A slight detour out of the pool: Lessons from running the NYC Marathon

 

I am going to make a slight detour out of the pool for this blog post.  Just recently, I completed running the NYC Marathon. To start let me describe my marathon history.

The 2017 NYC Marathon was my fourth overall and third NYC Marathon.  I did 2 marathons (Vermont and NYC) back in 2004 and vowed to never again to do one.  I stupidly did not even come close to training appropriately.  Essentially, I finished (did not run most of either) them by probably training with a few 3-5 mile runs in the months beforehand.  That is no way to prepare one's self for a 26.2 mile race.  I survived alone on being younger and still in semi-decent shape from being a swimmer.  Fast forward to the day of the NYC Marathon in November 2015.  I had done some running that summer to prepare for my first triathlon.  I kept running afterwards to add some variety to my exercise routine.  A fellow swim coach (who was much more of a runner than I) messages me that she was watching the marathon on TV and decided to run next year (2016) with a charity.  She suggested that I might want to run it in 2016 too.  My first reaction was no way, that is crazy and I said never again.  I gathered some more information and thought some more about it and eventually decided that I would like to try again.  I think I realized how I left things just did not sit well with me.  I had not given my best effort and that still bothered me over a decade later.  I actually started real training and did okay with that.  My training was not that good as I did not follow a structured plan (even though I had one available to me).  I competed and finished in 2016, breaking my previous best by almost 1 hour.  However, I still felt there was more I wanted to accomplish.  I also wanted to complete this marathon experience with my friend that suggested doing it.  She missed out due to injuries and had to defer until 2017.  I was even more focused on proper training for 2017.  I was much more consistent and felt much better about things.  I set 4 goals for myself.  One was a very aggressive goal (break 4 hours) that I may never achieve, but I like to set that one goal that seems unattainable.  The other 3 were to actually run the entire race, have a time of 4 hours and something, and lastly make the NY Times results section (they cut it off usually around 5 hours -- too many names to print all 50,000+ finishers).  Well, I achieved those 3 goals when I finished in 4:45:56 this past Sunday in the 2017 NYC Marathon.  I had come a long way from struggling to be the last official finisher back in my first marathon in Vermont.

So, how does this marathon experience relate to swimming and coaching.  There are so many things.  I will touch on a few.

1. TRAINING: You have to put in the work to succeed.  There are no shortcuts.  With each marathon I have completed, I have gotten better in my training and as a result I have done better.  The same is true in swimming.  If you take the time to train smarter and better, the more likely you will succeed.
2. GET OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE: As coaches we often tell our swimmers to get used to feeling uncomfortable.  You can only improve if you get out of your comfort zone.  I truly believe that, but swimming has been a part of my life for so long that I think I have become comfortable feeling uncomfortable.  It was getting hard for me to relate to younger swimmers and what they experience regarding this.  I hope that makes some sense.  Being a relative newbie to marathons, I have found again what it means to feel discomfort as I try to improve my marathon running.
3. MENTAL TOUGHNESS: Again another thing I have just become too comfortable with.  I really re-learned what it means to be mentally tough.  While I have improved my physical conditioning with each marathon, the aspect that made the most impact was becoming more mentally strong.  My body hurt just as much, if not more, this year as the miles added up, but I forced myself to keep running.  My body was going to hurt whatever I did, but I had to train my mind to set aside that feeling and keep running.  My friend and I talked about this before and after the race.  We were in total agreement how it was going to hurt and it did hurt, but fighting through the hurt was so important.  This is something that all swimmers struggle with to varying degrees.  I think I can understand better what young swimmers are feeling as they are being asked to try and expand their skill sets as swimmers.
4. PACE YOURSELF: As a distance swimmer, I am very aware of the ins and outs of pacing.  Running marathons just added a whole new level to my knowledge set.  Last year, I got caught up in the crowds of NYC and went out too fast and paid the price later on.  That was a good mistake and one I actually encourage my swimmers to make.  Finding out how much you can handle is important.  This year I was much more controlled in my early pace.  Early on I wanted to go faster and keep up with my friend, but I knew it was not the right strategy for me.  It paid off for me as I felt better towards the end.  I actually was able to speed up at the end.  My friend admitted afterwards that she probably went out too fast feeding too much off the crowds.  That was the exact thing I experienced the prior year.  We even talked a bit about that prior to the race, but until you actually experience it it is hard to make the adjustment.
5. TECHNIQUE: It is so important to maintain proper technique.  When you are tired, it is normal to lose some control over your technique and get sloppy.  It may feel better in the moment, but you will become less efficient.  And less efficient means you will get more tired, more quickly.  As the miles added up, I could feel the soreness of my leg muscles with every stride.  I knew I had to maintain a proper stride and rhythm with my legs and arms.  This is the same thing in swimming as you must maintain a good efficient pull and steady kick.  Even breathing is important.  Just like your coach probably tells you to maintain a breathing pattern, this is true in running as I had to breath normally.

Hopefully, this was a useful detour down my marathon running experience and you can see how it relates to the development of a swimmer.  Just as important I hope I can take this knowledge to continue improving as a coach.  And yes, I am intending to go for 3 in a row and run the NYC Marathon in 2018.

Thoughts on how to train age group swimmers

Months ago I started to work on this blog post about my training philosophy for age group swimmers.  I knew this would be possibly a controversial topic.  There are many differing opinions on how to train swimmers of all levels.  I will be completely honest and say that part of my delay in completing this blog entry is due to being unsure if I wanted to deal with the differing opinions.  While I respect and welcome well thought out opinions expressed in a polite manner, I know there are some out there who can be very unaccepting of different opinions and as a result are downright rude and disrespectful when expressing their beliefs.  Those are the types of discussions I do not want and what kept me from posting this.  For those willing to have a respectful discussion, please do comment as I am open to your ideas.  My ideas while still grounded in the same basic beliefs have changed over time to adjust to new knowledge and what I think children need and want today.

To start I would like to provide a little background of my own swimming as I believe this shaped the foundation of my philosophy as a coach.  While tracking the volume of yardage was commonplace for me, I did not come from a background that did extreme amounts of yardage.  Probably the peak weekly yardage I did was in high school with my high school program and it reached around 50,000 to 60,0000 yards.  Looking back, I would say that 20-25% of that was what I would consider garbage yardage today.  It may have had a purpose, but I don't recall one.  My club practice volume peaked at around 40,000 to 45,000 yards weekly.  Part of the difference was that we did not typically do doubles with my club team, while my high school team had doubles 2-3 times a week.  Going back to my age group swimming days, pre-high school, I came from a program that emphasized much of what would be considered today's USA Swimming IMX program.  Without training extreme volume, we were encouraged and prepared to swim all events and distances.  That is where I learned to love distance free, 400 IMs and 200 flys.  Moving forward into college, I still trained as distance swimmer, but we again were not a volume based program.  Our weekly average yardage was slightly higher than my club experience (mainly due to 2 doubles a week).  We did do the typical increased volume during a winter break training, but that was not the norm throughout our season.  In summary, I was introduced to a training philosophy that trained distance and IM while avoiding extreme yardage volume.  Note that I did not mention much about short race pace training.  While we would do sprint sets occasionally, it was not a large part of my training experience, good or bad.

Now, onto my coaching experience.  As I am now in my 18th year of coaching, I have seen a slow positive change in the way age group swimmers are trained.  I think when I started to coach the prevailing popular approach was to mainly increase training volume over time to develop senior swimmers.  In some ways, treat young age group swimmers like mini senior swimmers.  While increasing the volume swimmers train is important, I think often the curve was too steep.  More and more, I am gladly hearing about coaching not increasing the number of practices or even number of hours practiced.  It is more about better utilizing the time already scheduled.  For younger swimmers there should be more down time within a practice, as much more instructional attention is necessary (and they are slower).  Thus, the density of practice time being actually filled with swimming will increase as a swimmer gets older and more experienced.  I would much rather see a swimmer increase and exhaust their training capacity in this manner before adding any additional practice sessions.  As a coach of mainly swimmers ages 10-12, I believe offering 6 practices a week ranging from 1.5-2 hours in length is more than adequate.  It is understood and expected that most swimmers will miss 1-2 of those practices a week due to other activities.  I strongly believe that is acceptable as these children should be involved in other activities and sports.  They do not need to be making a commitment to only swimming just yet.  If they choose to do that, that is fine, but that is the exception and not the norm.  Within the 2 hour practices is when we take more time for instructional work or just plain fun and games.  Often 30 minutes of that is used to just work on technique or some type of fun game.  They already have put in 1-1.5 hours of hard work.  Another aspect I find  increasingly becoming more true is that swimmers today take longer to understand and apply the various training concepts.  What I mean is it takes more time before a swimmer understands and independently knows how and when to change intensity (learning the energy zones however you teach it).  I think many swimmers start understanding the concepts long before they learn how to make their bodies apply that knowledge properly.  It can be frustrating as a coach, but we must be extremely patient as we will feel like we are repeating the same lesson hundreds, maybe thousands, of times.  The last aspect that I truly believe and I think is common amongst most coaches now is training from an IM perspective.  We are trying to create well rounded swimmers that can do any event or distance.  Yes, they will have favorites and ones they are better at.  However, we create a system that allows them to respect and be comfortable swimming anything.

The last item I would like to address is USRPT(Ultra Short Race Pace Training) for age group swimmers.  While I have not researched the details of it much, I will provide my limited opinion.  I strongly believe that part of what we must teach is how to swim fast.  One of the best ways to do that is by doing short, fast swims at times.  That is where I think USRPT is an awesome tool for age group swimmers when used in moderation.  However, USRPT as the sole or dominant training approach I think is detrimental to the long term development of age group swimmers.  I believe reasonable training volume above and beyond USRPT is critical for long term success.  I think USRPT is something that can be increasingly incorporated for a swimmer in the later stages of their careers (college and beyond).  We are seeing many swimmers in that demographic succeed with it.  That is great and I think we must remember that they have not trained like that their entire careers.  We are only starting to now see swimmers use USRPT predominately from a young age.  I am curious to see how their long term development progresses.  Maybe I will be wrong and then it will be up to me to adjust as I hope I am continually doing as new knowledge is learned.