Silly and Misleading Yardage Advice

I think the main reason people are amazed at the idea of a fast 70.3 swim on three hours a week is the sheer amount of bad advice floating around social media.

Go ask the internet how much you should swim to get ready for a half Ironman. Wander into a triathlon forum, read a few threads, and see what the loudest voices tell you. It goes something like this:

"I swam 20,000 to 25,000 yards a week for years to get my swim where it is."

Wow. So you're well into five-figure weekly yardage before you've even toweled off. Better quit your job to fit it in.

Here's the thing about advice like that, and it's the same trick as those retirement calculators that tell you that you need three million dollars to ever stop working. It's not technically a lie. That person really did swim 25,000 yards a week. But look at who's talking. It's almost always a former swimmer, or someone who came into triathlon obsessed with the pool, describing what they personally did with a swimming background and, apparently, unlimited time. Then a nervous age-grouper reads it and thinks, welp, guess I need to swim 20k a week too. And they can't, because they have a job and a family and two other sports to train. So they conclude they're just doomed to be slow.

More Isn't Always Better

That "more is always safer" assumption is one of the most damaging ideas in triathlon. If a person swam 25,000 yards a week to get fast, does that mean you need to? And if so, how is it that plenty of triathletes come out of the water near the front on a third of that? How do the pro athletes I coach do it on 12,000 to 15,000, and the age-groupers on 4,000-8,000, while the forum says you need nearly double?

It comes back to the You Might Just Get What You Need post I wrote recently. The number that matters was never the total. It's whether the meters are doing anything. That forum hero grinding 25k a week wasn't fast because of the 25,000. He was fast in spite of most of it, dragging along a huge pile of junk yardage that a background of swimming let him absorb. You don't have that background or that time, and the good news is you don't need them. You need the meters that matter and none of the ones that don't.

Because here's what nobody counting yardage ever tells you: total volume is a garbage measurement. It counts warmup, cooldown, easy filler, and undirected drills exactly the same as it counts hard, race-specific work. Two swimmers can both write "5,000 yards" in the log, and one did 1,000 yards of real work while the other did 4,000. The number is identical. The training is not even close. So when someone brags about a weekly total on their Strava, they're bragging about a number that doesn't measure the thing that makes you fast.

The Breakdown

So let me give you a quick yardage calculator of my own, the honest version.

A time-crunched age-group triathlete training for a 70.3 needs somewhere around 4,000 to 8,000 yards a week, across three swims (depending on your level). That's it. Not 20,000. My full-distance pros race off around 15,000, and a short-course athlete can do great on 6,000. If you don't want to overthink it, aim for three swims a week, call it 6,000 total, and make those meters count.

And here's what "make them count" actually looks like, because a number alone can still be junk. A real week has one job per session. Here's one of ours:

Look at that. Around 2,250 yards, and this is my "Long" option, every one of them pointed at something, and it will beat a mindless 5,000 every time, for a fraction of the hours. The forum guy spent his whole life in the pool to get fast. You're going to do it on three focused sessions and still make it to your kid's soccer game.

So here's the headline: stop asking how much you should swim. Start asking how much of your swimming is actually doing anything. Answer that honestly, and the scary five-figure number the internet handed you turns out to be about half fluff.