflates even as you have less and less left with every tick of the stopwatch. So middle-distance racers need a two-pronged training strategy:

1. Long, aerobic sets for endurance—sets that will do far more good if they train the nervous system right along with the aerobic system, focusing on stroke efficiency too.

2. Race-pace swimming, to develop endurance at higher speeds and get you used to the stroke rate and anaerobic conditions that make these distances such a thorough test.

What it all comes down to is finding and holding the right pace—staying out of oxygen debt,

operating aerobically for as long as you can. (The more efficient your stroke, remember, the

longer you can hold on to that aerobic state of grace.) It’s a hard trick to pull off unless you

swim most of the race at an even pace. A blazing first half usually guarantees a painful

second half. That’s why the world’s best middle-distance swimmers almost always swim the

second half as fast as or even faster than the first. And mastering that tactic takes practice.

(See the appendix for some suggestions.) 

  

3. DISTANCE SWIMMING: 800 METERS AND UP 

For the thousands of runners who turn to swimming every year to find less body-punishing workouts and who think of a two-mile footrace as barely the far side of a sprint, the comparatively short distance–horizon in swimming comes as a surprise. The 1500 meter, which may take a top contender fifteen to twenty minutes—nearly the same time as a 5K run—is the longest event most swimmers ever enter. And the marathon’s time span of three to five hours, a fairly common experience for runners, is all but unheard of in swimming. 

So why all the emphasis on high-yardage training? Because swim coaches believe we must not only develop endurance but also “feel for the water,” which is really just another way of saying natural efficiency. And they believe it takes years of practice and millions of yards of repetition to develop this.

It doesn’t. If you can accelerate the development of an efficient stroke, which is just what you’re learning to do in this book, then you can drastically reduce the yardage it takes to prep for an endurance swim. Instead, you work on developing what I call efficiency endurance, the ability to keep your stroke the same whatever distance you swim. Training sets up to half again the distance of your race will do this if you use them to practice and improve your ability to keep your stroke long and efficient, lap after lap after lap.

The second reason coaches push so much high-yardage training on swimmers is to develop the “clock in the head,” the instinct for swimming at just the right pace so they don’t kill the race by overswimming at the beginning. Distance swimmers practice pacing endlessly, learning how to keep going at the same pace for lap after lap even as fatigue mounts. One way to shorten the learning curve is by swimming descending reps, which we mentioned in the last chapter, in which each one gets progressively faster during a long set. (See the appendix for samples.)