In my experience in masters swimming, the swimmer is far more independent than an age group, high school, or collegiate swimmer. We grow up with coaches making all sorts of decisions for us. They write our workouts, pick our events for us, arrange our travel and meals on the road, plan our taper and make sure we are ready for every race. For a masters swimmer, most, and sometimes all of these things are left completely up to the athlete. It can work, just look at Olympic Gold Medalist Jason Lezak who has trained completely on his own for 6 years.
First, if you haven't been here before, I'm a father of a child with Autism and I'm competing in the 2012 US Masters Swimming Summer Nationals, and raising money for the Ozark Center For Autism. Go here for my intro blog.
I do still have a coach to write workouts. He does as good of a job as I can expect. Many of the workouts are geared towards types of swimmers that are not anything like me. But, they are still challenging to me, and I know going head to head with my team mates makes me better every workout. I can appreciate I don't get workouts tailored for me in this, or just about any masters group. Close to half the group are triathletes, and a good portion of the remaining in the group consider themselves distance freestylers. A person that is training for a 2.4 mile swim just to begin their race, needs very different training than someone that specializes in going really fast breast stroke for short distances like I do. So, 2 or 3 years ago, I began swimming on my own, at least once a week. This is where I work on my breast stroke drills, speed work, and big kick sets that I don't get with my masters group.
For quite some time, I went completely on my own. Just recently I started reaching out for help on writing my workouts. For this morning's workout, I went to a blog written by Jeff Commings. We are pretty similar types of swimmers in that our primary stroke is breast stroke, and we like the shorter distances. It's also worth noting, Jeff is quite a bit faster than I am, and will be competing in the U.S. Olympic Trials next month at the age of 38. Even at my lifetime best I fell short of qualifying for that meet, missing the 100 breast by less than 1/2 a second in 2000. The qualifying time was slower than it is now, and that was 12 years and 2 kids ago. So I have no illusions of keeping up with Jeff, and I'm quite thankful that in my next meet, he and I will be in different age groups. I do think copying his workouts will help me reach my own goals. Today I did the same workout Jeff did Wednesday. Go to Jeff's blog to see what it was. I was looking for some good quality fast swims and this workout gave it to me. The only adjustments were I couldn't go from a dive at Health Ridge. There are no starting blocks, and it's only 4' deep, so diving is a bad idea. But the pool is 25 meters, so I didn't have to adjust anything else. Getting my 75 times was tricky, I tried to sync the clocks, but only got them to with in 3 seconds of eachother. But, the 50 breast at the end, I pushed a 34 flat, which I am extremely happy with, considering how tired and sore I was in this workout.
Another workout planning lesson I learned this week: Tuesday night I planned my Wednesday morning workout on my Workout Trainer app on my phone. I picked out 3 workouts as I was dozing off, put them on my calendar before dropping my phone on the nightstand. The first workout, Wicked Weights, I was thinking 'Wow, that's a lot of push ups'. Then the next workout, Peripheral POWAH!, just as many push ups. And the last workout, Arms & Abs added even more. I probably would not have planned that if I wasn't dozing off. Before it was done, I had completed 260 push ups. Sore chest for 3 days!!
Have a great Memorial Day weekend. I think the best we can do to honor thos that died for what we have, is to enjoy the freedoms they gave us to the fullest!
No comments:
Post a Comment