Endurance Nation | Triathlon Coaching, Ironman Training, Half Ironman, Beginner Triathlon

In Part I of this series we introduced you to the concept of using “Return on Investment” to make decisions on how you invest your limited resources of time, headspace, Spousal Approval Units, and money towards triathlon training. These constraints are simply part of being an Age Group triathlete.

To help you navigate your own particular circumstances effectively, we recommend you continually ask yourself these three questions:

1. What returns on race day will I see for this investment?
2. Is that return worth the associated costs?
3. Can I achieve a similar or better return with a smaller or similar investment ? In other words, can I do less, do something different, not incur this cost at all, or buy this vs that?

In this second installment of the ROI series, we continue our exploration of maximizing the average Age Group triathlete’s training by applying these questions towards the investment required to become a faster swimmer.

Question #1: What returns can I expect to see on race day for the time, headspace, SAU’s, and money I invest in becoming a faster swimmer?

First, the training focused required to become a faster swimmer changes as you improve. Our general observations of the types of investment required along the swimming spectrum are:

• If you are slower than about a 1:15 to 1:20 Ironman swim, or a 38 to 40 minute Half Ironman swim, becoming a faster swimmer, for you, is like learning to play a musical instrument: it’s 95% technique and the fitness required to sustain that technique for the distance of your ace. That is, you don’t need to bang for hours on the keyboard to develop finger fitness. You need to work primarily on technique for a focused period of your season. In swimming parlance, it’s all about the shape of your boat (speedboat vs barge) vs the size of the engine.
• Between about 1:05 to 1:15 for Ironman, or about 32 to 37 minutes for Half Ironman, swimming begins to have a larger fitness component. That is, your barge is almost a speedboat and swimming faster begins to be about putting a bigger engine in the boat — learning the technique of grabbing more water and then developing the fitness to sustain that more powerful pull.
• Faster than about 1:02 for an Ironman, or 31 minutes for a Half Ironman, it definitely becomes about swim fitness. You need to have turned your barge into a speedboat and then developed the fitness to maintain a powerful stroke/engine for the length of your swim.
• Obviously, there are caveats to these general guidelines above based on sex, age, natural talent, confidence in the water, etc, but the point here is to show you where the proper training investment is to be made as you progress.

Second, the nature of the appropriate investment for each group of swimmers changes as they move along the swimming improvement spectrum:

1. Beginner Swimmer: A very, very large percentage of your swimming time and resources should be spent developing the skill of swimming…and then about 12-16 weeks out from your goal race, developing the fitness required to sustain your best possible stroke for the length of the swim. For these swimmers, small, incremental technique improvements can yield huge gains on race day. If you’re a 1:45 Ironman swimmer, the difference between you and your 1:20 Ironman friend is technique first and fitness a very, very distant second.
2. Intermediate Swimmer: Technique is becoming dialed in but swimming also shifts slightly to be about grabbing more water; this is your fitness component. After making massive gains in your first season through the judicious use of a local technique coach, future gains will now be:

1. Much Smaller — It is now a game of working all season to shave 5-7 minutes off your swim, not 20-30 minutes.
2. Much More Costly — These smaller gains come at the cost of many 1:1 sessions with a coach to find _that_ technique improvement that just clicks, and/or 3x swims per week at 1 hour each + 30 minutes of admin time on each end of those sessions = a 6hr total time investment each week for a 5-7 minute gain on race day.

So, to the question “what returns can I expect on race day for the typical investment in the swim?”

• Slower Swimmer: Massive gains (15-45 minutes or more) depending on how “challenged” you are at the start and assuming you make a significant time investment with a quality technique resource.
• Intermediate Swimmer: Moderate gains of 5-7’ minutes, assuming you continue to apply significant resources to refining your technique as well as building powerful swimming fitness.
• Advanced Swimmer: Tiny, tiny gains. Swim, swim, swim, all season, to net 1-3 minutes on race day.

Question #2: Is the return, listed above based on your ability, worth the associated cost?

Consider that every swim session, regardless of length, is typically accompanied by 45-60 minutes of total admin time — pack a bag, drive, change, shower, change, drive again…it adds up. Also, since you are subject to the hours of pool availability (ie, you can’t just toss on your suit and knock out a 30 minute swim from your door like you can with your run), you likely compromise other areas of your life to fit in these swims — a very early wake up to make that 6am masters workout, for example. Finally, incurring these swim costs month and months before your goal race, soon after ending a months and months long triathlon season, can have significant motivation implications later in the year. 6am on the pool deck in January or June for a September race are two very different scenarios.

We believe that you should make your own personal assessment of these costs, as they relate to your situation, and determine what investment of your time and effort is worth the expected gain on race day. You perform this cost/reward assessment in many other areas of your life and we believe that triathlon swim training should be no different.

Question #3: Can I achieve a similar or better return with a smaller or similar investment?

This is the question we as coaches asked ourselves in about 2007 when we first started Endurance Nation. As coaches, the question was framed from the perspective of what we could legitimately ask of our athletes: “Before I ask someone to invest into an activity, what is the expected rate of return on race day, based on our experience of having coached hundreds of Ironman athletes? Are there better return on investment activities?”

In our experience:

1. The cost of swimming is highly variable across the year. Waking up and starting a cold car three times per week at 5:30am in January to swim for an hour after a loonngg triathlon season, while training for a race in September, is much more costly than that same investment in July, eight weeks out from your race.
2. Because such a significant part of swimming is about technique, you can take large amounts of time completely off from swimming–bringing your swimming fitness to near zero–without becoming dramatically slower than your PR swimming self.  This is because you still have the good technique of efficient swimming. What’s missing is swim fitness and that comes back very quickly.
3. Your swimming speed comes back very quickly, even after a long layoff. Again, your technique is there, you just need to shake off a little rust, regain your “feel for the water,” and rebuild some fitness to apply to your technique. In our experience, this process of going from Zero to PR/Hero was about 16 weeks of focused, consistent, quality swimming.

Based on this assessment we made the following changes to the swim training of our athletes:

• We eliminated swimming altogether from our OutSeason (Winter) training plans, their training solution from October/November through February/March.
• By eliminating or greatly reducing swimming from 4-5 months of their season, we could now apply these recovery resources (ie, two to three days off per week, days that you would otherwise be swimming) to making them much faster cyclists and runners.
• We then encouraged them to make their own cost/reward assessment. If they did decide to swim during the off-season, we bundled for them…

• Our “Swim Clinic eBook” so our athletes could have a high quality technique resource regardless of the availability of a quality local technique coach.
• A comprehensive schedule of very solid, make-me-faster-through-hard-work swim workouts

So Does This Approach Work?
We’ve applied this approach to thousands of triathletes since 2007. These have been their experiences and comments:

• Swim speed and fitness comes back very quickly — many of our athletes have taken months and months off from swimming. They’ve reported that they are usually back to their past season swim PR form within about 3 months of focused swimming. Still more become much faster swimmers as they apply our technique + fitness solutions above to the swim training much closer to their races.
• This approach allows them to focus on becoming much faster runners and cyclists, where the potential gains on race day are much, much better. Not swimming 2-3 times per week creates the opportunity to bike and run VERY hard, taking 2-3 days off per week to recover from those workouts. They then apply their much improved bike and run fitness to the much longer, by comparison to the swim, bike and run courses, reaping massive PR’s.
• By not requiring themselves to make a large head investment months and months away from their race, they report much less mental burnout and the ability to maintain their motivation across a very long triathlon season. They are then more able to make a concentrated investment in improving their swim technique and fitness when it will do them the most good: about 14-16 weeks out from their goal race.

Please go here to read Coach Patrick’s “everyman” take on this approach.

In summary:

• As you move from Beginner to Advanced swimmer, the flavor of the investment you need to make in additional improvements shifts from technique to fitness.
• These improvements become smaller and smaller and at a greater cost.
• At some combination of swim ability, time of the year, and potential swim gains on race day, we recommend you suspend or significantly reduce the investment you make in the swim and consider applying that time to becoming much faster on the bike and run, where the potential for race day gains is much greater.
• If you do decide to continue investing in the swim, use our examples above to determine where you should make those investments — technique and/or fitness.

We’d like to help you: go here to download, for FREE, our Swim Clinic eBook — 25 pages of swim instruction, video drill demonstrations, poscasts and more, used by thousands since 2005 as their go-to swim technique resource. And we’ll also include our Four Keys of Ironman Execution DVD, a $37 value, used by thousands more to learn how to race triathlons, and Ironman in particular, like a vet!

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By Patrick McCrann

This time of year there are lots of great things to reading about swimming. But that doesn’t mean you need to do everything you read, all at once, and starting today!

Swimming is a skill-based activity, with more than 80% of your “effort” being directed into proper form and positioning. This isn’t something you just start doing; it takes time and the proper attention. Here’s my age-grouper approach to working on my swimming across the context of a season of triathlon.

Step One: Stop Swimming
Time: Approximately Three to Five Months

The first thing I do at the end of the season is take a huge chunk of time away from swimming. That’s right, I essentially spend part of my year–every year–desensitizing myself to swimming. I know it sounds radical, but bear with me. At the end of the day, becoming a better swimmer for the average triathlete means two things: engaging your swimming frequently and engaging it with the open mind set of a total beginner.

Swim improvement for the vast majority of us comes from improving our technique. The ability to improve your technique is a function of how you swim. Not a function of how much you swim, but rather what you do when you swim during the time that you do get into the pool.

Step Two: Dedicated Swim Re-Entry Time
Time: Approximately Four Weeks

Taking time away from swimming means I can focus on improving my bike and run fitness during the winter OutSeason training months. After a few months of hammering the bike and run, I need a break to transition back into being a triathlete. I usually take two very easy weeks, followed by two weeks where I slowly build up some volume again.

This translates into four weeks of no-pressure, technique-oriented swimming. During this time I’ll hit the pool two to three times a week and I will exclusively do drills. In fact I usually do this type of workout before I’ll do a harder workout on the treadmill or something else at the gym. This low-pressure time is a great way for me to get back in the water, focusing on technique, before I begin to even think about about my swim fitness.

Here’s what I do during my Re-Entry Period:

• I focus exclusively on technique.
• I strive to find what feels right, smooth, and effortless.
• I avoid looking at the pace clock for the first two weeks; last year’s splits don’t matter.

When I say technique, as a triathlete of ten years I have my own personal set of drills that really help me “get right.” I use these drills to recalibrate my stroke; they form the baseline for how I get back into the water. My personal favorites are one-arm swimming (side view video), the catch-up drill (side view video), and the fist drill (side view video; front view video).

Step Three: Add Swim Fitness
Time: Approximately Eight Weeks

Now that I have spent some time in the pool, I am both physically and mentally ready to begin laying down the work required to build my fitness for race performance. I don’t start by targeting a pace per hundred yards / meters that yields my goal time.

Many triathletes make the mistake of working backwards from that goal time. By putting themselves in a box, striving to swim to a goal time that represents their peak swim fitness, they’ll quickly lose the ability to swim with proper form and technique.

Instead I focus on what my average 100 pace was from the prior year. My first goal is to get back to that level.

During this phase most of my swim workouts consist of very short intervals (between 50s and 100s).  They are at varying degrees of intensity but all have more than enough rest. My goal here is to string together as much fast, with excellent form, swimming as I can.

The minute I begin to feel my form deteriorate, I increase the rest or reduce the set that I’m attempting to complete. Being able to identify the point at which your form falls off is a critical skill–not just for this phase but because that’s how we recommend you race: only swimming as fast as your ability to maintain form, managing the line between speed and skill, and making sure that we never move outside our comfort zone in terms of proper swimming technique.

Step Four: Race Specific Swimming
Time: Approximately Eight to Twelve Weeks

With race day on the horizon, it’s time to begin switching into some longer swim workouts with longer individual interval sets. Since my key race every year is an Ironman, the demands on my swimming time are extremely high. I need to put in some real quality swimming that needs to be as race specific as possible.

Across three given swims a week, at least one of them will include a longer swim set. This is either a recurring 2,000-yard time trial or something at least over 1000 yds. This set is both for fitness as well as mental training on what it means to manage my stroke across an extended period of time. The rest of the time my workout emphasis is still on quality over quantity, as I focus on stringing together quality intervals ranging between 200 and 400 yards.

The only exception to this three times a week model is if I have the time to get in some open water swimming. In many ways, open water swimming is an entirely different undertaking than swimming in the pool. There’s no black line to follow, there’s wind, there’s chop, there are distractions like other swimmers…all the various elements that make swimming so dynamic. The only way to get better at open water swimming is to just do it.

Open water swimming should become a top priority within the last five to six weeks of your race preparation phase, especially as the volume on the bike and the run peaks out and begins to fade away. At this point, we recommend you increase your swim volume and intensity, keeping it rolling until about 7 days out from your goal race.

Conclusion
Never lose sight of the fact that swimming, while an important part of our sport, is almost never the deciding factor between whether or not you will have a great day. Learn how to swim well, practice your swimming when it matters, and swim with your head…and you’ll have a fantastic race. Good luck this season!

Want to boost your swimming this season?
Check out our FREE Swim eBook. You can download it, watch the videos and begin doing the right work to improve your swimming. Get it here (and be sure to open with Adobe!).

Author’s Note: This article is a follow up to our most recent article on what it means to focus on your swim. It’s entitled Seven Essential Tips for Swimming, you can find it here on Active.com.

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photo credit: Sonic Fitness

6:59am — music blasting, kayakers herding swimmers, and nearly 2500 Ironman athletes treading water or standing on the beach of the Ironman swim start, waiting pensively to start a very, very big and long day.

7:00am — BOOM! And so begins perhaps the most unique spectacle in all of endurance sports — the Ironman swim start. Nearly 2500 bodies and 5000 arms and legs churning the water to start a 140.6 mile day. Below are our tips for surviving, and excelling at, the Ironman swim.

Where to Line Up
Endurance Nation had over 1000 Ironman finishes in 2011. Rich and Patrick have nearly 30 Ironman finishes between them and have been to 4-6 Ironmans every year since 2002.  We’ve learned that a lot of fast people position themselves right on the buoy line. Many more people position themselves as far as possible away from these people, as far from the buoy line as they can get. As a consequence, the middle of the start line is often less crowded than you would expect.

Therefore we usually recommend you position yourself near the middle of the start line and then seed yourself front to back about 2-4 minutes faster than you expect to swim. For example, if you expect to swim a 1:10, find those 1:05-08 people. In our experience it is better to be swum (politely) around by slightly faster swimmers than to be timid about your starting position, seed yourself around much slower swimmers, and then have to swim through many swimmers for 2.4 miles.

Only Swim as Fast as Your Ability to Maintain Form
The net difference between you swimming “hard” and swimming “easy” is usually only about 2-4 minutes in an 11-17 hour day. It’s just not worth it to try to make something happen. Instead, focus on swimming as smoothly and efficiently as you know how. Swim with your best possible form and only swim fast enough as your ability to maintain your form.

It’s helpful to have some individual cues for what good/not good form is for you. For some folks your breathing count (3-count or 4-count strokes per breath) is a good metric. Others prefer to focus on perceived exertion. Whatever you choose, know that it’s time to slow down if you start to feel your form slip!

Keep Your Head Inside the Box
2500+ bodies trashing around in a small space, all trying to go the same direction. It’s the very definition of chaos! Maintain your focus by keeping your head inside The Box of what you can control:

• In the Box: Head position, breathing, body rotation, catch, pull, etc. All of your form cues. These are things you CAN control, focus on these.
• Out of the Box: Any contact you experience, the pacing of other athletes, etc. Basically anything that takes your focus away your form.

The simple tool we use to keep our heads in the Box is to count our strokes. Left, right, left, right, 1, 2, 3, 4, keep counting until you lose count then start over again. The simple act of counting arm strokes will bring your head back into the Box of what you can control, helping you let go of the stuff outside of your Box. Try it, it works!

Keep Head-Lift to a Minimum
We typically lift our heads to keep feet in sight as we draft (a little), or to sight on navigation buoys (a lot!). Every time you lift your head…you drop your feet/hips…and you compromise your form a bit. Here’s what to do.

• Drafting: Don’t think so much about drafting, and looking for feet, that you forget to keep your head in the Box and focused on form. 2500 people all swimming the same direction…relax, it’s gonna happen. 
• Navigation: 2500 people all swimming the same direction…that’s a lot of people to follow, put on your right or left side, and in general decrease how frequently you need to compromise your from by lifting your head to sight for buoys.

FREE Endurance Nation Swim Clinic eBook
Go here to download our “Swim Clinic eBook“– over 25 pages of swim drills, videos, 45 minutes of podcasts, and much more. Published in 2005 and revised in 2008, this resource has been used by over 10,000 athletes as their go-to swim technique guide!

Do you have course-specific swim advice? Where to line up, navigation tips, etc for specific Ironmans? Please share them with us and our readers in the comments below!

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I recently saw advice on a triathlon forum to develop/improve the propulsiveness of the kick to become a faster swimmer.

As a triathlon coach coaching triathletes, 95% of whom are not former competitive swimmers, are swimming 2100-4200yds in a race (much, much farther than your typical competitive swimming event) in a wetsuit that adds a lot of buoyancy to their legs and who have to bike and run a long distance after their swim, my opinion is that the kick should be viewed as an aid to body position and balance first, propulsion a very, very distant second.

In my opinion, the best kick for a triathlete to have is one which does no harm. Rather than “powerful” or “fast,” its “effective”:

1. Lifts your feet up at the surface of the water, getting them inside the tube created by your body moving through the water.
2. Feet are kept inside this tube. That is, you don’t have a leg swinging out all crazy every other stoke, getting outside of that tube and creating a lot of drag.
3. Is an aid to and does not hinder body rotation. An ineffective kick will simply get in the way of the natural rotation of your body in the water.
4. It’s not a tool to increase propulsion, helping you go _that_ way.

For this reason, I don’t recommending kicking sets, especially with a kickboard, with the goal of developing a more powerful kick. I would rather have that time spent doing drills to improve body position first, propulsive swimming (better catch) second.

In my opinion, the swim leg of a triathlon should basically be a pulling event: legs only doing enough to help/do no harm to body position, not being used as another propulsion tool. The pull is a much better tool for that job and your arms are done working for the day when you exit T2.

Rich Strauss
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Endurance Nation Triathlon Coaching
Signup for one of our FREE triathlon training seminars! You’ll receive a 10% discount on any Endurance Nation training plan AND a FREE copy of our Four Keys of Ironman Execution DVD, a $37 value!

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by Rich Strauss

I’m not big on triathletes and learned-to-swim-as-adult swimmers using paddles. I think it’s another symptom of the gear-geek mentality of triathletes: buying any tools you think you need vs learning the basics first and asking advice from smart people .

Paddles are made for guys like (the old, young, competitive swimmer) me: back in the day, the ability to put power to the water (vs technique, which was good) was an actual limiter. So paddles were invented as a form of very sport-specific resistance training. Paddles came in bigger and bigger sizes (more resistance). Then we’d add a wheelbarrow wheel innertube twisted around our ankles (more drag), then a drag suit (even more drag).

However, we had the technique first and, more importantly, years and years of swimming mileage in our shoulders, so more able to handle the strain that paddles put on our shoulders and therefore much lower risk of becoming injured.

Triathletes:

• Don’t have that shoulder durability yet. Using paddles is a good way to injure yourself before you get that durability.
• The ability to apply power to the water is not yet a limiter. That is, body position, rotation and balance are the first things you need to address. Next comes putting power to the water through proper technique, ie, an effective catch and pull. Very last on the list is applying power to the water by being able to generate more power. I feel that by the time you’re at this place where the technique fundamentals of body position, rotation, balance and effective pull are dialed in, and the ability to generate more power is the last remaining limiter…you’re more than fast enough for a triathlete.

However, for triathletes, paddles can be a good tool to help you learn proper catch and pulling technique. The much greater surface area provides a LOT of feedback on the (in)effectiveness of your pull.

• Green Belt: pull with paddles, with the strap on your wrist, loop around your middle finger. Focus on a fast catch and facing the paddle straight back to the rear as quickly as possible, and maintain that rearward orientation throughout the pull.
• Brown Belt: only use the finger loop, no wrist strap. If your catch isn’t good, the paddle will slide around on your hand. Try to not have to grab it with thumb and pinky to keep it steady.
• Black Belt: no loop or strap, just hold the paddle. Grab it as your hand exits the water, release it after you initiate the catch, keep it pressed to your hand only with the force of your pull and the water.

Sets using brown and black technique should be performed like drill sets: 50-200yds at a time with lots of rest so you can focus on technique and process the feedback the paddle is giving you.

Endurance Nation Triathlon Coaching
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