Aerobic swimming

I happened across Chris DeSantis’ blog entry for yesterday (www.swimbrief.net, 4/11/12), and noted the name of a swimmer from the past that he mentioned, Chas Morton, kind of in a “what ever happened to…” way. So, this morning I Googled “Chas Morton swim.”

Among other results, the search produced a link to an Eddie Reese talk at an ASCA World Clinic around 1998. In it, he spent a lot of time discussing the fast times of the 10 & unders and 11-12 year olds, and his theories on why those swimmers who were fast then often weren’t around later, as they reached 13, 14, 15, etc., at least not at the top of the age group rankings. There was some discussion about the physical stature of certain highly ranked swimmers at the younger ages compared to the lower ranking swimmers. He too had noted that many of those highly ranked 9, 10 ,11 and 12-year olds dropped down in or disappeared from the Top 16 as they got older, but as I read it, he primarily emphasized the need for younger swimmers to focus on aerobic training, not speed.  Coach Reese contends that the best swimmers in the older age groups and at the elite level had coaches who focused on aerobic capacity in their earlier years, rather than on speed and strength. (Full article at http://www.swimmingcoach.org/articles/9805/9805_5.htm)

I had the good fortune in the mid-60’s to swim for Don Gambril. One year, when I was in college (pre-Title IX days), I had a difficult time in getting to workouts because I had no transportation from the college campus to the community college about ten miles away where our club team trained. Coach tried an experiment on me – each time I made it to the pool for the entire spring semester, maybe once or twice per week, my workout consisted of a warmup, followed by:

5 x 50 kick

5 x 50 pull

5 x 50 swim

All 15 were ALL OUT!!! - using my heart rate for the next send-off instead of specific interval times. I was able to push my heart rate to 33 for 10 seconds as measured at the completion of each repeat. When it dropped/recovered to 14 beats per 10 seconds, I had to push off and go again. Recovery was relatively quick early in the workout, about 1:00, but by the end of those fifteen 50’s it would take around 2:30 minutes for my heart rate to get back to 14 per 10 seconds, and I was fighting to not throw up. All I can say is Ouch! But…I swam personal best times in the 100 free and 100 fly that season. Later, when Coach and I reviewed that season, he said that it was a great experiment but it worked because of all the “base” I had put in during the preceding years.

During those earlier years, every one on our team had to swim the 1500. That included teammate Sharon Stouder, who won 3 golds and 1 silver medal in the 1964 Olympics (100M free, 100M Fly in world record time, and both relays). Sharon was also the first American woman to break 1:00 for the 100-meter free in those Olympics, coming in second to the great Dawn Fraser. Lucky Sharon – she no longer had to swim the 1500. On the other hand, at the outdoor nationals in 1965, our team had 5 of the top 8 finishers in the 1500 (I was not one of them – hated that race).

This was an interesting article, because yesterday I also stumbled across an article by Paul Yetter, Coach at T2Aquatics, posted on his blog, in which he advocates a blend of “volume and velocity.” His premise is that neither volume nor velocity is meaningful in and of itself, without understanding the rhythm of the stroke. Specifically, how the swimmer’s stroke looks at the end of a race. Coach Yetter’s position is that “we tend to value (and discuss) that which we can measure” – volume (yardage/meters) and velocity (speed).However, he goes on to say that, “An athlete wins by slowing down the least over the given volume of the race!” Not by having the highest training volume, or the fastest repeats in workouts, but by “training the stroke to handle the stress of the race, so that the athlete can maintain the VELOCITY through the entire VOLUME of the race.” (Full article at http://developingthechampionwithin.blogspot.com/)

My point with all this is that I agree with Coach Reese in the value of early aerobic training. Once younger swimmers have that base, other facets of swim training can be developed, or may emerge naturally as swimmers’ bodies change with added strength. In addition, I agree with Coach Yetter on the need to blend volume and velocity. Coach Reese addresses this in one part of his talk, where he comments (speaking as a college coach) on the need get the aerobic base from September into perhaps January, although the workouts cannot be exclusively aerobic. That ties in with Coach Yetter’s “blend” philosophy.

Coach Gambril and others of that time instinctively knew this. Our seasons were essentially broken into three parts – early season, with emphasis on aerobics and volume; mid-season where the quality of the swims grew in importance; and end of season, leading into the taper, where speed and recovery were the primary focus.  During double-days, the mornings generally covered the volume side of the equation, with the afternoons emphasizing the velocity side. And, in Coach Gambril’s program, technique was always emphasized. Of course, we only had two major meets each year at the time, with Olympic Trials added in every four years. I think with today‘s schedule of Grand Prix meets and more opportunities for National Team travel meets, that it is harder for the elite level swimmers to spend the amount of time necessary to build that aerobic base between major competitions, meaning that building the base of aerobic swimming when they were younger is all that more crucial.

And, yes, there were several mentions of Chas Morton in various web pages (including in Coach Reese’s talk). He was a successful swimmer at Stanford in the early 1990’s, and is now an attorney in his home state of Tennessee.