Distances

santosubito

What a great forum. I've only recently gotten into swimming seriously. I wish I had years ago - what a fantastic, if not addictive, exercise. I've seen some great tips here for front crawl techniques an my ridiculous pace has increased to just laughable. Fair play for the tips.
I'd be interested in knowing how far people here swim, on average.
I read on a post somwehere here about a boardsie saying he could swim no problem for two hours (just thinking about that makes me tired:). The most I've ever done was 2km in a 25 metre pool. It took me around an hour. I know that's ridiculously slow, but I'm no Michael Phelps. I'm nearly 40 and by no means thin.
Anyway, I usually do one kilometre in a 25 metre pool at the embarrassingly slow rate of around 39-42 seconds a length. But I know it's all relative.

So how far do you good swimmers go?

Mint Sauce

used to swim quite regulary up to about 10 years ago, almost daily for a period of a few years, usally a few lenghts of a 33m pool up to a 1000m, done a sponsored swim of 5000 metres a couple of times, taking my time, doing it in about 2 1/2 hrs

swam a 1000 metres many times for swimming awards, none of them raced against other people, think the quickest i done the 1000 (against the clock) was bout 20 minutes,



seen the 400 done this morning in about 4 to 5 minutes

:eek:

santosubito

irish-stew wrote: »

used to swim quite regulary up to about 10 years ago, almost daily for a period of a few years, usally a few lenghts of a 33m pool up to a 1000m, done a sponsored swim of 5000 metres a couple of times, taking my time, doing it in about 2 1/2 hrs

swam a 1000 metres many times for swimming awards, none of them raced against other people, think the quickest i done the 1000 (against the clock) was bout 20 minutes,



seen the 400 done this morning in about 4 to 5 minutes

:eek:

Phelps did it in 3:43. Frightening. That's 8.9 secs every 25 metres - compared to me lumbering iun at around 40 secs. I shudder to think how many times he would have lapped me in one length.

BendiBus

santosubito wrote: »

Phelps did it in 3:43. Frightening. That's 8.9 secs every 25 metres

I think that works out at 13.9s per 25m. Still bloody fast!

santosubito

Ah yes, my mathematical ability is worse than my swimming.

Andrewf20

Im not particularly fast myself. I might do 30 - 60 lengths of the 25 metre pool. 36 mins for 60 lengths. Cannot seem to bloody beat that. Did 96 lengths in 1 hour there in the NAC 2 weeks ago. I get the impression that with my limited training this is as good as il get unless I really ramp up the training for small gains in future.

hunnymonster

make sure your technique is right. Endless laps with bad technique will not make you faster. In fact it will just habituate you to bad habits and slow you down long term.

Typically I do a 2.5 - 4 km session which takes anything form 1-2 hours.

Mellor

Used to swim alot, average maybe 10-15km a week depending on stroke being trained.
Did 1000s in training every now and again, averaging 15mins.

Stopped 7 years ago and barely back into water since.
Attempted a mile recently, did it in 33mins (64 lengths of a 25m pool), 30 second a length average. Happy with that considering it was my first time in the water in years

Clseeper

I suppose it depends on what you’re training for. I know a lot of the people on here would be geared towards sea swims and triathlons? This would involve a large amount of long distance training focusing solely on frontcrawl. I come from a competitive swimming background so prefer to mix around my distances and strokes. It also gives a better all round work out.

I would get in about ~2km in an hour session. My club team, which would be training consistently, would average about 3-4km per hour and about 30k per week. They would be averaging 20 sec per length on frontcrawl in middle distance aerobic set.