Ever feel like you're wasting your time?

Kurt.Godel wrote: »

To be honest, I watch skinny kids doing this sort of distance pace and think it has to be achievable. Why not? (to return your question)

Are they also second AG in Kona?

The title was tongue in cheek. If by comparing myself to faster athletes, I genuinely did feel like I was wasting my time, then I'd have given up triathlon long ago. The reason for posting was just to highlight a fairly impressive swim done by one of the world's top age groupers.

And Peter, I've never swam 10k and have no immediate plans to do so either.

Good research, Peter. That's why you're poster of the year. Did you also tell him his swim was being talked down on some obscure Irish triathlon Internet forum?

https://www.strava.com/activities/1510172826

The latest swim by the central character of this thread; done on his way to winning the AG race, in an impressive 8:42:16 finish, at Ironman South Africa.

Kurt.Godel wrote: »

Why do you think he can swim these times and you can't zico? I'm genuinely curious, as you seem to set (and reach) high targets for the other disciplines. Do you hope to hit them in future?

That's a far more probing question than you might have imagined. I don't have the answer, just a lot of poorly considered musings.

The simplest answer is; he's better than me. Then I suppose that begs the question, why is he better than me? I'd say first and foremost, he's just more naturally talented and probably possesses a much higher VO2 max. And you might find this hard to believe, but he also trains more than me. Just look at his Strava activities, I honestly think he's at the point where he couldn't possibly fit in anymore training than he's doing right now. No doubt what's motivating him is winning the overall AG title in Kona. I'm not for one second trying to say it makes the training easier, but having such powerful motivation, is a huge help. He has the talent and the motivation. Those two things combined with the training he's doing, is why he's getting results.

From what little I know about the man, he doesn't have a swimming background. Nor do I, but why can he swim times I can only dream of? He swam 3,800m 11 minutes quicker than I did in Kona. It's a seismic gulf and how one adult onset swimmer can put that much time into another might point to a greater aptitude in the water. It reminds me of what Mohamed Ali said about golf; “I’m the best. I just haven’t played yet.”

If you saw both of us swimming beside each other, maybe you'd surmise my style was akin to wrestling a bullock and his would be similar to a 2018 Kurt Godel's. I've never seen him swim, so I don't know, but if the only way I am going to improve is by improving my technique, as several very competent swimmers have told me, then it's probably a safe assumption that he has better technique than me.

While I only properly started to learn how to swim as a adult, I could still "swim" from youth. The stroke I used to get from one end of the pool to the other had numerous flaws. I feel these flaws were so deeply ingrained, I'm still trying to overcome them. I sometimes wonder if I would have been better off starting triathlon with no swimming ability whatsoever and with proper coaching, I would have been doing the right things from the start. Maybe that was Lars Petter Stormo's starting point, maybe it wasn't, it's just another of my many musings on your thought provoking question.

Another theory I have is that when it comes to swimming, maybe he doesn't have any more refinement than me, and he merely swims the times he does on account of having such a big aerobic engine. I once thought this explanation might also have gone some way to explaining Bryan McCrystal's sub 60 Kona swim in 2016, but this seemed unlikely given how he followed it up with a 4:29 bike split. And Lars Petter Stormo didn't fare too badly on either the bike or run in Kona 2017, so I'm not sure how valid an argument it might be.

Lastly, with a name like Stormo, he's bound to be good.

Now leaving the Norwegian gentleman aside, and getting onto why I have never gotten near the pace needed for a sub-55 Ironman swim. I've a lot of other disjointed thoughts on that too.

I came within 7 seconds of breaking the holy grail of 60 minutes in Mallorca in 2016. If I could swim straighter, I've no doubt I would have done it. So while I know I wasn't a million miles away from hitting the target, and even though my Garmin tells me I bettered the pace needed to go under the elusive 60 minute barrier, maybe not doing it, left a subconscious imprint in my mind that I just wasn't going to swim well in 2017, no matter how hard I tried. And in truth, I didn't try as hard last year as I did in the previous years.

Peter often chastised me for not trying hard enough at his sessions and he probably had a point. He sometimes said we should be slumped over the wall at the end of certain sets and I very seldom gave this commitment. Obviously you don't want to be completely fncked after finishing a swim in a triathlon, but looking back on the swim training I've done over the last few years, I realise I should have finished more swim sessions feeling this way.

I never go as far into the red when swimming as I do when running. Running intervals, I usually sound like an old nag that needs to be put down. I remember watching an interview Adam Peaty, or some British swimmer, gave to the BBC just after finishing a race. Obviously a certain amount of time had passed between the race finishing and the interviewee speaking, but he was still breathing extremely, extremely heavily. It really struck me how hard he must have been working to have still been hyperventilating to the extent he was several minutes later. I could only think how comparatively easy my hardest efforts were in comparison. Obviously I'll never be as fast as Adam Peaty, but it occurred to me that maybe it would be a good idea to at least try work as hard as him.

Another thing Peter once said to me was 'I bet you're a sh!t dancer.' He's right. I was equally sh!t at ball games growing up. And needing some degree of coordination to swim, coordination that good dancers and hurlers would have, swimming was probably always going to be a struggle for someone like me to learn.

As regards setting targets, I'd claim I set realistic targets rather than high targets. I've done nothing in training or races to suggest I could swim 3.8km in 55 minutes or less. But I'd done plenty to tell me I was capable of cycling 180km in under 5 hours and running the marathon in under 3. Consequently I wasn't afraid of going for either, but just picking 55 minutes as a goal time for the swim, because the top iron distance athletes in Ireland are capable of it, would not be an evidence based approach to racing.

I'd love to hit fast times, but you have to walk before you can run. The following are my ironman swim times over the years:
Copenhagen 2010: 1:07:48
Mallorca 2014: 1:03:05 (non wetsuit; but I strongly suspect it was short)
Mallorca 2015: 1:01:34
Mallorca 2016: 1:00:06
Perhaps I'm not at the level you'd expect for someone who has invested so much time in swimming, but there are signs of steady progression in all 4 swims. I don't know when, but I'll get back to Ironman racing someday. A sub 60 swim will be the target yet again, and if I can do that, then the next target will be a sub 58 swim.
In all likelihood though, I probably won't be racing Ironman for long enough to get my Ironman swim time down to that.

I hope that's enough to satisfy your curiosity.

peter kern wrote: »

I guess the reason is zico was never at the Irish mountain bike national team... ( pink and not so pink ie guy has coordination talent and work ethics)

I know you've connected my poor bike handling skills and swimming before and while there might be something to be said for the point, I'm sure they're are plenty of uncoordinated people who can handle a bike well. Cycling requires a very limited range of motion and none of the finesse good swimmers show in the water. I've poor balance and very little cajones. It's hard to work on the former when lacking the latter.
I'll never be a graceful swimmer, but I'm hoping by just doing what I'm doing, I'll hit upon a robotic stroke that gets me through the water in as efficient a manner as possible. If I hit upon this magical technique, I'd just be repeating the same cycle of kicks and arm rotations again and again. Like Kurt perfecting the pogo stick dance, it won't matter how it looks. It's not like he wanted to do the tango.

By twice going to Mallorca to practise the hairpin bends in the race, I dealt with the technical descent in the race. When it came to race day, without bossing the descent, I thought I did okay. But had the course been changed and we were given a different descent off the mountain, I'd have reverted to type. Conditions can vary of course, but open water swimming is always open water swimming. What works in one body of water is going to work in another. All I need to do is find something that works.

Anyway I feel I've talked enough and Kurt always gives a fairly thorough analysis of his swimming in his log. So maybe, Peter, if you didn't mind, could you tell us why can't you break 50 minutes for an ironman swim? It's an equally fair question surely, and just a few bullet point answers would suffice. (pink, and not so pink.)