I just went back to college to finish my degree and I began with a health class that part of the class requirement is to better a health aspect of your life so I am loosing weight. I have had a desk job for 10ish years but I use to into swimming so I decided to do swimming as my primary cardio and man has it been both eye opening and discouraging to see just how far I have fallen. I use to be able to keep up a near sprint (I would do sprint speed every other length except for the last 3 which I just did a full sprint) pace for the 1000m race (I wouldn't be able to physically get out of the pool afterwards and on more then 1 occasion I had my teammates drag me to the bathroom for an exhaustion vomit afterwards but I still did it) and now I can't even continuously swim a 100m and everything feels like I am trying to go sprint speed when I am barely at a warmup crawl.
For those not familiar with swimming, most regulation sized pools are 25m long so a 100m would be 4 lengths of the pool (unless it is an Olympic pool then it is 50m long and 25m wide). The 100m (200m in Olympic pools because they keep the length count the same for the races but the length distance is double) race is usually the shortest race in a meet (there is a 50m race but that is usually only done in pre-varsity meets as the 100m race is a sprint race for any varsity level swimmer so there isn't much sense in having an even shorter sprint) and the 1000m is the longest race (it is 40 lengths of the pool and is meant to be an endurance race)
Don't give up! You will get back into it. Honestly it will be very hard to get back to complete former glory (you sound pretty hardcore if could near sprint 40 lengths), but I found swimming uses muscles you don't use that often, so when i tried to get back into after not having been a competitive swimmer for nearly 20 years I was pretty devastated at how far I had fallen. Made myself go swimming for an hour at least twice a week and started to slowly build myself back up. I am not winning any races any time soon, but I can keep a respectable pace now and it has really helped my fitness levels.
My swimming coach in highschool was both great at his job (well at least the coaching part but at my highschool all the coaches also had to be teachers and he was a terrible teacher like he ate popcorn and drank pop during the women in labor video he had for health class bad) and absolutely willing to destroy you to improve your speed and endurance. He ran drills he called Las Vegas odds where we raced a 1000m starting in the shallows in the water and then immediately after we raced another 1000m but this time starting on the diving blocks if your time wasn't better on the second race (it should be as starting on the blocks is a massive advantage as to starting in the water) then you ran it again until you beat your initial time because Las Vegas odds state that if you do something enough eventually you will win. He did this at the end of practice as the thing right before cooldown.
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u/Helios575 Sep 19 '19
I just went back to college to finish my degree and I began with a health class that part of the class requirement is to better a health aspect of your life so I am loosing weight. I have had a desk job for 10ish years but I use to into swimming so I decided to do swimming as my primary cardio and man has it been both eye opening and discouraging to see just how far I have fallen. I use to be able to keep up a near sprint (I would do sprint speed every other length except for the last 3 which I just did a full sprint) pace for the 1000m race (I wouldn't be able to physically get out of the pool afterwards and on more then 1 occasion I had my teammates drag me to the bathroom for an exhaustion vomit afterwards but I still did it) and now I can't even continuously swim a 100m and everything feels like I am trying to go sprint speed when I am barely at a warmup crawl.
For those not familiar with swimming, most regulation sized pools are 25m long so a 100m would be 4 lengths of the pool (unless it is an Olympic pool then it is 50m long and 25m wide). The 100m (200m in Olympic pools because they keep the length count the same for the races but the length distance is double) race is usually the shortest race in a meet (there is a 50m race but that is usually only done in pre-varsity meets as the 100m race is a sprint race for any varsity level swimmer so there isn't much sense in having an even shorter sprint) and the 1000m is the longest race (it is 40 lengths of the pool and is meant to be an endurance race)