Laurence swam for me 35 years ago during my first coaching gig, at the US Merchant Marine Academy, and was one of my first coaching successes, improving in 18 months from 2:15 to 1:49 for 200-yards Free.  He’s been an avid triathlete since 1983, but as this message indicates, swimming is on his mind again.

Terry
I am on a mission. The 50-54 age group 1-Mile Cable Swim record is 23:13. Do you think I could break that ? By July of this year if I started training now? What would it take physically? Lots of weights ? Lots of mileage? You would say lots of technique. Please give me some idea if you think it would be doable and worth pursuing.

My Reply

Laurence I’d be pretty excited about the opportunity to be your coach again. I’m pretty familiar with the pace you’re aiming at — 23:00 per mile because, in 2007, when I  broke the 55-59  record for the 2-mile Cable Swim for the second time, I went 46:20 . . . though Bruce Gianniny, a good friend and good rival, went 46:10, so the record passed to him. In the event, I can share with you how I thought about the training it would take to break a record.

To go about it as I did, you should begin by quantifying the task:

1) You need to be able to maintain a pace of 1:27/100m or faster for 1600m.

2) Because you’ll have to swim 1600m with no pushoffs — i.e. no rest breaks for your arms — you need to be able to maintain that pace with relative ease, and particularly while reducing the workload on your arms. That’s the "Open Water" technique taught in Lessons Three to Five of the Easy Freestyle DVD that you have.

3) What’s the "math" for traveling 100m in 86 seconds? If you travel 1.2m/stroke, it’ll take you 83 strokes to cover 100m. That means you need to take a stroke every 1.03 sec, which can be easily quantified with your Tempo Trainer. If you travel 1.1m/stroke, then it’ll take 91 strokes to cover 100m. That means you need to take a stroke every .94 sec.(How can you tell your Stroke Length? While swimming in a 25m pool, if you begin swimming, after pushoff, at 5 meters, covering the remaining 20 meters in 16 strokes is a Stroke Length of 1.25 meters. Over a long distance, with no arm-resting pushoffs (and possibly a bit of added chop), you’d have to maintain keen concentration to hold that SL between 1.1 and 1.2 meters per stroke.

So you get the idea. You’ll need to improve your stroke efficiency so you can travel at least 1.1 to 1.2 meters per stroke, then drill that pattern deeply into your muscle memory so it resists breakdown because of fatigue or the variety of things that can happen in an OW swim. Then you need to train your neuromuscular system to take strokes of consistent efficiency at a tempo sufficient to travel 1600 meters (one mile) in 23 minutes. And you need to find a way to take those strokes without making your arms tired — i.e. by taking work that most swimmers rely on arm muscles to do and distributing it over the whole body.

You’ve got 3 months. How long will it take you to:
a) reprogram your stroke for greater efficiency, then
b) program it to complete strokes with an SL of 1.1m every .94 sec?

As you can see, record-breaking, particularly in open water, is a problem-solving exercise. One of the problems I’ve alluded to briefly is wind and water conditions on the day you swim. If it’s less than ideal, all of the neuromuscular programming I just mentioned needs to be both adaptable to those conditions and highly resistant to breakdown.

As you can see, I haven’t given you a cut-and-dried response (swim X 100s at this interval and pace) but instead outlined the specific task required to achieve a record-breaking pace for 1600m in open water. We can dialogue about how you train for that task, but it seems to me that the first step is to start with increasing your efficiency as expeditiously as possible. I think it would be a good idea to have a friend video your stroke then compare it with what you see on the Easy Freestyle DVD.
You won’t have to be as efficient as I needed to be to swim that pace because your fitness level is greater as is your strength to weight ratio. I had minimal margin for energy-waste and needed to become an "energy-conserving machine" in order to swim that pace for 2 miles.  I believe you could swim that pace with a slightly less efficient stroke — but one that will need to be more efficient than it is today.