DD(12) is a fairly good swimmer at an old, traditional, small club. She swam all strokes last year at Regionals, albeit quite an easy region, and we expect her to do similar this year if she gets her act together.
She started squad aged 8 1/2. She had the opportunity to swim 3 x 2 hour sessions. One finished at 9:15pm so we often used to skip that. By a year later she was probably swimming all 6 hours unless we were away.
She moved to senior squad aged 10 1/2, gradually increasing her swims as the coach thought she could handle it. In theory she swims 9 hours, but invariably there is a weekend session that gets cancelled due to open meets or we can't make due to school stuff....we probably average out at about 7 hours. We don't have too many competitive galas, just a few open meets/Counties etc.
When looking at how "busy" a young swimmer is you really should take other sporting/active stuff into account. Somehow DD also managed to fit in 4 1/2 hours of dance classes alongside 5 hours of games/hockey a week. Obviously we've dropped a lot of that in the past 18 months. They do need some rest and plenty of sleep. Sometimes they just need to sit and watch Youtube.
Whatever you do, I would urge you to cut it all back if you find DC is getting a lot of colds/bugs or is getting too many aches and pains.
Belated congrats to minieccles. 100 Fly takes a lot of skill!
DD had one good day, one underwhelming (but she had a busy week at school). On the plus side we finished in time to have a lovely Sunday lunch I didn't have to cook and it felt very festive with everything lit up.