Poolside chat - new year, new racing!

[Glittertwins]

Hope this works, am rubbish at this!

@Littletreefrog that sounds really unpleasant, but I'd go with the good suggestions already given. We've had swimmers join our club from bigger ones because of attitudes like this elsewhere (it doesn't aspire to be a high powered club and the coaches care about the swimmers, but it will still push swimmers if they can make it to regionals and nationals). Friends who train together should only be encouraged to get super-competitive when they are racing against each other and even then, someone's got to be slower on race day.

I'll preface by saying that DD(16) swims with a small club; we probably have 80-100 active swimmers in 2 squads.

Now we are down to 4.5 hours/week training (half the pre-covid levels because of costs) we send a handful of swimmers to Regionals and about 1/4 to Counties. Were you to ask most of the children why they turn up each week, they train because it helps with fitness for other sports and primarily to be with mates outside the school bubbles.

We've watched swimmers move on to "club of clubs" (usually at 10-12 when parents convince themselves that they have a future champion) only to see them thoroughly miserable with the grind/the hours/the pressure. All bar one of DD's "talented" cohort have stopped swimming either through pressure or injury by age 14. It is very easy to get sucked into that competitive "you'll win if you could just train harder" mentality.

Yes, occasionally I might need to nag, but why force a child to do something that makes them miserable for a big chunk of their leisure time? It will surely impact all aspects of their life socially and at school (and perhaps mentally and physically too),

littletreefrog I would be looking for a new club, or maybe giving it a break. Mental health is just too precious to strain unnecessarily IMO.

Absolutely agree. Ds did t even start at a club until 12. Was 16 when he moved to a bigger club and trained all these stupid hours!

But he loves it and that's why he keeps going. I've always said if they don't enjoy it what's the point?

Also ..... Aquatics GB summer champs schedule is out now.

Thank you for the reminder @itsgettingweird. I had the tab open on the website and had been keeping an eye out but hadn't looked yet today. Now downloaded.

Really good post @Madcats Looking at the regional entries for my younger one’s age group it’s dominated by performance clubs and other big clubs, and I sometimes wonder how he has any hope of competing, but something must be working for him to do as well as he has on half the training hours I suspect most of them do, and he is happy, has friends, isn’t under lots of pressure and doesn’t have a long trek to a far away pool at crack of dawn. Hopefully in the long run that makes him less likely to burn out and give up, ultimately the aim is fitness and enjoyment, and if the environment isn’t having a positive effect on them it may not be the best place even if on paper it is the ‘best’ club.

@Eccle80 I think so totally. The other problem with doing 10 hours per week for example is then if you stop doing them you get slower. So that also leads to many giving up in the long run, at least from my observation.

It is great he is doing so well, Eccle80. If he isn't aiming for longer races, short speedy sets will work well (which was a shame for DD as she really ought to be a long distance swimmer, given her natural stroke).

Now that we need to schlep down to Plymouth for Regionals, we go to get the hoody (which I will apparently integrate into a sporting patchwork blanket by Uni) and a bank holiday Airbnb weekend on the Devon coast, rather than the swimming. AKA we're just having fun and DD commiserates with the kids from certain schools if she bumps into them.

Surviving past the point that others have burnt out isn't a bad strategy! I have suggested it to DD1 more than once when she has been bemoaning how unachievable it feels to be able to beat the local speed merchants in her age group 😂
9yo DD1 is doing well, but even in the events where she has a 3rd-5th county ranking she has absolutely no hope any time soon of getting near the times of the 2 girls who are consistently ranked 1st and 2nd without hugely increasing her hours, which is not going to happen. The 2 girls are from much bigger clubs who have a huge number of pool hours - they will be doing 9hrs+ compared to DD's 3, and none of the other girls' times in the county age group come close to them. I do wonder how they will be expected to keep up (and presumably extend) that much training over the next 10yrs, as once meets are thrown into the mix (and 2 DCs in different squads...) it already feels like our lives revolve around a pool! I'm not sure where I'd find the extra 6hrs plus travelling at this point in time! DD does scouting and martial arts too and I wouldn't want her to miss out on that variety and be forced to specialise so soon.
I also figure you never know what individual curve ball puberty is going to throw all of them, plus there will come a time when the speedy young swimmers can't realistically get much quicker yet DD still has room to improve, allowing the gap to be closed.

Our club as a whole works with fewer hours than the others in our county, with our top squad getting 9 hours. The youngest end of regional qualifiers get 4.5-6hrs. Our head coach puts a lot of work into maximising each session to make up the difference, and it clearly works somewhere as we always have a good chunk of the swimmers making regionals with 1 or 2 making nationals - not too shabby for a small club!
I am reading more and more from different sources about the effectiveness of shorter pool hours but carefully crafted sets, so maybe this will eventually become the norm and help to stop younger swimmers burning out? It is fascinating to see the different ethos and approach between the various clubs though. At counties this year, most did a few dryland stretches but we had one of the large clubs running a full-blown circuit training warmup on the deck complete with skipping ropes (I'm amazed this was allowed given the space constraints), looking very serious about the whole affair. Meanwhile our swimmers were wandering in munching on a Gregg's they had picked up next door on the way in, chatting with their friends and putting all their efforts into setting up their camping chairs and other comforts 😂 We are definitely known for being a more relaxed and social club!

At 9-11 he was consistently slower than others in his age group. We did move clubs then as he wanted to do better and be like the others . Quite honestly the then current club was not good in many ways. We never expected him to do what he has done and he loves it (although the occasional grumble about early mornings).

And just because someone is good at a young age, it does not mean to say it will continue. I know of several who were quite literally head and shoulders above the rest at that age and are now around average a few years later.

It's actually really good practice to get them warming up using RMAP from a young age before even getting in the pool.

It helps prevent injury.

And yes to not knowing what a swimmer will be like at 9/10/11.

Some don't even start at clubs until 11/12.

It's one of the reasons they look at and focus on long term athlete development. And one of the reason they have changed the younger swimmers to swimming only 200's at nationals. Younger swimmers need aerobic capacity and technique. The rest comes (much!) later!

What will need to happen next season which was too later for this one is L3 meets including 200's so swimmers get times to enter L1 races to be able to qualify.

But with all change it's a process and they have to ensure the fun doesn't disappear alongside it! (Hopefully 🤞)

Just catching up on the messages and I agree re: the ones who stay versus the ones who burn out.

Mine was a decent swimmer but I recently looked back at her regional results when she was about 12 years and she was coming 2nd / 5th / 8th but many swimmers ahead of her are no longer swimming today.

We also started at a small social club environment with low yardage and good technical skills and she moved when she was 17 because she felt ready and wanted to swim at a higher level.

The programme she moved to was the right place for her at the right time.

Mh ds didn't move until he was 16 for same reasons.

But he absolutely loves all the hours and training and racing. It's definitely an individual journey and very personal.

Good posts @Eccle80 and @Madcats. It's interesting seeing different experiences. We've definitely found that a lot of swimmers who were good (very good) have given up from the bigger clubs with really strict policies on attending training and long hours. DS would train more and would perhaps like to go to a bigger club, but as a younger swimmer he would not have wanted to. That said, I don't think I could get him to a bigger club anyway and keep my job, so it will have to be a decision for when he's older.

And puberty can be a game-changer, especially for girls @SkankingWombat (or boys for that matter, but for different reasons).

So the day has arrived!

Ds is off to Madeira to European para swimming championships. He's got all his new aquatics GB kit too

Thats fantastic, what a wonderful time he is having travelling the world with his swimming. Well done him.

Thats so exciting for him.

Good luck to him! What a great experience ☺️

And thank you to everyone sharing their experiences about the younger swimmers who seem untouchable with their crazy training hours and super-fast times. It's easy to feel it'll be impossible for your DC to ever make up the difference, but reassures the rational part of my brain that tells me being able to maintain a (small!) variety of extracurriculars plus steady but solid progress in the pool is what's needed at this age. I don't have any expectation for what level either DC will achieve, but want it to be a love that continues long term and you do need to feel you're in with a chance, even if you know that time is further down the road, for that to happen I think. I have already been selling 'the long game' to DDs, but will add your experiences to that too. DD1 is getting pretty good at concentrating on her own progress without too much comparison with others in training, but it can be hard to maintain that mindset at galas when seeing what younger swimmers at the bigger (long hours) clubs are doing and the difference is so stark.

My DS was getting really fed up at age 15, slogging away on long boring sets that were designed to keep most of the swimmers busy whilst the head coach concentrated on his handful of ‘stars’. Last straw was the move to a brand new pool which, whilst being a great facility, meant arriving at 5.15am and plodding up and down a big pool for 2.5 hrs and then struggling back across town to try and make it in time for school (he was a sprinter, but only the ‘stars’ got to train for that).

He was able to switch to a smaller club that concentrated on doing HIIT sets, for 4 or 5 hrs a week, and dropped huge amounts of time off his 50s / 100s on all strokes. Everyone got equal attention, even the guy that was working full time and still training that made the Commonwealth Games squad.

Amazing what you can do with a great coach (they did a lot of technique work and starts and turns) and training at racing pace.

And good luck to @itsgettingweird miniweird.

Amazing, hope he has a brilliant time @itsgettingweird and good luck to him!

@SkankingWombat absolutely agree with keeping the balance at that age, there’s always the option to move when they get into their teens and can make that decision themselves they want to commit to a bigger number of training hours, and as others here have shown they can do very well out of that. For the long term love I think it’s better to build gradually rather than piling on the hours and pressure pre teens

Good luck to your DS @itsgettingweird!

Skanking I don't really comment re age because I have no experience. Ds was 12 when he joined a small club. 16 when he transferred to the city club.

Doesn't seem to have harmed him 🤷‍♀️

Brilliant news!!!