Consider Swimming Less in the Winter
Team,
As you know, we apply the ROI lens to everything we do, expecially to the choices we make in the winter, in the OutSeason. As a result, we encourage you to not swim at all, or as little as neccessary.
Earlier this year we fired up a spreadsheet to record your last season swim PR's, your swim TT time after a long layoff, and then your times at subsequent TT's to document how little absolutely time you "lose" from taking a big layoff and then how quickly we get it back. I'm now putting the final touches on our end all, be all, don't swim in the OS article to be published on the blog and likely on Active.com. See the draft copy below.
This is what I need from you: I needs mo' data!
- This is the original spreadsheet
- This is a distillation of that, which includes athletes with more than 2 data points.
Please do us a HUGE favor and enter your TT times, etc in the second spreadsheet. A screenshot of this will be included in the final draft of the article.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Return on Investment Series, Part II: Don’t Swim in the Winter
In Part I of this series we introduced you to the concept of using “Return on Investment” to make decisions on how you invest your limited resources of time, headspace, Spousal Approval Units, and money towards triathlon training. These constraints are simply part of being an Age Group triathlete.
To help you navigate your own particular circumstances effectively, we recommend you continually ask yourself these three questions:
- What returns on race day will I see for this investment?
- Is that return worth the associated costs?
- Can I achieve a similar or better return with a smaller or similar investment ? In other words, can I do less, do something different, not incur this cost at all, or buy this vs that?
In this second installment of the ROI series, we continue our exploration of maximizing the average Age Group triathlete’s training by applying these questions towards the investment required to become a faster swimmer.
Question #1: What returns can I expect to see on race day for the time, headspace, SAU’s, and money I invest in becoming a faster swimmer?
First, the training focused required to become a faster swimmer changes as you improve. Our general observations of the types of investment required along the swimming spectrum are:
- If you are slower than about a 1:15 to 1:20 Ironman swim, or a 38 to 40 minute Half Ironman swim, becoming a faster swimmer, for you, is like learning to play a musical instrument: it’s 95% technique and the fitness required to sustain that technique for the distance of your ace. That is, you don’t need to bang for hours on the keyboard to develop finger fitness. You need to work on technique. In swimming parlance, it’s all about the shape of your boat (speedboat vs barge) vs the size of the engine.
- Between about 1:05 to 1:15 for Ironman, or about 32 to 37 minutes for Half Ironman, swimming begins to have a larger fitness component. That is, your barge is almost a speedboat and swimming faster begins to be about putting a bigger engine in the boat -- learning the technique of grabbing more water and then developing the fitness to sustain that more powerful pull.
- Faster than about 1:02 for an Ironman, or 31 minutes for a Half Ironman, it definitely becomes about swim fitness. You need to have turned your barge into a speedboat and then developed the fitness to maintain a powerful stroke/engine for the length of your swim.
- Obviously, there are caveats to these general guidelines above based on sex, age, natural talent, confidence in the water, etc, but the point here is to show you where the proper training investment is to be made as you progress.
Second, the nature of the appropriate investment for each group of swimmers changes as they move along the swimming improvement spectrum:
- Beginner Swimmer: A very, very large percentage of your swimming time and resources should be spent developing the skill of swimming...and then at some point developing the fitness required to sustain your best possible stroke for the length of the swim. For these swimmers, small, incremental technique improvements can yield huge gains on race day. If you’re a 1:45 Ironman swimmer, the difference between you and your 1:20 Ironman friend is technique first and fitness a very, very distant second.
- Intermediate Swimmer: Technique is becoming dialed in but swimming also shifts slightly to be about grabbing more water; this is your fitness component. After making massive gains in your first season through the judicious use of a local technique coach, future gains will now be:
- Much Smaller -- It is now a game of working all season to shave 5-7 minutes off your swim, not 20-30 minutes.
- Much More Costly -- These smaller gains come at the cost of many 1:1 sessions with a coach to find _that_ technique improvement that just clicks, and/or 3x swims per week at 1 hour each + 30 minutes of admin time on each end of those sessions = a 6hr total time investment each week.
- Advanced Swimmer: Long gone are the days of the 20-minute swim PR. That 5-7 minute PR is a fond, but also distant memory. It’s now a game of 1-3 minutes saved on race day for the same seasonal investment of our Intermediate Swimmer above. Do you have the goal of swimming faster than 58 or 29 minutes for your next Ironman or Half Ironman? Standby because, unless you’ve got some serious talent, that’s a very, very tough goal for the triathlete who became a swimmer as an adult.
So, to the question “what returns can I expect on race day for the typical investment in the swim?”
- Slower Swimmer: Massive gains (15-45 minutes or more) depending on how “challenged” you are at the start and assuming you make a significant time investment with a quality technique resource.
- Intermediate Swimmer: Moderate gains of 5-7’ minutes, assuming you continue to apply significant resources to refining your technique as well as building powerful swimming fitness.
- Advanced Swimmer: Tiny, tiny gains. Swim, swim, swim, all season, to net 1-3 minutes on race day.
Question #2: Is the return, listed above based on your ability, worth the associated cost?
Essentially we are asking you to determine your Per Hour Cost of Swimming. By quantifying your training return for swimming in terms of dollars, you will have a significantly improved understanding of what you are asking of yourself, your family, your coworkers, etc., when you outline your training season.
Let’s call it $30/hr, as the sum of the value you assign to your time, headspace, SAU, and dollar investments in swimming. Could be more, could be less, could be that you dig/hate swimming, have a pool in your backyard or have to drive 45’ each way. We all have our own value assessment...but we’ll call it $30/hr to keep it simple.
Total Investment: Your typical age group triathlete is usually swimming 3 x 1 hour sessions per week, with about 30’ of admin time on each end of each session. Admin time includes packing a bag, driving, changing, showering, packing bag, driving, etc.). That’s about 6 hours per week = 24 hours per month x 9 month season = 216 hours x $30/hour cost = $6480 invested.
Return on Investment, In Terms of Dollars:
- Beginner Swimmer: Call it a 20-minute time improvement for a $6480 investment equals $324 per minute faster on race day.
- Intermediate Swimmer: A 7-minute improvement equalling $925 per minute
- Advanced Swimmer: A 3-minute improvement at $2160 per minute.
Question #3: Can I achieve a similar or better return with a smaller or similar investment?
This is the question we as coaches asked ourselves in about 2006 when we first started Endurance Nation. As coaches, the question was framed from the perspective of what we could legitimately ask of our athletes: “Before I ask someone to invest $6480 into an activity, what is the expected rate of return on race day, based on our experience having coached hundreds of Ironman athletes? Are there better dollar-per-minute activities?”
In our experience:
- The cost of swimming is highly variable across the year. Waking up and starting a cold car three times per week at 5:30am in January to swim for an hour after a loonngg triathlon season, while training for a race in September, is much more costly than that same investment in July, just eight weeks out from your race.
- Because such a significant part of swimming is about technique, you can take large amounts time completely off from swimming--bringing your swimming fitness to near zero--without becoming dramatically slower than your PR swimming self. This is because you still have the good technique of efficient swimming, which is largely independent of your fitness.
- Your swimming speed comes back very quickly, even after a long layoff. Again, your technique is there, you just need to shake off a little rust, regain your “feel for the water,” and rebuild some fitness to apply to your technique. In our experience, this process of going from zero to PR/Hero was about 12 to 16 weeks of focused, consistent, quality swimming.
Based on this assessment we made the following changes to the swim training of our athletes:
- We created our “Swim Clinic eBook” so our athletes could have a high quality technique resource regardless of the availability of a quality local technique coach.
- We eliminated swimming altogether from our OutSeason (Winter) training plans, their training solution from October/November through February/March.
- By eliminating swimming from 4-5 months of their season, we can now apply these recovery resources (ie, two to three days off per week, days that you would otherwise be swimming) to making them much faster cyclists and runners. Please note: We’ll have those bike and run ROI discussions in our next installments of this series.
- Rich put on his NCAA Division Three, 16+ years of competitive swimming swim cap on when writing the swim workouts for all of our Ironman and Half Ironman training plans -- very solid, make-me-faster-through-hard-work swim sessions applied within 12 to 20 weeks of their event vs months and months.
So Does This Approach Work?
Anecdotaly, every year we have heard our athletes telling of massive race day personal bests thanks to significantly improved bike and run fitness as developed across the season. With swimming such a small part of any triathlon, folks could swim +/- 3 off of their previous swim times and still be much faster by the finish line.
To get more data, we decided to fire up a little exercise. In the Spring of 2011, we asked our athletes to record their swimming progression across their season with EN. We feel it makes a very good case for taking significant time off from the pool, or greatly reducing the investment you make months and months before your race, and instead applying a very focused investment in the last 12 to 16 weeks before your event. You can view that data below.
INSERT THE TABLE
In summary:
- As you move from Beginner to Advanced swimmer, the flavor of the investment you need to make in additional improvements shifts from technique to fitness.
- These improvements become smaller and smaller and come at a much greater cost.
- At some combination of swim ability, time of the year, and dollar-per-minute gained on race day, we recommend you suspend or significantly reduce the investment you make in the swim. The ROI numbers simply don’t add up, in our opinion.
- We encourage you to review the experiences of our athletes above and come to your own conclusions.
Comments
Great stuff Rich but can't help but notice you managed to completely leave me out of the mix as my usual and customary IM swim time is 63-65 minutes! Why are you singling me out???
I'm guessing I'm in the intermediate category since I learned to swim in 2001! Loving the great explanation of ROI in a way anyone can relate to.
Jeff, I didn't leave anyone out. Rather, there were so many holes and whacked formatting in the original spreadsheet that I decided to basically start all over with this streamlined 2nd spreadsheet. Please fill in your data!
Also, no need to use your last name as I don't want the ST Mafia to show up at your door at 5am to throw you in the pool for a hard 4k session in January...
J/K Rich, I actually meant your swim times were under 62 for advanced and 65-75 for intermediate and I swim EXACTLY in between those two categories. And yes, the ST Mafia would definitely show up to kick my a$$!
I entered last year's swim TT's and was pleased to see my last test was about same as previous year's PR!
Tim,
We have a lot of testimonials on this topic scattered all over the place but if you, or anyone else, want to put yours/consolidate them here, that would be awesome!
Much like we did with the original Four Keys article and Ironman execution, we want to put to bed the discussion of the REAL ROI related to the swim, the opportunity cost of swimming year round, etc, by explaining it as well as we can and then backing it up with as much DATA from you folks as we can get.
In our experience, 90% of AG'ers get and appreciate this messages and even if they choose to do differently they are making an informed decisiont. But it drives other coaches and high volume, torqued up AG'ers batshit crazy.
Basically, I want people to consider the time/$$ cost of the training decisions they make.
Agreed...would be interesting to get all kinds of data on all kinds of stuff so...ENTER YOUR DATA
Do you want data that contradicts your premise? My 2011 results are the counterexample, even if it's just one data point . It took me more than 5 months of swimming to get back close to my 2010 training levels and my race swim splits this year were well below what I did in 2010 (or 2009).
All that said, I think the exercise of assigning monetary value to the time, and calculating an ROI in dollar terms, is not useful and frankly unhelpful. You quantify the "I" (in a pretty sketchy way) but the "R" is incompletely quantified. Enough people will have problems with the assumptions that the whole exercise will undercut the credibility of the article. The logic is sound and there is data to back up the results. That is enough. The quantification attempt will only give the anti-EN crowd more ammunition.
I also suggest a different table. The isn't about the TT results. This is about 2010 PR vs. 2011 PR, and the point is that those PRs don't go down in 2011, despite no swimming for many months. You need to standardize the "before" and "after" metrics. It is fine for different people to use different metrics, but each person needs to have the same metric for 2010 and 2011 in order to most clearly make the point.
Just trying to be helpful here. I am an absolute evangelist for the EN swimming philosophy, so am only trying to be helpful with suggestions on how to tell this story.
You make some great points in this article. While I 'm new to EN so I didn't take part in your experiment, my N=1 is this:
I broke my hand in 2009, I broke my arm in 2010, I broke my arm in 2011 (at the elbow)
All three of these necessitated taking a good chunk of time out of swimming every year. Every year I spent my time ramping back into swimming with a big technique focus and very very few yards. Every year I came back to the same swimming speed rather quickly. This year, just 10 weeks after breaking my arm, I swam 6.4 miles in 2:40. While my peeps were out putting in 3 - 5 mile open water swims in preparation, I was gnashing my teeth and wondering if I would be able to even complete the long swim. Turned out to not be a problem at all and I swam with the fastest group.
So, even for an "Advanced" swimmer according to your criteria, it didn't take big yardage to hold onto my speed. Small yards and big technique focus worked just as well, and that was after taking time completely off from swimming as well and having to heal up to boot.
I disagree in how long it takes to return to previous fitness level or "speed" how you call it.
I never touched my 2009, early 2010 times, all pre EN, after embarking on late season 2010 HIM plan and later 2011 OS. I am a "gray area" swimmer according to your definitions. I am a late comer to swimming/triathlon but have clocked in HIM swims from 28:45 to 32:25 at various races with 28:45 swam at 2009 LC Nationals in Sept. 2009.
So, someone like me, no prior swim background, but relatively fast for non swimmer triathlete, takes a lot longer to climb back up to "previous level" than your selected swimmer.
If your selected swimmer swims 1:45-2:00/100y it cannot get much worse than that (no offense to any of you, I really don't mean it in a negative way), when you stop swimming, how bad does that really get. No, you don't slide back much as that is the basement. You come back to your level rather quickly as you did not put much work into it to begin with, easy to match that, put a little work again and you are there.
If your selected swimmer is ex college or state level high school swimmer, earlier in life, well, the work was done in the past, some "speed" can be brought back very quickly, much like in the case above, however different physiology mechanisms. This swimmer knows he/she will never swim as fast, but they also know that on their bad day, he/she will be out of the water 2nd or 3rd with minimum strain putting a 25min HIM split.
And than there is a group I think I described above first, that is in no men's land. No, I don't quite agree with you when I try to apply your logic to my group. With only 4 years of swimming at 3-4x week, there is not much that base to rely on to return to best times as quick as you suggest and these times are relatively quick. Putting 9x400@6:15 holding 5:45 SCM for a non swimmer is not something you can return to in 8 weeks after a 5 months of no swimming. For real swimmers, above send off is a joke, for my group, we sweat our balls off. That goes on to produce a 28:45 HIM split.
I put it in very simple terms so most can understand what I am trying to say. If I need to elaborate this with more style and more professional languagge, I can do that too.
This group ends up trading the times under your assertion and plan. I give up swim time for some run time improvement. I am ok with that. I will gladly take it.
You know better what kind of swimmers you have on your team. I am sure you do a great job tailoring your approach to that majority. It stands very true for the overwhelming majority here, but not quite for everybody. I fully support your angle but am also capable of altering the plan to fit my need.
Rich - here's another story you can use...
3 years ago, I tried to get faster in the water on my own,self coached, made pretty good improvement, swimming alot based on drills, usually 1 hr workouts on my own, maybe 4x week. And had a pretty good fall HIM swim that I was targeting.
The next year, I had to prep myself for this big 24 hr bike/run/bike/run/bike/run 300 mile challenge. My swimming consisted of ONE time per week, 20-30 minutes, maybe 10x 25's of catchup drill and gliding, just pure active recovery, right?
After the charity thingy, I was pumped and let myself get talked into the same fall HIM from the previous year. 6 weeks later. And I decided to add 1 more swim a week but keep the workout as short and easy as before.
The result...finished the swim all of 10 SECONDS slower than in the previous year.
Changed my perspective. And that was before I joined your crew.
tho, I do have to confess to getting that local swim coach for this winter. But, that gets back to the technique thing you discussed.
1) Of the ENers, how many truly take the 5 months off of swimming. Based on the comments I see in forum, the vast majority decrease their swimming dramtically, but it seems that a signficiant percentage still get in the pool with some frequency, even if the effort is low, during the OS. As you collect data, this seems critical to note. It might reinforce the point that there is low ROI to OS swimming, or it might identify an opportunity to add some technique work into the plan to improve overall performance.
2) As a "beginner" the jump from no swimming to the intensity of the race prep can be a bit much. In my pre-EN days, I made the leap to high intensity workouts (with poor form) too quickly and ended up injuring my shoulder. I am still limited in the workouts I can do, and therefore I'm very cautious about recommending someone go from 0 yards per week to full workouts if they do not have significant confidence in their stroke.
3) Personally, I am planning to take a middle ground approach to the swim. I'm using the swim ebook for technique (and some lessons) in the OS, but not do any significant yardage. Hopefully, at the end of the OS, my form will be sufficient to allow me to complete the necessary distances to be ready for IM and get to T1 in a respectable time.
4) Lastly, I completely agree with Matt A, the measure of success is year to year PR, and not year to year swim time. Clearly, taking 5 months off does not maximize improvement in the water, however the benefits of the OS for bike and run should outweigh the losses (or stagnation) in the swim to improve overall PR.
DEFINITELY. We'll have to get you back the IM Swim bragging rights for sure! Bring it
Yes my swim times have stayed about same. Pre and post EN. Around 60 minutes.
Some other considerations though. Got into triathlon to get a more complete workout. Swim works muscles not worked in biking or swimming. A lot of us are trying to do some strength and flexibility work during the outseason. Swim works in with this well. So keeping some swim gives a more balanced body? Keeping some swim is generally healthier? Good mental change from bike and run?
That being said am doing minimal swimming now. Hope to get back to once a week. Maybe twice during the outseason.
---Ann.
@Michael: I would want to have a discussion about what gains you did/didn't make in the other sports concurrent with the difficulties (?) you had getting your swim mojo back.
@Matt: I hear you on the monetary analogy. I think I'm too close to this stuff sometimes. I'll see what I can do to rework it. Standardizing the data: understood but in the absence of that I'm just trying to get ANY data from you guys. This thread has been view close to 400 times but I only have entries for 14 people, one of whom is me :-) This will go out in the Team Update tomorrow and I'll continue to poke people in the eye about it over the next week or so.
@All: either in this article or across the whole series we want to emphasis the net result of this ROI focus, across all three sports. Steve and Ann's performances come to mind. Steve has a relative flat to negative swim improvement…but PR's IMAZ by about 50 minutes over IMCDA? Ann PR's the bike by 17 minutes and clearly describes how those gains on the bike were enable by her application of swim training and recovery time to the bike.
The fact is that practically none of us currently swimming faster than about 1:20 IM, :40 HIM are going to see the swim gains that we can potentially see on the bike and run. How many stories of 20-45' IM bike split PR's have we seen in here? 45-2hr run PR's?
These are the points I want to get across in the article:
I think we'll need to do some case studies to tie all of this SBR ROI stuff together -- pick a half dozen athletes, break down your SBR training (how you trained, how you applied your time) and gains, their performances in races this year, do a podcast with them to get their perspective, etc.
Exactly. Because part of the "R" of ROI is the opportunity cost of not using the time to train the bike/run. I'm happy to share my story and I think it is compelling evidence of why "don't swim in the outseason" works. And for the record, I did not swim a single yard from the end of August 2010 until the middle of April 2011.
@Rich- "Steve and Ann's performances come to mind. Steve has a relative flat to negative swim improvement…but PR's IMAZ by about 50 minutes over IMCDA? "
Uhhh, I believe that was a 1:05:00 PR! Thank You very much!
I'll add my two cents here - last year was my first in EN, I did the OS, started in December - did not swim once until the first week of March. Then only sporadically until I started my IM program in April. When I first got in the water - it was slow.......very slow. I have friends I ride and train with who swim masters 3 days a week - they are 55-59 minute IM swimmers. These people thought I was nuts - I almost started to believe them - but stayed the course following the OS. The first month back in the pool - slow, very slow.
It took about a month and I was hitting my numbers from years past - at best I am a 1:35 - 1:40 / 100 yds. I was hitting 1:40 pretty consistently by the end of May. My first race was a HIM in June, swam 37 minutes...not bad for my first OWS of the year. Here is the kicker - I had a PR by 15 mins. The last 3 miles I ran at 7:30 pace. I took it way tooo easy on the bike - my point being, the swim really did not hurt me on race day.
Did my first IM in August in Louisville - that is like swimming in hot soup. No wet suit - swam a 1:15. Did a 13:18 overall - I was pumped!
If this is your first season with EN and you are questioning the methods, I did as well. But what matters are results - this sh*t works! If you think about in terms of ROI - as well as knowing that a swim in any triathlon, is typically the easiest part of the race, you start to see where this type of training makes sense.
I start my OS in 10 days - I may swim once a week, I may not. I have the comfort of knowing that I really don't have to swim until maybe April if I choose not to.
Again - if you follow this for one season, what do you have to lose? Change is often difficult - especially if you are used to do something the same way over and over. If you do follow the swim recommendations, then follow the race guidance on race day........you will be glad you did.
like B, last year was my first w/ EN and no OS swimming. I did add a once a week swim in Feb and twice a week in March and did a sprint tri in April and was almost exactly the same split in pool as last year! It comes back so quickly!
I will do the same again next OS.
Great discussion!
Again, we want each of you to make your own decisions based on your personal assessment of ROI, time cost, potential gains on race day, etc. More importantly, we'd like you to frame it within the same decision-making context that you use with everything else in your life: what's it gonna cost me (time, $-wise) and what will I get from it vs blindly swimming (or doing anything, for that matter) 3-4x/wk.
Our position is that you do these things with everything else in your life. Triathlon, and swimming especially, should be no different.