Training Plan 40K

The program will cover the main physical and mental preparations you need to achieve the objective.

Physical Preparations:

• General physical conditioning
• Injury prevention
• Metabolic conditioning (power supply)
• Muscular conditioning (ability to work)
• Environmental adaptation (specific ow skills)

In general, the physical preparations are intended to get your body ready to work, injury-free, in a positive-stress state for up to 15 hours.

Mental Preparations:

• Building mental ‘control panel’
• Attention endurance
• Attitude (reframing experiences into positive perspective)
• Mental games
• Self-diagnostic and decision skill

In general, the mental preparations are intended to get you mind ready to ‘pilot your vessel’ with skill, wisdom and a good attitude. All these advantages added up will give you the best chance of healthful success.

We understand the English Channel swim to be more of a matter of duration in the water than actual distance. The distance is only 21 miles straight across, but with tides and currents, the swim is much longer.

This may mean being in the water up to 15 hours, in water that may be only 16 C at its warmest, and possibly around 12 C. With this in mind we have set up the training to prepare you for about 40km or about 15 hours of continuous swimming, with a sustained steady pace.

Both distance and duration will be used as measurements for your training because of how sea and weather conditions could affect the swim. The training will anticipate feeding intervals of about 60 minutes during the crossing. Effort and intervals will be designed around this time frame. 60 minutes of swimming may allow for about 2.5 to 3 km of swimming.  Because of tide and currents this is according to distance experienced, not necessarily actual distance covered.

In an orderly, sequential manner the training topics, the monthly schedule will be provided for you in this program.

We will work together to design the weekly assignments as we go along, based on the feedback you get from your training experience.

The objectives and training purpose for each practice type has been provided for you as well. The skill projects are suggested to you in order of priority. We can work together to develop some practice patterns you can start with and modify to suit yourself. I will guide you in making decisions about increasing challenge and work load gradually, according to our training principles.

I recommend that you make as much of your practice plans a routine so that the amount of decision you need to make each day and each week is limited and you can expend that mental energy on monitoring feedback, comparing to previous results, and making micro-adjusments to your practices to make them more effective. Big, or frequent changes will compete for your mental attention and energy. Variety is built into the overall plan, but you don’t want too much variety so that you can conserve precious energy for the actual swimming and training.

Over the course of this training plan, in 8 months, we have a list of skills or strengths to develop under each of these categories:

• Stroke Skills – efficiency and injury prevention
• Open Water Skills – dealing with stressful sea conditions
• Cold Water Adaptation
• Metabolic Training – preparing to work for 15 hours
• General Conditioning – strength in spine, core, shoulders, hips
• Event Nutrition – fueling during training and the crossing
• Lifestyle Nutrition – outside of training times
• Mental Training – strength of attention and perception

In your personal training plan notes we will identify all the specific skills and strengths you need in each of these categories, and set goals or objectives in each category for each month.

An important element to the plan is to go through a process of adaptation in cycles. Give too few weeks for this and there will not be sufficient stimulation to get your systems to rise to higher performance. Work for too many weeks continuously at this and the systems will get overloaded, fatigued in a negative way, and make you more vulnerable to injury and illness.

There is some leeway in the prescription depending on many factors, but for our distance swimming purposes we will aim for 5 to 6 week cycles – this means, in a 5 week cycle, you will build up intensity for 4 weeks and then rest your systems for a week with much lower volume intensity, and even a change of some of the activity types.

Variety

Another important principle is variety – or more specifically, changing the way signals are sent through the circuits while training. Pure, unaltered repetition, hundreds a day, day-after-day, will soon cause the nervous system to go ‘numb’ to the signals and the skill-improvement potential of the activity will diminish. Instead, it goes much better to work the same skill but work it from different directions. So, each week you are provided with a variety of practice types that will work on your skills from different directions. And in each new cycle, the challenges and activities presented should alter as well so that your nervous system is constantly challenged to ‘stay alert’ and grow new circuits and grow stronger circuits. 

Rest

Then you provide critical rest each night, and in different forms during the week culminating in at least one full day off from swimming activity, and then one week of low-intensity activity per cycle. Regular rest which provides full recovery and restoration of the systems that happens between practices and cycles is actually the unseen pillar of higher performance. The athlete who remains sensitive to the signals of recovery and has the restraint to respect this (not initiating high intensity work until the body is ready for it) will be the one to excel over the entire season, and over many seasons.

Your (dry-land) conditioning work is meant to supplement and support the work you are doing in the water, not compete with it for your time or energy. It is important to do this conditioning regularly as you build up strength and stability around your joints, in order to reduce the risk of injury.

I propose this schedule for your conditioning initially, for the first few months, while building up general strength and stability around the body…

Day 1 (could be Monday)

• Conditioning – 45 minutes
• Tempo Practice

Day 2

• Conditioning – 30 minutes
• SPL Practice

Day 3

• Conditioning – 15 minutes
• Power or Pace Practice

Day 4

• Conditioning – 45 minutes
• Rest Day – No Swimming

Day 5

• Conditioning – 15 minutes
• Distance 1 Practice

Day 6

• Conditioning – 15 minutes
• Distance 2 Practice

Day 7

• No Conditioning
• Rest Day – No Swimming

Power Practice is intended to build muscle power, with short, high intensity intervals. Later on this increased strength will be available to your body as your pace and training volume increase.

In the first cycles you this practice will use ‘Power Burst’ sets.

In later cycles you may have practices assigned with 25, 50, 75, or 100 sprints. These will be assigned as needed, based on the data of your practice reports.

Your skill objectives are to:

• Push your body to apply more power (past the normal restraints)
• Look for weak spots in your propulsion actions
• Discipline your body to maintain effort as fatigue sets in

This practice is high physical intensity with moderate mental intensity.

Total distance in power sets may be up to 1500 m for the main set.

This practice would occur only once per week.

This practice may be conducted in a short-course or long-course (50m) pool, or in open-water.

Pace Practice is intended to simulate expedition stress upon your system. This beneficial stress is intended to provoke adaptation and increase sustainable pace.

It is difficult in practice settings to simulate the kind of stress you’ll feel particularly from swimming for hours and hours. So, these kinds of practices are intended to put your body into stress within much shorter training distances, and give you the opportunity to develop strength and better responses to that stress.

Your skill objectives are to:

• Choose suitable pace
• Establish consistent pace
• Adapt to faster pace (relax into it, make it feel easier)
• Switch pace on command

This practice is high physical intensity with moderate mental intensity.

Pick up to 2 skill projects for the week, and work on those in this practice. Choose two of your focal points for each skill or use those assigned by your coach. Cycle through those focal points on regular intervals during this practice.

Total distance in practice can be up to 8K for the main set.

This practice may include feeding.

Conduct this practice at least 1 time per week.

This practice may be conducted in a short-course or long-course (50m) pool, or in open-water if you can measure pace while you are swimming.

Distance Practice is intended to simulate expedition stress upon your system. This beneficial stress is intended to provoke adaptation in your joints, tissues and metabolism to sustain movement for hours.

It is difficult in practice settings to simulate the kind of stress you’ll feel particularly from swimming for hours and hours. So, these kinds of practices are intended to put your body into some level of stress in long swims going past 3 hours (to fully shift your body into a fat-metabolism state), and to eventually (toward the final stage of training) stack up distance swims, twice a day or day-after-day to simulate extended work with less-than-adequate recovery between them. This will provoke your body to develop more metabolic strength and allow you to develop better mental responses to that fatigue.

Your skill objectives are to:

• Choose suitable Stroke Length
• Establish a feel for holding consistent SL
• Switch SL on command
• Practice feeding + swimming

This practice is high physical intensity (from distance) with moderate mental intensity.

Pick up to 2 skill projects for the week, and work on those in this practice. Choose two of your focal points for each skill or use those assigned by your coach. Cycle through those focal points on regular intervals during this practice.

This practice should include feeding.

Your are balancing available time and energy each week with your need to get your body ready to work for up to 15 hours continuously.

Distance Practices are meant to gradually increase the stress to give the body and mind time to adapt.

Conduct this practice at least 2 times per week, as assigned.

This practice should be conducted in a long-course (50m) pool or in open-water.

The practice could be done in segments when windows of time are limited. For example:

• Two practices per day, dividing up the total distance.
• Two consecutive days, dividing up the total distance.

However, try to simulate as much continuous swimming (with feeding breaks) as possible. So single, long distance practices will be best for provoking the kind of conditioning we seek.

Total Distance

5 km total

Warm Up

1 km silent swim

1 km easy with brisk 50 m every 200 m (in pool) or 50 strokes every 3 minutes (in OW)

Main Set

Set tempo to Distance Tempo (TD), the tempo you are currently comfortable swimming long distance with.

In open water, for remainder of swim do 2 rounds of this cycle:

• 20 minutes at tempo TD
• 5 minutes at tempo TD – 0.03
• 5 minutes at tempo TD – 0.06

In the pool, for the remainder of the swim do 2 rounds of this cycle:

• 1000 at tempo TD
• 300 at tempo TD – 0.03
• 200 at tempo TD – 0.06

Total Distance

5 km total

Warm Up

1 km silent swim

1 km easy with brisk 50 m every 200 m (in pool) or 50 strokes every 3 minutes (in OW)

Main Set

Set tempo to Distance Tempo (TD), the tempo you are currently comfortable swimming long distance with.

In open water, for remainder of swim do 2 rounds of this cycle:

• 20 minutes at tempo TD
• 5 minutes at tempo TD – 0.03
• 5 minutes at tempo TD – 0.06

In the pool, for the remainder of the swim do 2 rounds of this cycle:

• 1000 at tempo TD
• 300 at tempo TD – 0.03
• 200 at tempo TD – 0.06

Total Distance

5 km total

Warm Up

1 km silent swim

1 km easy with brisk 50 m every 200 m (in pool) or 50 strokes every 3 minutes (in OW)

Main Set

Set SPL N to the stroke count that you are currently comfortable holding for longer distance.

Effort level should be at RPE 2 or 3 at most.

In the pool, for the remainder of the swim do 6 rounds of this cycle:

• 450 at SPL N for every length
• 50 at SPL N-1

Total Distance

5 km total

Warm Up

1 km silent swim

1 km easy with brisk 50 m every 200 m (in pool) or 50 strokes every 3 minutes (in OW)

Main Set

Set SPL N to the stroke count that you are currently comfortable holding for longer distance.

Effort level should be at RPE 2 or 3 at most.

In the pool, for the remainder of the swim do 6 rounds of this cycle:

• 450 at SPL N for every length
• 50 at SPL N-1

Total Distance

5 km total

Warm Up

1 km silent swim

1 km easy with brisk 50 m every 200 m (in pool) or 50 strokes every 3 minutes (in OW)

Main Set

Power Bursts

Effort level should be at RPE 5.

In open water, do this cycle:

• Swim 12x 3 minute intervals
• At the start of each 3 minutes swim 12 strokes at your absolute highest power – 110%
• then swim the remainder at easy pace to fully recover, RPE 1-2

Then swim the remainder of the distance today at RPE 2-3 with your chosen focal points.

In the pool, do this cycle:

• Swim 12x 200 m intervals
• At the start of each 200 swim 12 strokes at your absolute highest power – 110%
• then swim the remainder at easy pace to fully recover, RPE 1-2

Then swim the remainder of the distance today at RPE 2-3 with your chosen focal points.

Total Distance

5 km total

Warm Up

1 km silent swim

1 km easy with brisk 50 m every 200 m (in pool) or 50 strokes every 3 minutes (in OW)

Main Set

Power Bursts

Effort level should be at RPE 5.

In open water, do this cycle:

• Swim 14x 3 minute intervals
• At the start of each 3 minutes swim 12 strokes at your absolute highest power – 110%
• then swim the remainder at easy pace to fully recover, RPE 1-2

Then swim the remainder of the distance today at RPE 2-3 with your chosen focal points.

In the pool, do this cycle:

• Swim 14x 200 m intervals
• At the start of each 200 swim 12 strokes at your absolute highest power – 110%
• then swim the remainder at easy pace to fully recover, RPE 1-2

Then swim the remainder of the distance today at RPE 2-3 with your chosen focal points.

Total Distance

Distance 1 = 7 km

Distance 2 = 8 km

Warm Up

1 km silent swim

1 km easy with brisk 50 m every 200 m (in pool) or 50 strokes every 3 minutes (in OW)

Main Set

Swim continuously, with focal points chosen for this week.

Effort level should be at RPE 2.

In open water, swim with SPL N, by feel, check stroke length occasionally with your watch. In pool, swim with SPL N, by counting on one length every 100 m or so.

You may use a Tempo Trainer if you like, set to your tempo TD.

Every 15 minutes (without TT, or ignoring the BEEP) do 1x 100 strokes at a brisk pace, faster than TD.

Total Distance

Distance 1 = 8 km

Distance 2 = 8 km

Warm Up

1 km silent swim

1 km easy with brisk 50 m every 200 m (in pool) or 50 strokes every 3 minutes (in OW)

Main Set

Swim continuously, with focal points chosen for this week.

Effort level should be at RPE 2.

In open water, swim with SPL N, by feel, check stroke length occasionally with your watch. In pool, swim with SPL N, by counting on one length every 100 m or so.

You may use a Tempo Trainer if you like, set to your tempo TD.

Every 15 minutes (without TT, or ignoring the BEEP) do 1x 100 strokes at a brisk pace, faster than TD.

This week is intended to give you some rest from the intense training you have been doing.

You may swim 2 or 3 times, but keep intensity low and swim for less than 2 hours. This would be a great time to do a Form Practice, with low physical intensity and high quality attention, to look for features of the stroke you may improve.

You are encouraged to do other activities like walking and hiking as you please, as long as you do not exhaust your muscles or metabolic system.

You may do running, cycling, or other aerobic activities that last less then 90 minutes to not stress your metabolic system too much as it recovers from this training cycle. Please be very careful about activities or actions that might put strain on your spine or shoulder joints.