A ny race longer than 400 meters or 500 yards should be considered a long distance race. No matter if it’s only a mile or 3 miles, your body will need to dig deep in many ways to achieve the desired result. Digging deep into your mental capacities will allow your body to perform at a high level for an extended period. Digging into your aerobic endurance base will make the swim more manageable and allow you to complete the final quarter of the race with little lactic acid buildup. Most competitive long distance swimmers spend the first part of each season working on endurance training, then often switch to anaerobic training in the peak time of the season. This tends to wear down their aerobic base throughout the season, resulting in progressively slower times in the pool. Think of trying to build the skeleton of a house on a foundation that’s not completely poured. If you start to build the house before making sure the foundation is complete and dried, the house will be on shaky ground. Before long, the house will crumble. The following set allows you to work on your aerobic endurance capacity, with a chance to push that aerobic capacity to its limit (and possibly beyond that) at the end. It’s a set that requires you to know your current aerobic endurance pace per 100 yards or meters. If you don’t know it, swim for 30 minutes nonstop and divide 180,000 by your total distance. This will give you a pace per 100 yards/ meters in seconds. To gauge your improvements throughout the season, it’s best to do this set once every month. DISTANCE FREESTYLE TRAINING SET (Don’t forget to warm up first) 3 x 800s as follows: • • 800 freestyle holding aerobic pace (heart rate shouldn’t be at max) • • One minute rest • • 800 freestyle negative split (first 400 at the pace of the above 800, second 400 faster) • • One minute rest • • 8 x 100s freestyle (each one should be at a faster pace than your pace on the first 800, and each 100 should be on an interval that gives 30 seconds rest for each swim) —JEFF COMMINGS Building Long Distance Endurance TUNE-UP Whether it’s a mile or a 10K, you’ll need a strong aerobic endurance base One small, often-cited 2008 study published by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine found that college swimmers who got 10 hours of sleep improved their 15-meter sprint times by an aver- age of 0.51 seconds, reacted 0.15 seconds faster off the blocks, im- proved turn times by 0.10 seconds, and had a higher kick rate. Lat- er research in basketball players dramatically confirmed the sleep-performance link: When players increased their sleep time to aim for at least 10 hours a night, sprint times improved and shooting accuracy increased by more than 9 percent. And don’t forget that sleeping the right amount can also help keep you from getting sick, which can be another slump driver. FOCUS ON GOALS, NOT TIMES “You can still improve the quality of your stroke even if you’re in a slump,” McCann says. “And just getting better at something can be very helpful in terms of breaking out of slumps.” The trick is measuring improvement using something other than speed as an indicator. Find a way to measure what you’re specifically work- ing on in the water, he recommends—maybe that’s improving the first 15 meters underwater or doing four dolphin kicks instead of two or improving your flip turns in a specific way. Figure out which technical goals are realistic for you, and find a way to mea- sure them so you can see how you’re improving. MIX IT UP If you’re not swimming on a high school or college squad, you generally have more control over your workouts. Maybe you sub- stitute backstroke for butterfly in the IM sets. Or you call your slightly-less-than-fast pace “fast” because you really hate to sprint. Totally fine, but doing what you’ve always done, with a minimum of variety, can contribute to a slump. “Even if you like routine, it’s good to break out of your routine,” Taylor says. Add some different sets, go to a different practice, swim in a different pool, try a tempo trainer, really make your fast sets fast and your slow sets slow—there are a million ways you can mix it up. Try adding just one new thing the next time you swim. What makes you a great swimmer—the ability to suffer and a tendency to love the routine and the pressure—can also make you vulnerable to a slump. But if you listen to what your body is telling you and understand how fatigue is affecting your mind and your life, you can turn it around.—MARTY MUNSON Mike Lewis 9 ju l y- au gu st 20 19