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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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
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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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Please Get Out of The Water — Until It Matters
photo credit: m.gifford

It’s pretty well-known by now that Endurance Nation recommends that you don’t swim during our OutSeason training cycle. That means for a grand total of five months, our athletes aren’t swimming a single stroke. This approach has generated a lot of buzz, mostly negative, that how we train is in someway incomplete. After all, what’s a triathlon training plan without swimming in it? The Long Answer: It’s an incredibly focused approach to building the required bike and run fitness that will carry you through a personal best on race day. The Short Answer: Re-Learning how to swim is better than constantly swimming and making tweaks.

The Problem

As adults engaging the water, we are at a distinct disadvantage because we simply don’t have the time to train like actual swimmers. And by time I mean the five days a week for years that will allow us to develop an insanely effective stroke. To further compound the issue, most triatheletes spend an inordinate amount of time working on building their swimming fitness as opposed to developing an actual stroke. The truth is, it’s way easier to just pile on the miles in the pool every year than it is to dig down into the fundamentals of what can make you a faster swimmer and eliminating whatever is holding you back.

The Facts: Swimming Is 80% Technique and 20% Fitness

As a triathlete you are very aware of just how much technique plays a role in swimming speed. There’s nothing like being a ridiculously fit athlete on land but getting your butt handed to you on a regular basis by an out-of-shape, former collegiate swimmer with a nice beer gut. Or, as some of our members can attest, by their own 8-year-old kids who are way faster. While Mr. State and your kids don’t hang out, they do have something in common — they have put the time in to learn how to swim, and they started young.

Your goal as an Age Group Triathlete looking to improve your swimming is to find the most time-efficient way of improving your stroke. Your job is to seek out the advice, coaching and learning opportunities that will allow you to improve our stroke given the basic constraints we all face (lack of time, two other sports, job, life, family, etc.).

Inside Endurance Nation we eliminate the time cost of off-season swimming by removing it entirely from the schedule. Now you can sleep in an additional two to three days a week, and you are more rested to hit the run and bike workouts on your schedule. Most importantly, you have the advice and support of 600+ athletes who all are telling you that swimming in the winter doesn’t actually make them any faster than the work they do in the final three to five months before their big race.

Let’s learn more about why that works…

Re-Learning Beats Tweaking

With swimming being such a technique oriented undertaking, your mental and physical focus has to be 100% if you are going to be able to identify and make the changes that will improve how you swim. Nothing dulls this mental edge more than the combination of year-round swimming and group swim workouts with forced distances.

While common sense says the more you swim, the better you’ll get at swimming, actual experience says otherwise for the time-crunched triathlete. Just as in any individual swim set, say a 300, you know that the first 50 is better than the last 50; that the first half is better than the second. Over time your form and skill succumb to fatigue and lack of focus. (Note: This is why we recommend swimming lots and lots of repeat 100s with rest, to ensure that a large part of your swim workouts will consist of actual quality strokes.) But the same effect happens on a macro-level scale as well: the more often you swim as an Age Group Triathlete, the less likely you are to have a technique breakthrough.

In other words, being away from swimming makes you much significantly more prepared to become a better swimmer when you do return. This is not the case for fitness dependent sports like cycling and running, but it is born out in the swim on a regular basis.

“my ‘haven’t swam 1 stroke in literally 6 months’ self swam about 1 minute slower than my PR self from the previous year. Less than a month later, I set a 30 second PR, after focused technique work and some fitness sets. “

Compressed Timelines Make a Difference

Finally, there’s nothing like a deadline to motiveate you to improve. If you only have fifteen weeks to swim, then you make the most of it. Giving yourself all year only means that you are spending more time in the water since extra time doesn’t in and of itself guarantee improvement.

What Can You Do?

If your race is more than 20 weeks away, you can back off the swimming right now. When you do drop into swimming, spend the first 30% of your time on technique alone. Once you feel comfortable with your form, then it’s time to begin adding a bit more fitness each week.

The 1k Time Trial Challenge

We can talk all we want, it’s the performances of our athletes that really sets the tone for what do here at Endurance Nation. To that end we have fired up a 1000 yard challenge. We are asking our folks to:

1. Record their last timed swim. For many this will be several months ago.
2. Perform a 1k time trial in the pool. Preferably, this will “cold,” with little to no swimming in the weeks beforehand, so we can quantify exactly how much time they have lost by not swimming.
3. Repeat these time trials every month so we can document how quickly they get their swim, and then some, back.

Our experience is that their cold TT will be a bit slower then their last season PR, the second TT a month later will be spot on (4-6 weeks of swimming) and the third test will show improvement over last year’s previous best…in just 12 weeks.

But talk is cheap! We’ll record these results and share them with you in a few months after we have many data points!

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photo credit: k.steudel

Auth Note: PSA = Public Service Announcement

Attention Triathletes: Do Everything You Can to Avoid Swimming This Winter

If you are like me, you don’t like to wait. We live in an on-demand world, and nowhere is this more true than in the realm of our performance, where we seek out incremental speed gains by dropping cash on wheels and carbon widgets. If you are planning on being faster next season, and are ready to do the work to get there, here’s the single best tip we can give you this winter: Stop Swimming.

Swimming in the winter is the fitness equivalent of voluntarily waiting in a really loooooong line at the post office.

You are effectively saying some version of the following:

• I don’t need to recover or rest in the Winter.
• I don’t need to do quality bike and run sessions that will boost my fitness.
• I will do the same work now, in the winter, that I do during the regular tri season, and I will hold out hope (against all odds) that I will see different results by my next race.

Training Isn’t Complicated: If you want to be fast, you have to train fast.

Since 2007 we have helped over 2,000 triathletes build the baseline strength and speed over the winter months that has carried them to personal best performances during the regular season. Let’s take a closer look at our No Swim Policy and what it means for you.

The Average Swim Session Is Twice the Time for Half The Work

Think about it: 30 minutes drive + change, 60 minute swim, 30 minutes change + drive. Do this three times across a week and your 6 hours of time is only netting you 3 hours of training. Contrast this with a bike or run session from your house (or in your basement) where an hour long workout takes just that — an hour.

But it gets more challenging. Most swimming pools aren’t open at “regular” hours that fit our basic schedule. Most triathletes have to be at the pool between 5-7 in the morning to get in their swim, meaning an early morning wake up call and reduced sleep at night.

The real rub on swimming? Swimming is a technique-oriented endeavor. For most of us triathletes, proper swimming is about 80% technique and 20% fitness. This makes it incredibly muscle-memory dependent — meaning that unless you are a human rock in the water, your swim time is much better invested closer to your actual race season — when you can build your skills and fitness and then put them directly into a race.

And the final straw? Swimming is the shortest leg of any triathlon. Improving by 5% in an Ironman swim, for example, will move you from a 1:05 swim to a 1:01:45. Put that same 5% improvement into a 6 hour bike split and you’ll be flying to a 5:42 (that’s 18 minutes faster!).

Real Swimmers Don’t Have It Better

True swimmers have been in the water since age 5. By the time they are 20, they have been putting in 25, 50, even 75,000 yards per week! They have swum more in the first 15 years of their career than you or I could ever hope (or want!) to, given our jobs, lives, and multisport focus. But at the end of the day, those 15 years of swimming might earn them a 50 minute Ironman Swim…maybe only 15 to 20 minutes ahead of you. You can make that up with a solid bike and a smart run…and you got to watch all those episodes of the Smurfs and the A-Team while they were swimming away their youth.

But…But…But…

Everyone has their own reasons for swimming, and we certainly respect that. Outside of it being a powerful social activity, there is no real reason to suffer through the winter and miss out on better bike and run training.

#1 — Social Butterfly: If swimming is the only place you get to hang out with and get your tri-mojo, then cut that back to 1x a week in the winter. Think about it…if you save the other 4 hours, you could get stuff done and then actually have time to go out for a social night!

#2 — The Ambitious Upstart: After one year of racing, you are ready to pour your heart and soul into getting better. You have figured out how to squeeze the most time out of your week by cutting back on social stuff, curtailing family time and leveraging the trust of your employer to be a bit late (or leave early)…combined with a few well-placed sick days, you are ready to train 20 hours a week for the next 8 months….YEAH! With an IM swim time is slower than a 1:15, you aren’t a rock but you do need to focus on swimming. Don’t waste the better part of your winter in the pool…get faster on the bike and run while you research a good 1:1 swim coach in the area and plan on starting your “real” tri season in the spring with a few good weeks of multiple 1:1 sessions. Done.

#3 — The Rock: Yes, you. You are a great athlete, able to defy gravity on the bike and the run…but there’s something about the water that makes it your personal kryptonite. You are the sole exception to PSA #132 — you can start to work on your swim stroke. That said, instead of signing up for a masters program with tons of hours but little personal attention, we suggest you find a swimming workshop (think Total Immersion) that will get you the fundamentals. Then put those into practice 2x a week during the winter…keep the sessions to technique only so these days are very similar to a day off. When the season is nearing, you can begin to look at the guidance for the Ambitious Upstart listed above.

The Background

We launched the “No Winter Swimming” policy with our 2007 OutSeason training plans to a great deal of buzz. A triathlon coaching company who say don’t swim…people thought we were pretty crazy. We had to do a lot of damage control, as folks assumed we meant never, ever swim (not true)…and we even capitulated and now offer swim workouts and our swim ebook with all of our triathlon training plans, even the winter OutSeason plans. As the results trickled in from the 2008 season, we saw athlete after athlete who took 14 to 20 weeks off from swimming and swam just about the same speed as the previous year.

The real rub, however, was that these folks had taken their newly found free time and used it to recover better and get stronger on the bike and the run. The net being a season full of PR performances ranging from 10 minutes to almost three hours! This cycle has since repeated itself every winter, with a new host of Team EN athletes taking the no swim pledge and making the most of their focused winter training. If you are interested in taking your triathlon game to the next level, and know that swimming 5k three times a week in January for a September Ironman event just ain’t right, then please check out our OutSeason Training Plans here.

Interested in learning more?

Please take the Endurance Nation FREE five-part “Rethinking the OutSeason” Email Seminar. We’ll cover these topics above in much greater detail while also teaching you the basics of training with power, pace, annual scheduling, and much more. Join the more than 5,000 athletes who have benefitted from the EN approach to winter training!

Visit Endurance Nation to create a FREE Five-Day Trial or Shop our Triathlon Training Plans!

photo credit: MattJP

One of the big changes for the 2010 Ironman season is that there are no more official open water sponsored swims in the mornings before the race. Triathletes will be on their own to get in some swimming before the race. On one hand, the swim is really the least important part of your day. It’s really the price of admission to the rest of the race: it’s the shortest leg time-wise, it’s the shortest leg distance-wise. But all that said, if you measure the stress levels associated with the different legs of an Ironman Triathlon, the swim would probably rank the highest.

Whether you are a great swimmer or not-so-great, there is a lot of anxiety around the swim. The majority of Ironman athletes learned to swim as adults, and as a result, don’t have significant amount of experience in the water.  Swimming by yourself in a pool is great, but doing so with 2,000 other people around you…not so great.  And whether you have a beach start or your all jammed into the start like at Lake Placid, it’s going to be crowded and your going to get bumped.

There is no real way to train for being pushed or shoved, other than to understand that it’s going to happen.  The number one thing you can do is simply be mentally ready to know that  someone is going to bump you, and your goal is to just let it go. Let it slide. Let it run right off the outside of your wetsuit like that water, and continue focusing on what you can control. The minute you begin to internalize the pressure and anxiety from folks around you is the minute you stop focusing on you swim stroke and you start slowing down. Slowing down means you spend more time with those folks, and you want to get out of the water. There are a couple different things that you can do to prepare for what can happen in the swim.  

First of all, before the gun even goes off, seed yourself according to not only your speed, but also your anxiety level. You’re really concerned about being bumped, but there is no rush to jump into the front of the line. Take your time, go to the back, let everyone go when the gun goes off, and then work your way in.  You’ll still be bumped, but not as badly.

Second, you can be careful with how you swim.  It’s very easy to get drawn into a race with other people and your goal is simply to exude confidence and swim with purpose.  In our world, we ask you to only swim as your ability to maintain form and as such, your going to swim very smoothly and deliberately. In this way you are going to carve out your own space in the water, essentially making your own place to swim. While you want to avoid making any final tweaks to your stroke, you might consider putting your hands out a little wider at the entry. This has the effect of putting out little antennas, little feelers, that other folks who are swimming around you will probably bump into that hand or bump into that arm, and as a result they’ll redirect around you. Most people don’t want to swim over the top of you, so when they make initial contact they’re going to adjust. Put that hand out there as a means of forcing that adjustment to happen and that way you are being proactive by sort of putting up a perimeter that people will go around as they come in contact with you.

The worst that could happen is that you get pushed under water. Since you’re a swimmer and you’re in a wetsuit you’re going to pop back up again. You should strive to remain calm…people are not going to hold you under water for a while. Once you bounce back up again, your goal is to catch your breath and get back to the business of swimming. The more swimming, kicking and splashing you do, the more likely it is that people will go around you instead of mistaking your stationary swim cap for a buoy.

The fifth thing that could potentially happen is someone grabs your leg or ankle. If this happens, don’t start kicking furiously. That’s a great way to get a hamstring or calf cramp. Instead, just keeping pulling with your hands and let your legs go limp. Just let them go dead. If your legs go dead, there is really nothing for them to pull against, there is no tension, and they’re going to let go of you. If you start kicking like that, you are setting the bad karma train in motion. If you kick them, they’re going to kick the next person, and the bad mojo will just go down the line. So, cut it short by just letting your leg go limp and take it easy — no need to fight it.

The sixth potential thing that could happen is a common fear: somebody knocks off your goggles or the goggles fill with water. While not super frequent, it happens enough that you should be ready for it. Some people like to swim with goggles under their swim cap, some folks keep them on top. It’s up to you and what you want to do in terms of comfort (and try it out in your training before you get to race day of course). If your goggles do get dislodged or kicked, don’t worry about it. It’s a very simple deal and it’s actually a drill that we give a lot of our athletes.

This is called “three by threes”, so you’re just going to be swimming freestyle and on one of the strokes when you reach that hand out in the water, you’re just going to reach extra far and roll right over onto your back right into backstroke. It’s a very simple thing to do, it’s just rolling from your tummy to your back. When you complete that roll and now you’re on your back and all you have to do now is keep kicking, keep the bubbles going, and adjust your goggles. Reset them on your face.  Take a couple strokes on your back to get your momentum up again and then roll right over onto your tummy and keep swimming.  The goal here is to continue to moving so you’re not mistaken for a buoy.

While you can’t eliminate race day issues, you can get them under control without even getting wet. Start by understanding that:

1. Something’s going to happen, and that’s okay.
2. If / When something does happen, the best thing to do is to approach it calmly and deliberately.
3. If you get grabbed or kicked, all you have to do is just slow down and go limp, catch your breath.
4. If your goggles come off, you can fix it very easily with that protocol I gave you. You can roll over on your back.

And your overall goal is to just swim as steadily as you can, as well as you can, the duration of the distance.  Focus on the rest of the race.  Because that’s really where the rubber meets the road.  Don’t get caught up in the swim, and don’t let the swim dictate your day.  Be smart, be smooth, have fun.  Stop that bad karma train if you see it coming, go fast and have fun.

Visit Endurance Nation to create a FREE Five-Day Trial or Shop our Triathlon Training Plans!

The Triathlon Revolution is coming home to Boston. Join the coaches and athletes of Endurance Nation for a unique weekend of learning, training, and social activity.

We kick things off with a FREE Saturday afternoon/evening Open House. Endurance Nation Coaches Rich Strauss and Patrick McCrann have personally coached over 400 Ironman finishers, with hundreds more using their training plans and DVDs. They will present “A Primer for the Self-Coached Athlete” on Saturday, sharing with you the training and planning secrets they’ve employed with their athletes over the years.We’ll roll right from that into some free food and a social hour where everyone can mingle and connect. The learning continues on Sunday with Power and Swim clinics: with over 10 years of combined power coaching and training experience, Rich and Patrick will bring you years up the learning curve. The swim clinic will feature 3+ hours of pool time, including underwater video.

There is still one slot open for the power clinic and several for the swim clinic…we’d love to have you there so please sign up today.

Endurance Nation is on a mission to build a global team of age group triathletes dedicated to achieving their personal best. In our first year alone we have 400 new members with over 100 Ironman finishers and some incredible results! Consider this weekend our official New England Recruitment Drive!

Our mantra is Get Fitter, Get Smarter & Have Fun Doing Both…this weekend is sure to cover all three. Don’t miss out — Sign Up for each session before they close out!

Hope you can make it!

Rich and Patrick

Visit Endurance Nation to create a FREE Five-Day Trial or Shop our Triathlon Training Plans!

Swimming is approximately 80% technique and 20% fitness…and off-season is 100% about technique! Proper swimming requires focused mental attention to every lap, instead of mindless wall tag. A critical step in improving your ability to swim well is to master the basics of how you interact with the water.  Coach Patrick will review the fundamentals of position, breathing, and balance, he will cover the EN basic swim drill progression and conclude with the mechanics of a proper catch.

Participants will leave the clinic with printed speaker notes, a free copy of our Swim eBook (including underwater video of the drill demonstrations) and an 8-week training plan. This is our sixth consecutive year running our winter tri swim clinic series; come and experience what has helped hundreds triathletes get faster in the water!

The clinic space is limited to 12 participants, cost is $125 per person. Use the link below to sign up today!

Visit Endurance Nation to create a FREE Five-Day Trial or Shop our Triathlon Training Plans!