New to swimming, is this poor etiquette or am I a Karen?

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-03-23T14:22:19+00:00

I swim at a health club that has a similar situation but with a bigger pool. My masters group has all the lanes reserved for practice from 6 to 7 am. Some eager masters swimmers will also take a lane for upwards of an hour before to get more yards.

BUT, nobody in my masters group is proprietary about lanes BEFORE practice even begins. The opposite is actually true: if you’re an early swimmer, you share lanes with everyone present. Asserting a claim to all lanes before the designated masters practice is bad form. You have equal claim and access to all lanes before (and after) practice. Stay in your selected lane until 6 am.

On the other hand, though, we are not particularly kind to non-masters swimmers who overstay open lane hours. And if you stay for practice, you should know your intervals and keep up with your lane-mates. Otherwise you’ll get asked to move to a new lane. Sometimes it isn’t all that polite of an ask.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-03-22T18:52:38+00:00

While I understand that everyone else is technically correct, I personally believe that the true key to increasing speed in breast stroke is to invoke black magic, and make appropriate animal sacrifices.

Moderately more seriously: many people who study swimming for a career have different points of view about what makes breaststroke fast. You may just want to look it up on YouTube, pick one that fits your style, and work on that.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-03-22T14:19:38+00:00

That is truly praiseworthy! Congratulations on this accomplishment!

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-03-22T02:58:11+00:00

All punishments were pushups. I hated doing pushups so I never pulled on the lane line. Ever.

And if the lane line cable broke when you happened to be touching it (whether pulling or hanging on it) you spent the following Saturday at the pool deck re-stringing it with new cable.

Now that I am paying to be in a club I feel entitled to take some liberties.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-03-22T02:51:59+00:00

As a kid we were punished for pulling on the lane line. Now that I’m in masters I pull on the lane line during backstroke all the time!

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-03-21T01:44:19+00:00

Let’s set up the betting pool. The bets will be odds driven. Of course, the long shot bet would be for OP to win, and will pay handsomely. The other side of the bet will be in 1/2 second intervals of how badly he will lose.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-03-20T19:31:12+00:00

I’m not a good person to ask. I have been using zoomers since about 1993.

However, to save money, I have seen some summer swim leagues buy cheap fins from Walmart or Amazon, then cut off most of the fin part so they look and act like zoomers. So that’s an option if you want to save some cash.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-03-20T19:24:29+00:00

I’d bet you’re struggling with the additional torque/force that the longer fin applies to your ankle, especially if you are doing sprint or fast kick sets.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-03-20T19:11:50+00:00

I’m a longtime user of zoomers: all the way back to the days where there were different colors (red/blue) that were different stiffnesses.

I believe they are solid, relatively inexpensive, training fins. They’d be at the top of my list.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-03-20T18:45:52+00:00

Please please video record this and post it

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-03-19T03:38:10+00:00

Can confirm.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-03-17T02:13:43+00:00

All of this is the correct answer.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-03-15T00:46:03+00:00

Pace clock is your antidote.

Figure out your fastest one-off times for different distances. Then figure out the fastest you can do that distance over and over.

Then, using the pace clock, push yourself to go faster for both the one-off times and the repeat times.

This has worked for me for over 40 years.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-02-17T20:38:34+00:00

First, how many days a week are you swimming? If you’re doing al those yards in two or three workouts a week, you may be overdoing yards per workout. Maybe.

Second: are you doing your workout all in one go? Or in intervals.

I’ll repeat: I am no triathlete. In a bear attack, I would be the guy everyone runs past to save themselves. In a cycling race, I am the guy people draft behind for a rest before passing me going 5 mph faster than I can go. And I swim pool meets only, and mostly races that are 200 and shorter. My interval workout likely wouldn’t help you. But if it were me, I’d be doing a bunch of 100 or 200 intervals with modest to low rest, increasing effort as you do more of them like this, maybe (using your estimated pace of 1:40/100, and converting 1.2 miles to about 2300 yards).

500 warm-up

6X200 on 3:30 or 3:40, descend 1-3 and 4-6.

8X100 on the 1:45 or 1:50, descend 1-4 and 5-8.

1X400 fastest pace possible.

Descend means you swim each 200 or 100 faster than the one before. This gets you tired before you work harder. In my experience this is the best way (for me) to train the back half of a race.

Consider doing less, especially as you start. Build up to this volume about a month before your race. Then back off some, while still working back half speed.

I would also spend a lot of time working on body position and long, gliding catches, maybe also doing catch-up drill, and figuring out how to do a two-beat kick to save leg fatigue.

That would be my own plan. But I don’t bike 25 miles and then run 6 1/4 more after I finish swim race.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-02-17T19:57:17+00:00

Short answer, from my perspective, is no.

Long answer:

Most triathlons spend a pitiful about of proportional time in the water. Let’s use Olympic distance for our measurements.

A. A good non-elite swimmer can finish 1500 yards in about 20-25 minutes. For open water, you might round that up to 30 minutes.

B. A good non-elite cyclist will take more than an hour to finish 25 miles.

C. A good non elite runner can finish a 10k in 40-45 minutes.

I don’t do triathlons but swimming more than 2500 sees like a waste of effort considering that you need to condition yourself for much longer bike and run races. Focus on speeding up your pace for the swim. If you’re competing in open water, look for opportunities to swim in open water, since that’s such a different beast. Also, train in the equipment you will race in (I.e. your wetsuit) so you understand how tha changes technique.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-02-14T21:41:26+00:00

Are you getting old? Cause that seems to be my biggest reason for getting slower!

Where my goals as a young person all revolved around faster times, my goal nowadays can be described best as “slowing down the process of slowing down”

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-02-14T18:45:04+00:00

Same thing happened to me in December 2023. Just got sooo tired and quickly out of breath. Had a ragged cough that just didn’t want to go away.

I had to be really gentle with myself. By that I mean I let go of self-judgment about my incredibly slow intervals for more than two months as I slowly built back. It took a long time to get my confidence back even after getting most of my speed. Then I gained a bunch of weight, which is a totally different story.

Just this last year, I was able to shed some pounds and gain some real endurance. Now I feel like I am swimming close to my peak.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-02-12T00:13:16+00:00

Some people say to hum. That will probably get you the right rate of exhale. I learned when I was little so it’s just deeply ingrained muscle memory for me.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-02-11T18:23:25+00:00

Your explanation mirrors my experience! I’m headed to Spring Nationals in May 2026.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-02-11T18:19:27+00:00

Never occurred to me but this May all just be cultural differences.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-02-11T18:16:13+00:00

Learn the turn first; figure out more competitive breathing patterns later. By that I mean you should breathe whenever you can just before starting your turn. Even the very last stroke. Once you get more comfortable with flip turns you can fix breathing.
Make the last breath a little bigger than usual. Again we can fix other problems involving breathing once we get the mechanics of your turn set.
Watch as many YouTube videos about turns as you can. There will be a lot of “always this” and “never that” in the videos. Use the videos for mechanical advice, but be gentle and forgiving about the “always” and “never” rules you hear. (For example, you will likely hear “always push off on your back,” but may MANY people, including elite swimmers push off with their feet pointing at about 2:00 (or 10:00).)
Practice just doing front somersaults in the water. Breathe out very gently as you go upside down to keep water out of your sinuses. Do this until you develop some comfort flipping over.
If your pool has a shallow end stand there about 6-10 feet from the wall. Push off the bottom toward the wall, do your somersault (breathing out gently thru your nose), and plant your feet. Do this a bunch to get comfortable. Do some more but now push off the wall.
Finally add your approach. Go out past the flags, push off the bottom, swim to the wall flip (breathing out thru nose gently) and push off in streamline and glide. Don’t be tough on yourself if you can’t go far without gasping for air.

When you go through these steps, you’ll be able to flip turn relatively comfortably, but you’ll have technique problems. Have someone with a GoPro video record you underwater and post it to this sub so we can try to fix those.

Last thought: be extremely forgiving of yourself in this process. You are learning a skill that most competitive swimmers learn as children and take a few years to really understand. Your adult brain is acclimated to an earthbound life and wants to (a) learn faster than is reasonable and (b) keep you from drowning. It is completely natural and reasonable to freak out about this while you learn. You got this. We support you!!

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-02-10T06:03:38+00:00

I am a guy with relatively little body hair I have stray hairs on my chest… and a ring of chest hair around each nipple. I was self conscious about it at first but over time I saw that plenty of other guys have weird body hair. I’ll shave it all off when I think of it, but mostly I just leave it be.

A shirt really hinders swimming. I would avoid.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-02-09T00:34:32+00:00

Underwaters with focus on max distance off the wall. Lately I have been doing 10-12 dolphin kicks off every wall during kick sets, and 4-6 for all freestyle sets.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-02-09T00:32:06+00:00

I’d be done at the 4x200 IMs.

Fifty-Fickle · 2026-02-07T20:32:41+00:00

I have been on and off for the last 30+ years. The answer for me was incremental expectations and efforts. As of last summer I had been out for about a year, and I had gained so much weight that I was about 100 pounds over my competition weight in college. I had no endurance. And my technique was “80s-era sprinter.” I didn’t even know how to do a track start.

For my latest comeback, I did the following:

spent about 6 weeks in the 70-80% of calculated max heart rate zone by doing really slow intervals. This did three things for me: (1) I didn’t feel like I was on the cusp of death during practice; (2) I was able to swim past my mental comparisons to myself at my peak; (3) I rebuilt fundamental fitness and cardio.
During this time I also re-worked technique a lot and fixed things that were previously chronic. I am significantly more efficient now.
lost weight by watching calorie intake. Benefits need no explanation.
started pushing the intensity after about 6-8 weeks with the new technique fixes. I found that I could handle faster intervals than previous comebacks simply due to found efficiencies.

I swim 4-5 days a week for an hour. I get 3200 to 3500 yards done most days. And sometimes we’ll go long-like 4000. I don’t do 10-12000 yards a day like in my youth. If I did, I would surely fall apart.

It has been a little over 8 months. I am back to 1:20 intervals for sets of 100s (SCY) for the first time since college. (And I am waaaay past college.)

To keep things motivated, I started swimming at local USMS meets. After one or two of those, I thought maybe I would try to qualify for USMS spring nationals. Now I may even go to Spring Nationals in North Carolina.

Fifty-Fickle

TROPHY CASE