Masters is great for giving people a positive view of aging, in no other area of life that I know of do people actually boast about how old they are ! But I stopped swimming Masters about 20 years ago. Partly because I prefer to do my own thing training wise, but mainly because I never swam faster in races than in training, certainly not on anything over 50m. Thus racing was a deeply frustrating experience for me.
Being able to pull it out in a race is one of the three keys to success in swimming (or any other sport) that plus talent and, above all, hard work.
It’s always the second to last which is the slowest for me ! And the third quarter in any race or time trail ! !
Supposing someone hadn’t been swimming for 4 years and that someone decided to enter a 13km OW swim in June, where would that someone best start for the first month. Asking for a friend. 
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You may want to warn your friend that the seal on their goggles may have perished & their trunks may be a bit tight 
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I’d say the best place to start would be the looney asylum 
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Yeah, I think I might be trying to talk my ‘friend’ out of it.
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Being serious for a moment, I think I should do something like that. I’ve done distance running & cycling things that have frightened me but never pushed myself swimming. I doubt if I’d place among the proper swimmers but I’m pretty proud of how my swim has come along since I started Tri.
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June is miles away, no need to start yet!.
I can dig my training plan out from when I did coniston if you want? That was only about 9km but would still work
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That would be fab! Thanks @GRamsay
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Hmm, I think I might need to start quite soon. Form good habits, and all that.
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Actually, one of my friends posted on our open water swimming WhatsApp this morning trying to see if anyone is interested in the great north swim, he wants to do the 5K.
I think it’s a Friday though and I’m running out of holidays. Wouldn’t be interested in that but I think there’s a 3.2k option.
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Ok, had to dig through a few things. I thought I had a dedicated plan for Coniston but I was doing quite a bit of triathlon at the time as well so had two separate plans from my coach
Consiton was 3rd September and I started proper training on 1st Feb, so 8 months. I hadnt swam a lot leading up to that as I had an awful eye infection which took months to clear (nearly went blind in one eye, dont swim in contact lenses!). I was a good 2mins off my 400m PB I told my coach before I started this.
1st Feb - 16th May I was swimming twice per week, sessions I will put below.
16th May onwards I was swimming 3 days a week, the 3rd day was an open water swim. For the OW swims I started at 1600m and added 400m each week (apart from an easy week every 4th week). The max OW swim I did was 5000m. Think with long distance swimming its a lot like marathon training where you dont want or need to be swimming anywhere near the event distance.
There is a bit of debate as to whether you need to that much OW swimming or whether a more focused pool session would be better. When I trained for Lanza I did 3 pool sessions, mostly because it was out of season for OW. I did it for Coniston because I knew it was going to be cold and I am a cold water wimp so wanted plenty of time in the lakes.
Swim Sessions. The pool sessions were about 2800m swam in total. I was also having 121 swim sessions and so I had quite large warm ups where i was doing drills to fix technique (the drills below were specific to me so ignore them). The sessions below rotated week on week so week 1 do Sessions 2 and 3, next week Session 1 and 4 etc. You wont want to be doing Session 4 more than every couple of weeks. These sessions were all done basing it off CSS (How to Use Critical Swim Speed Training | TrainingPeaks) and using a Tempo Trainer. I did a CSS test at the start and a couple before Coniston. I stopped doing CSS tests in the end because it was hard doing them in a public session. If a few sessions in a row started feeling easy I just knock half a second off the trainer.
Session 1
Warm up:
200 easy ↑ Lower Head ↓ Heel Break
200 fins ↑ Look Across ↓ Head Up
8 x 25m Swim Golf with 15 seconds rest
Build:
4 x 50 freestyle (Tempo Work) (20 seconds rest)
Main Set:
2 x through entire set below – all at CSS pace, set tempo
Trainer on mode 1 to beep per length
4 x 100 freestyle (+ 1 beep rest)
2 x 200 freestyle (+1 beep rest)
4 x 50 ignore beeper instructions and beat the beeper and
start next interval on beep (very short recovery)
(take 1 beep recovery and repeat entire main set)
Session 2
Warm up:
200 easy Ankle Pull
200 fins ↑ Look Across ↓ Head Up
8 x 25m Band Work with 15 seconds rest
Build:
6 x 50 freestyle (Tempo Work) (20 seconds rest)
Main Set:
All at CSS pace and all with 1 beep recovery, set tempo
Trainer on mode 1 to beep per length
4 x 100
1 x 200
4 x 100
1 x 300
4 x 100
1 x 400
Session 3
Warm up:
200 easy ↑ Lower Head ↓ Heel Break
200 fins ↑ Look Across ↓ Head Up
8 x 25m Swim Golf with 15 seconds rest 200 pull
200 easy Ankle Pull
200 fins ↑ Look Across ↓ Head Up
8 x 25m Band Work with 15 seconds rest
Main Set
All at CCS pace, use tempo trainer on mode 1 set to beep
per length!
100 +1 beep recovery
200 +1 beep recovery
300 +1 beep recovery
400 + 2 beeps recovery
500 to finish! (Try and stay with beep!)
Session 4
No warm up needed for today’s session as it starts off at a
nice easy pace:
10 x 400m as…
4 x 400m at CSS pace + 6 sec per 100m
3 x 400m at CSS pace + 5 sec per 100m
2 x 400m at CSS pace + 4 sec per 100m
1 x 400m at CSS pace + 3 sec per 100m
Take 60 seconds rest between each rep!
GOOD LUCK!
ETA - I have just re read your original question and you’ve not swam for 4 years. In that case I would probably knock 1000m off those sessions and dont even think about session 4 until you are a couple of months in. Also if you are just swimming and not doing much else I would start with 3 pool sessions a week
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Cheers mate. That gives me something to aspire to, should I pull the trigger in the new year.
I was hoping that this would be the case! 
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Although, similar to marathon run training, practicing and nailing nutrition is going to be important for a 3-4 hour swim.
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I didnt put much effort into that. Coniston had feed stations every mile with energy drink and jelly babies. Think I tucked a couple of energy gels in my swin cap as well. Roll on your back take the gel and tuck the wrapper down your wetsuit.
Id lillke to do one of those events again. They do Ulswater and Windermere. The Windermere one sells out quickly. Problem is with my shoulder issues I would need a long time to wind up to one of those again.
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I always try to do three pool sessions a week minimum. Quite apart from three being 50% more than two ( ! ) I find if I am out of the water for more than three days I feel less fit in the water, and that’s even if I do other stuff to stay fit. There’s general fitness / good cardio, which is well worth having as a base, but being fit for a particular sport is different.
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I’ve booked an endless pool assessment in a couple of weeks, I know I could actually improve by swimming more, doing some drills and intervals though 
But I’m fairly sure I’ve picked up some bad habits and when I breathe to my RHS I think my head is coming up too far, I then go banana shaped (not helped by weak core and pull buoy) which in turn is aggravating the hip\leg problem. Interested to see what it looks like.
I’ve only swam once in about 7 days now and ran quite a bit more with less problems, albeit mostly short runs and not fast.
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I did this a couple of years ago. Invaluable.
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I’ve been a few times in the past and it was useful, but probably about 7 years ago and I’m pretty sure I’ve picked up some bad habits in that time.
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