Summer is coming and the Season is Gearing up. What about Training?

Open water YIIIPPPPEEEEE!!!

 

This year is really running away with us, a bit like leaving the door open and the horse has bolted – with you on it!! if you are into open water swimming in Mud island, you have just got to love that opening photo that I took of a friend of mine that I took at my local lake. It has been a weird start to so-called “British summer” – only two weeks ago I ventured down to the Jubilee river on a cold an overcast morning to take my first real dip in the lakes. Temperature was hovering just above 10 Degrees Celsius and an intrepid swimmer and I were the only two braving the bracing, albeit refreshing river. My plan was to be in there for about 30 min as it was my first swim. with a lot of chatting and wallowing, we lasted 55 min in the water. It was so wonderful to have the entire river to ourselves and more surprising, was that I did not get cold at all. What a great way to get back into the rivers and lakes.

The following week was a typical Spring week in Britain with the Average day throwing all types of weather at us. On most days you would get Sun, Rain, Hail, Snow and high winds. However, when the weekend arrived, our temperatures suddenly climbed into the mid twenties and subsequently the water temperatures rose. The lake that I use was bustling over the weekend and it was glorious to be out in fresh water that was full of Duck poo rather than chlorine.

So now that Summer in Britain is over – we have had our two days of sunshine, the week brought the greyness back but the temperatures remained pretty good so the lakes featured a lot this week. I am still looked at like the mad man who I am when all these wetsuiters appear and there is Mr Hippo with my orange trunks and goggles and cap, whilst they are dressed up for the Arctic. Another thing that I focused on this week was not focusing, Every now and again it is nice to just jump in a lake and swim, no clock chasing, Not bothering that there are others out there that NEED to be overtaken – even if they are dressed in rubber. Just get in and swim and fall in love with the open water again. 3 nice dips in the lake this week.

 

 

                                              Training habits

As per usual, I have been following a few blogs and the DYST site, to keep abreast of who is doing what out there and my thoughts turned to training habits – or lack there of , in my case. I always find it interesting to see how vastly they differ from person to person. When it comes to marathon swimming (anything over 25km) the results are vastly different.  I understand that there are many types of personality out there and all of us are different, with regards to Nutrition, training, logging training sets, monitoring heart rate and many other aspects.One in particular caught my attention, actually, it left me dumbfounded. There is a person who is training For an English channel attempt later this year and his post was as follows :-

                                                    Hi All. Please your opinion.
Up till now I did once a month an “epic event”
October 20 k
November 24 k
December 28 k
Jan 30k
Feb 20k × 2 (2 secuence days)
Mar 32.3 k
Apr 22k × 2
I have 3.5 months to my tide .
Do you think I should do more 10+ hrs swim or from now on to stay with shorter back to back?

WOW!!!!! was my initial response. That is some serious mileage. I barely do that in my car. Now, as I understand, those are single swims, over and above other training swims. A typical flurry of responses – all good, ensued. This got me to thinking about why are they so different for different swimmers. I would now like to wade in with what my thoughts are  and what I have learnt over the last 8 years. Nothing Scientific but just my ramblings.

Trends seem to indicate that there are two schools of thought when it comes to training for these sort of events. Through my blogging, I am realising that there are many people who – quite frankly – become very intimidated by posts like the above and also by posts like the ones that I post with regards to getting by on minimal amount of work. Confusion in the pools, lakes, rivers and oceans is rife and many are too scared to express themselves with their queries. I liken it to the kids at School who always seemed  to just breeze through the curriculum with  – seemingly – very little effort, whilst others, this included me, had to really slog to get by.  I can say that there are three types of people who achieve  these sorts of goals in life

1. Micro mManagers. Focus is on   Mental preparation, nutritional preparation, physical preparation, technique training, logging and measuring times, speed, heart rates, calories used, weight loss, regular physios and massages, cross training, they employ trainers and professionals. In other words, trying to micro manage the whole event from goal conception to its final conclusions
2.  Spontaneous Swimmers. This group just swim. No planned sets, no dietary changes,no logging and measuring, no massages, no cross training. in other words, whatever happens happens! Do the work with no questions asked. I fit into this group. Spontaneity being a massive part of my life, as is procrastination.
3. Perfect Planners. A group of people who  manage to find the  happy medium between the above.

I  know people from all three of the groups that have gone on to successfully achieve their goals. Conversely, I also know people from all three groups that have not quite achieved what they set out to do,

The fact is, there is no wrong or right answer as to what you should do to get through your goals. We are all individuals and all of us require, and are stimulated by different things.

So back to the schools of thoughts that are out there with regards to training and when and where I believe they can be adopted

Long swims way ahead of time

Although the example, at face value, is hugely impressive, I really do not think that doing that sort of distance is good for you.  However, I do Agree that doing long swims is crucial for a first timer to get to know what it is like to do these sort of distances in the water and the cold. At certain points during a 12 plus hour swim, your body and your mind is going to rebel and knowing when this will happen and also how to deal with it is imperative to success. Commonly called “hitting the wall” it has only happened to me once and that was in the English channel and happened exactly after 8 hours and 20 minutes when my mind went to mush and I broke down. This, unsurprisingly, was about 20 minutes past the longest swim I had ever done. Luckily, I knew how to deal with this as it had happened a few times on the build up to this sort of time in the water. I cannot ever say that I have hit the wall due to physical capabilities, probably due to the fact that I can only – in my wildest dreams – live up to the example above . In my case it has always been mental. I wrestle with one question when this happens and generally I pull myself back from the brink and continue.

Mostly in this world, People talk about Hours not Kms so I have no idea how quick or slow this swimmer is, this makes a big difference as to how people approach their training some people swim at about 2km an hour whilst others are closer to 5km. You can see how the differences in distances would relate to time, with the former taking 10 hours to complete 20 km, the latter taking 4 hours. This becomes a huge factor when trying to fit those sort of distances into ones life. I can tell you that I very rarely have a 10 hour slot in a month to fit in any distance training.  I probably manage about 15km a week and my longest swim is never much over 1.5 hours  – or 6km.

A trend that seems to be obvious is that the new comers  in this game seem to get it into their heads that Distance is King, The longer I train the better! The old farts like myself are more of the opinion that we would rather at least get to the start in one piece rather than have done all that distance only to be afflicted by Physical issues. I think the older – and more fart like – we become, this is by far the overriding factor. This is how I train at the moment  Short Regular swims with the occasional 2 plus hour swim thrown in for fun. I only have about an hour a day that I am able to dedicate to my training and that is it.

Short swims on a regular basis

I would say that this is fine bearing in mind you have done long swims before and know where you might encounter problems when out in a channel or lake or river. Basically, THERE IS NO SHORTCUT. You are not going to become a marathon swimmer if you do not do the grunt work. At some point this needs to be done. Once you are happy with your body, your mental capacity and can realise when things are sliding and try to nip them in the bud, before they manifest themselves at a physical level.  I am still in awe at this example but strongly believe that this is some pretty heavy-duty training. I might train like that if I was going to swim the Atlantic!!!! Nah, I know me, only in my wildest dreams.

The common, and more widely adopted scenario is Winter (October to April) in the pool, with shorter swims concentrating on technique and slowly building your stamina, then, at the start of the Dover (May) training, you can mentally switch from shorter distances to developing cold and distance acclimatization. One thing I strongly believe is, if you have a decent base to work from, you will surprise yourself at how quickly you can ramp up the distance. Other common training techniques are to do no more than 60% of the distance of your race in one session ( if you doing an EC, I would not train much over 20km in any single swim) the third and final technique is to do one or two weekends of back to back swims so 8 hours Saturday and 8 hours Sunday.

Historically, I always worried that I was NEVER training enough, even now with quite a few marathons under my belt. it was only a few years ago that a friend and record for the oldest Channel swimmer put an analogy in my head which made all my worrying obsolete and defunct. It seems that I need to have someone give me an analogy to many things for me to understand things. Concepts will be completely alien to me until someone puts it in a way that my brain can conceptualize. The analogy  was this – you may have heard it before – Your car has a fuel tank and you can get 500 miles out of the fuel in that tank. You have two choices in keeping it full.

1- Top it up with a few dollars ever day

2 – Empty the tank and to fill it is going to cost you many dollars

An undeniable fact is that the car will always get about 500 miles out of that tank no matter how you fill it. In my head this made sense and my training now is very different from what it was, but still very inferior – from a physical standpdpoint -to most people out there doing the same goals.

Other Aspects that are effected by training

Training is a big part of a goal like this but it does have the ability to either make or break a swim as there are many knock on effects due to either OVER training or UNDER training. The most obvious one we have discussed above and that is your ability to at least arrive on the start beach in one piece. Bearing in mind the following equation from my own sub 12 hour swim, you are going to be doing near enough to 50000 strokes, on a back to back 8×8 training weekend = 67000 stokes. Now I do not care who you are, that is taxing and putting a lot of strain on shoulder, back, joints, tendons,muscles  and cartilage. There is a very fine line between Over training and under training and balancing that with the modern world is a very personal and very individual achievement.

Another Aspect of marathon swimming, or any endurance event, is the ability to keep focused. Knowing who I am, I know that focus is a big thing so I cannot have very long goals so I try to keep them short for fear of losing focus altogether. From signing up to do a channel swim to doing it was 7 months and All I did was what I was told to do at the beach, listened to many accounts of people who had done it and then went and did it. With 4 months to my swim, I hated the taste of salt water and I had never swum more than about 8km. You will be amazed at how quickly you can ramp up your distance and also ramp up your cold tolerance and your taste for salt water.

Train enough to keep the love of the goal going. There is nothing worse or more counter productive than doing something that you feel has become a chore. Over training can be a huge contributor to burnout and then you have this goal that you have invested so much in but you have to drag yourself round a lake or river or the ocean. At this point your reasons for doing the training are totally wrong. You now HAVE TO rather than WANT TO. I say burnout but let me be more specific, MENTAL BURNOUT. Any goal, marathon goals in particular, are very much a mental game Commonly, they say marathon swimming is 70% mental, 20% physical and 10 % luck. On that basis, I personally invest far more time on training my mind for a goal rather than my body. You can be the fittest person out there with thousands of kilometres of swimming under your belt but if you are not in the right mental space you might as well not even start as whatever deficiencies that you have mentally will finally manifest themselves in a physical way.

despondency is also a factor that I think needs to be taken into account. The internet is an amazing beast, it gives us instant access to thousands of tomes about pretty much everything. But the beast can bite back. Through my blogging, I find people who can relate to what I am saying. I fairly regularly get despondent people emailing me as they are reading about all these people training WAY more than they are and they become very despondent and a knock on effect is OVER training as they believe that they will only be successful with thousands of kilometres in a pool, lake or river.

The success rate in a marathon swim is pretty low, it is getting better but still pretty low. Of all the people whom I have met, successful or not, not one of them did not have the physical capability to accomplish  their goal. So why is it so low? In my opinion, we all get caught up in the physical aspect and the mental one is sadly and most commonly overlooked. This is through no fault of the people in question, the Physical side is tangible, it is measurable and very well understood. The mental side is far less tangible and measurable and far less understood.

In closing, I would like to offer the following

THERE IS NO RIGHT WAY OR WRONG WAY TO APPROACH A GOAL. THERE IS ONLY YOUR WAY.

The key is to LISTEN TO YOUR GUT INSTINCT. If you feel yourself suffering from any of the above, it is perfectly acceptable to take a break from training. Rather Train when you are in the right frame of mind.

Good luck to all out there with a big goal. There will be many out there right now who are planning on taking on possibly the biggest thing in their life.

NEVER LOSE THE PASSION FOR WHAT YOU ARE AIMING FOR.

On a lighter note, this made me chuckle

20 years ago we had Bob Hope, Johnny Cash and Steve Jobs

today we have no hope, no cash and no jobs

PLEASE don’t let Kevin BACON die