Triathlon swimming made easy (2 page)

Part 1

Why Swimming Frustrates You and How You Can Achieve Fulfillment

Our first three chapters will give you a succinct explanation of

• Why you're not swimming as well as you'd like

• Why no amount of fitness, strength, or training will make any real difference

• Why swimming easier will improve your total tri-race time far more than swimming faster

By the time you move on to Chapter 4, you'll understand what constitutes good swimming and how you can embark on the path to Mastery just by changing the shape of your "vessel."

Chapter 1

True Confessions: If I'm So Fit, Why Is Swimming So Hard?

Every Saturday morning, somewhere in the USA (or Canada, the UK, Europe or Australia) 30 hopeful and somewhat apprehensive athletes, mostly triathletes and tri-wannabe's, gather in a classroom and talk about why they'd like to swim much better. It may sound like group therapy; but it's actually the orientation session of any Total Immersion weekend workshop. Some athletes confess that they can ride 60 miles or run 10 before breakfast yet gasp for breath after two laps in the pool. Others say they are tired of finding their bike standing alone when they finally stagger into the first transition—
despite hour after hour of training laps in the pool.

Their frustration is simple and incredibly widespread. What is it about swimming that reduces otherwise fit and accomplished athletes to the point of needing TI "group therapy?" Why do all those tedious hours of repeats, laborious laps with kickboards, and wearying sessions with paddles and pull buoys never seem to produce improvement
or
yield results that are far too modest for the time and energy invested? Time on your feet and time in the seat work for running and biking. Why not for swimming?

The answer is that water is a completely different medium from air, and swimming is
a completely unnatural activity for most land-based humans. In water, the rules are different. If you try to improve by swimming more
and harder (an approach that comes naturally for cyclists or runners), you'll mainly make your "struggling skills" more permanent. If you seek instruction, you'll find that few coaches or teachers know how to teach you the skills and awareness that really make a difference. If you join a Masters swim team, your training program will be more organized than if you swim on your own, but unless you have the great fortune to be training with a coach who is just as good at teaching as training, you'll be a fitter flailer, but still not
a good
swimmer. Until you become
a good
swimmer, you'll a
lways limit your potential as a triathlete. That's because you need to have a certain level
of efficiency
to get results from all your hours of training.

The solution is not elusive, costly, or time consuming. You
can
become a good enough swimmer to hugely improve your performance, potential, and fulfillment in triathlon. What it takes is a little knowledge and a willingness to
practice
swimming in a completely different way from how you
train
for the other two disciplines. Running and cycling are
sports.
Swimming — at least as you need to do it to be the best
triathlon swimmer
you can be — is an
art.
It's a movement art just as rigorous and exacting as gymnastics or martial arts. In order to succeed in it you need to do two things:

1. Become your own swimming coach.

2. Practice mindfully, patiently, and intelligently.

This book will give you the information and guidance to do both well.

Why Inefficient Swimming Is Limiting Your Triathlon Success

Success in triathlon obviously depends greatly on sheer fitness. Thus, 95 percent of your energy as a triathlete is usually devoted to maximizing your aerobic potential. Because you have to squeeze in three sports around work and family, you can't waste time on unproductive efforts. Yet until you become an efficient swimmer, you cannot realize the hard-won aerobic potential your training has earned you. Poor swimming not only puts you far back in the pack before you get to your strengths but also prevents you from spending your aerobic resources wisely and optimally. If you'
re a poor swimmer, you lack control over how hard you work in the water.

It's fairly simple to ration energy wisely while cycling and running. On the bike, you even have gears to help you maximize speed while minimizing effort. For a poor swimmer, there is no choice. For a large percentage of triathletes, simply making it through the swim is a survival test. If that's you, you have to flail and churn the whole time — an effort that doesn't earn you anything approximating a good swim time. It just allows you to finish wearily and far back in the pack.

Considering how little of the overall race distance and time swimming takes up, it consumes an extravagant amount of the energy available for the entire race. If you're like the great majority of triathletes, you aren't concerned solely about how slowly you swim. You probably worry more about how
bard
you work to swim that slowly. The most important message I give triathletes at Total Immersion workshops is this: Your primary goal is not to swim faster. Focus first on swimming
easier,
and let more speed be a natural product of your increased efficiency. You will improve your overall perfo
rmance far more by saving energy for the bike and run than you will by swimming faster. But, better yet, as you become an efficient swimmer, you will
also
swim faster.

What It Takes to Be a Good Triathlon Swimmer

Unless you are an elite athlete, your smartest goal on the swim leg is to exit the water with a low heart rate. The swimming leg is too short for a speedier swim, by itself, to make a significant difference in a race that usually lasts for hours. If you do work hard enough to pick up a few minutes in the swim, that effort can easily cost you
many
minutes back on land. Conversely, many triathletes who have taken the TI workshop have found that their newfound efficiency, while it may have shaved just a few minutes off their swim time, resulted in
substantial
time drops for the re
st of the race, simply because they were much fresher entering the first transition.

So your first goal as a
triathlon swimmer
is to gain the freedom to swim as easily as you wish — to be able to virtually float through a mile of swimming if you choose. To be able to choose how long or fast you stroke. And to be able to adjust both with the same ease with which you shift gears on your bike.

Your starting point for accomplishing these goals is to develop four foundation skills: balance, body alignment, body rotation, and coordinated propelling movements. The key is to have a relaxed, low-drag, fluent stroke at low speeds and to maintain all of those qualities as you move through your "swimming gears" to go faster. For most triathletes, swimming
speed
will probably never be essential (I'll explain the exceptions in a later chapter). Swimming
ease,
however, is a non-negotiable skill for every triathlete. Ease means efficiency, and efficiency leads to speed. And for those of you approaching the elite level, you must learn to swim fairly fast, without exerting yourself so much that you blow up on the run. And the same fundamentals that let the beginner acquire ease also let the more advanced athlete develop efficient "gearing" for swimming faster when necessary.

Your essential goal as a triathlete is to have more control whe
n swimming — more ability to decide how hard to work, how much stroke length and stroke rate to use at any moment, and the skill to find the most efficient way to go faster when needed. Let's begin learning how to gain that control and why, as a triathlete, you have plenty of company in figuring out The Swimming Puzzle.

Chapter 2

Two-Dollar Gas: The Secret of Economy

Whenever the price of gasoline nears $2.00 per gallon, SUVs and other gas-guzzlers lose a bit of their popularity, while car pooling and public transportation gain ground. I drive a gas-sipping Saab, but my response is to drive with a lighter foot, avoid nonessential trips, and combine errands. As a triathlete, your training time and energy are two-dollar gasoline and there's no strategic fuel reserve to lessen the cost. Triathlon is a demanding discipline. Most triathletes cannot make a full-time job of training; thus, economy is the smartest success strategy of all.

By
economy
I mean: (1) efficient use of your limited training time and (2) efficient use of your body so that your available energy goes into forward motion and not struggle. If you take to heart the lessons of this book, you'll need to spend less time in the pool.. .and will accomplish
more
than in your current program. If you get excited about shaving
minutes
off your bike time with an expensive set of wheels, think how you'll feel if you spend almost nothing to learn how to swim with such ease that you might cut an
hour
or more from your total Ironman time (as has happened to more t
han one Total Immersion alum).

Your constant goal as a multi-sport athlete is to develop the capacity to go farther and faster and, more important (because most triathletes are in their 30s or older), the capability to do both without breaking down.
Faster race times are the motivation for training. Therefore you need to be rigorous in spending your precious training time wisely so that it brings
clear benefits to race time.
Training simply to prove that you can endure prodigious workloads would make sense if places were awarded to those with the most impressive logbook. But most triathletes have job and family responsibilities, and the best training program is one that produces the fastest race times with the least time and effort. And, as you'll learn, training intelligently is even more critical in swimming than in the other two d
isciplines.

Economy

In the physiology lab, economy is measured by how much oxygen you use while exercising, because oxygen consumption is the best indicator of how much muscle fuel you burn to go a given distance at a given speed. In the pool or on the road, heart rate is the most practical marker for economy because it helps trained athletes develop an acute sense of how hard they are working at any given moment. If a competitive swimmer spends fewer heartbeats (i.e., consumes less oxygen or fuel) to do the same work — let's say, to swim 100 meters in 1 minute, 20 seconds—she has two choices for how to us
e the energy surplus she's created. Sprinters can swim the distance faster, perhaps improving their 100-meter time to 1 minute and 15 seconds. Longer-distance swimmers can choose to maintain the same speed for longer, swimming 200 meters in 2 minutes, 40 seconds, or 400 meters in 5 minutes, 20 seconds. And perhaps ultimately 1500 meters in 20 minutes.
Tri-swimmers
have a third option — for most the smartest one — to save much of that surplus for cycling and/or running.

The longer the race, the more important economy becomes. When swimming a short distance — 50 to 100 meters — you could conceivably muscle your way through it. But there is no sprint distance in
tri-swimming.
Even a "sprint" triathlon starts with a 400-meter swim, which is a long way to be wasting energy. And the 2.4-mile Ironman swim is 250 percent farther than any Olympic swimming event. The opportunity to waste energy—to misspend heartbeats you badly need to bike 112 miles and run a marathon — is astronomical. And as we have heard countless times from
TI workshop alumni who have chosen to apply most of what they learned from us to swimming easier, rather than faster while their times for the swim leg have indeed improved markedly, their race splits in cycling and running have also improved dramatically, because they "save heartbeats" in the water for use on land.

From a
tri-swimming
perspective, in this book I'll show you how to

1.
Drive with a lighter foot
(swim with a lower HR and energy cost).

2.
Avoid unnecessary trips
(get more benefit from fewer and easier swim-training laps).

3.
Acquire a "smart" car
(retool your stroke for efficiency).

The effect of all three will be to turn the "cost of fuel" — your time and energy — back to those halcyon days of 30-cent gas.