50/50 Swim Challenge
OK, there are three flavors here; feel free to come up with your own variation. Thismis probably best for Jan OS people who want a swim focus, but I'm doing Nov OS, YMMV:
- Swim 50 km in 50 days. That's anything from 1 K each day for 50 straight days to 50 KM all in one day. Me, I'm planning on about 1600 km a day, five days a week for seven weeks. Let's call this. Level I
- Swim on any fifty days starting now until end of Dec, a mile each day. Level II
- Swim a total of fifty miles over fifty consecutive days. Hard Corps Level III
My plan for a typical swim is WU 400 yds, focus on distance per stroke. THen 100 yds backstroke, focus on linear roll. Then 500 yds of paddle work, as 50s or 100s, focus again on dps. A speed set of 500 yds, as 50 or 75s or 100s, with rest interval as needed for quality speed work. 200 breast, focus on quality of early catch. 50 yds CD, for a mile or 1600 meters.
0
Comments
Just know I'll be playing along, even if it's dry in the basement!
Mike, as self-appointed arbiter of this challenge, I hereby declare that if you are tough enough to do 3 hours/week for seven weeks on a Vasa Trainer, you can proudly call yourself a 50/50 finisher.
@ Patrick... my computer/interwebs skills are stuck in the '90s; I have no idea how to make a Google Docs spreadsheet. But I still have my 1984 Macintosh, as well as a Commodore 64 somewhere in the basement.
Wm
I will call my official start today with 3000yds. 10/31-12/19 will be my 50 days . I have no idea where I'll fall in as far as Level 1,2,or3. My plan is alot of swim volume leading into IMCZ , then alot of swim volume in the 2 weeks recovery so it should work out pretty well. Normally I try to get in 3 days a week, 1 day speed work 100's and 50's , 1 day endurance 500's , and one day strength w/paddles and PB. Any additional days will be easy mileage probably alternating between PB and Fin sets working on technique thru bi-lateral breathing and a good amount of back and breast stroke.
This is just the motivation I need!...I'm in.
I don't know when I should say I'm "officially" starting my clock on this. I swam three times last week, and four times this week. My work schedule the past three weeks has been a killer, to make up for all the time I lost training and racing in Sept/Oct. So I'm doing 7 x 24 hours in 19 days, which kind of puts a damper on getting to the pool.
I think I'll go with Monday, Nov 5th as my start date; 50 days from there gets me to Christmas Eve. At the rate I'm able to swim ... 1600 meters/35 minutes 5 x a week seems to be what I can do ... I should qualify for level 1, 50k in 50 days, with 6k/4 days of slack built in. If I keep swimming another 3 weeks after that, up until my ski break, I should hit 50 miles in 50 days of swimming, covering 10 weeks.
I'm finding that I can easily handle 250-500 yds of fast swimming/session, even on the days I do a bike or run OS wko. My current Swim Golf score for those intervals is 76-77/50 yds. Interestingly, the SG score remains the same whether I do the whole 50 hard, or just the first 25...My goal is to be @ 73 by the end of the year: 41/2 @ 32/1 strokes.
Also, the flips turns count as my core work
Gulp! That's 62 miles/7 weeks. I assume your weekly workload will drop after IM COZ.
9350 in the first 8 days, multiply by 6, add 2K, and I'm on track for 53 K. So I seem to be doing OK, distance-wise. I'm swimming on OS rest days, Sunday, and usually on either the 30/30 or FTP interval bike day.
Week 2: 8000 yds. My final swim golf 50 yesterday was @ 72 (42/30), so I'm getting close on that score. Maybe I should increase the lengths of my efforts.
After 4 weeks, 2 days (first 30 days), I have 30,220 meters, so I'm on target for 50k/50 days. The weeks have progressed: 5800, 6675, 7590, 8550 meters. I'm hoping to plateau out at 10,000 yards or about 9000 meters/week. Then, the remainder of the OS, I'll settle into swimming twice a week, following the OS swim workouts Rich put up, with extra yardage in each to get to 60-75 minutes 2x/week
Well, I did't sign up for this challenge but I thought I'd count up my meters this month just to see how I am doing anyway. I've swam 17,200 meters so far. And there was a 7 day span of no workouts (swim, bike or run) at all since I caught a bad cold and took a complete break to rest..so call it 17,200 meters in approximately 3 weeks. My weeks were: 5200, 7000, 0, 5000. Net, I'm slightly "off pace" to get to 50k in 50 days, but I think I could get back on pace with a few longer swims.
Six weeks done (42 days) and I'm @ 42,800 meters. So I should make the 50K/50 days by the end on next Tuesday (12/10).
I'm going to finish what I started, but, really, today would be the ideal time to stop. For the first time, my times on one of my standard workouts have gone up, not down from the previous week. And I'm getting over-reaching symptoms: sleeping more, grumpy, lost weight, skipped yesterday's OS run. It looks like 4-5 weeks would have been the ideal amount of time for a swim focus for me.
My Swim Golf score has continued to drop. Yesterday, I did 29 strokes in 43 seconds, then 30 in 42, for a consistent 72. Looking back at the start of this thread, I wrote: "My goal is to be @ 73 by the end of the year: 41/2 @ 32/1 strokes." So my distance per stroke has markedly improved over the last 5 weeks, to say nothing of the past two years. I was working hard and getting 48-50 sec with 34 strokes/50 yds in 2011, when I started re-building my swimming after my accident), but my top end speed is still not quite where it was 5 years ago (when I could do 41/30) ... which is to be expected, I guess, but still kind of hard to take.
Nice work on your Swim Golf!