Something
Spokane Al said to me sparked this post. In discussing my meet and event schedule for January & February, Al said:
Your busy schedule does not mention the hours of training that you will be doing between each event. That is the stuff that will make you fast and successful.And, of course, he's absolutely right. You can't perform at your best without doing the work. But there also are times when because you are doing the work you don't swim fast (and we all know fast is a relative term — it means very different things to different people). And there are always going to be times, for reasons that may be completely unclear that you just don't perform to your potential.
Here's a recent elite level example. I saw
this tidbit up at
Timed Finals. At first glance it seems shocking: at the Victorian Championships Grant Hackett failed to break :50 by almost a second and a half (:51.44) in the hundred free and placed 14th. Leisel Jones lost the 50 breast. Upsets of the highest order? Perhaps not.
According to the article, Ms. Jones went on to say to the press, “We have to do 4km a session here, so in between each swim, we are doing a kilometre swim and a kilometre warm-up.” She then added, “It’s not like we’re really racing at the moment, it’s full-on training. So it’s more of a focus on keeping up fitness and it’s not really about times.” In fact, later in the competition Ms. Jones went out a tad over .3 seconds slower going out in the hundred and won definitively in 1:06.49, and Mr. Hackett absolutely dominated the fields in both the 400 and 800 free. Were her comments mostly gamesmanship? An accurate statement of where they stand in the training schedule? Both?
Over the course of a year no matter what level we compete at, we can't peak for every meet, we can't hit every event, and we can't log a personal best each time out. In fact, racing as training is a solid way to improve performance over the longer term. We accept that early in the season we may be rusty, in times of heavy training we may be slower than we'd like, and sometimes a meet is just training; getting on the blocks, getting the experience in, feeling the nerves (or not).
Periodization is a training methodology that breaks a given time period (of usually a year or two) into cycles. In swim seasons we generally have an annual macrocycle, then smaller mesocycles (in many cases 2-3 months), and microcycles (usually a week). So in planning a program, the coach will look at the overall objective and some smaller goals to achieve along the way. Each week will have an objective, each mesocycle as well, leading to the ultimate seasonal goal; building to that peak performance. Sometimes the athlete may be unable to put in that performance, sometimes the program itself fails. Another elite example: in Athens, Canadian swimmers failed to bring home an Olympic medal for the first time since 1964, despite fine performances at trials. The national team head coach of many years, Dave Johnson, was dismissed. The team as a whole had failed to peak for the event of the quadrennial.
On a much less competitive level of the sport, periodization holds. My meet this weekend is still very early in the preparation phase of this mesocycle. There's been seasonal time off (and time off for illness), so I'm nowhere near the level of fitness I'd like to be at. It will be about swimming the freestyle distances that put less stress on my hip and back. About getting onto the blocks and swimming the events. And just seeing what happens. The same holds true for the meet in early February, where the goal is simply to add breaststroke to the roster. Swim the events. Try to get a good start and keep good form. The Winterlude meet is long course, as are Worlds. So that's my chance to swim the events as they'll be swum in Perth. I can't swim them all (there is an event limit at the meet), so I'll swim the ones I need to work on most plus the 800, which relates to a different goal entirely.
This mesocycle I'll be adding long course training to my practice schedule. So Saturday mornings when there isn't a meet, I'll be aiming to be at practice. Maybe only for an hour, we'll see how my body holds up. And for the first couple of months I won't be my sharpest. But that's fine. Because the most important goals are really to be fit and to have fun. The rest of it is absolute gravy.
One of the sights from the Indian Pacific is the Nullarbor Plain (apparently this is pronounced Null-uh-bore — go figure!). It is the crescent shaped area by the coast shown in this Terra satellite image. (Credit Jacques Descloitres. Image acquired by the Terra satellite on August 19, 2002 and found on Wikipedia.) We'll hit Kalgoorlie in the late evening Thursday May first, spend that day along the 478 kilometres of unbroken track (the longest stretch in the world) until we leave the plain at Port Augusta very early on Friday morning. Something to look forward to during tomorrow's snow event!
