I'll take you on as a sponsored athlete in exchange for you delivering to this forum your honest impressions of my instruction. Message me to discuss.

I'm an adult onset swimmer. Started swimming after I signed up for an ironman on a whim.

FWIW it took me probably 6 months before I felt comfortable in the pool and started to swim with any sort of confidence. At the time I just wanted to build enough fitness and confidence to swim 2.4 miles for the ironman.

After that ironman I decided I loved doing triathlon and what's helped my swimming the most is lots of 50 and 100 sets to be able to focus on technique. Just banging out 800 nonstop it's easy (especially starting out) to revert to bad habits.

swim as much as you can. Use a bouy a lot. Short sets of 200 or less.

Nor will it ever be. That's swimming.

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Proud Member of Chris McDonald's 2018 Big Sexy Race Team "That which doesn't kill me, will only make me stronger"
Blog-Twitter-Instagram-Race Reports - 2018 Races: IM Florida 70.3, IM Raleigh 70.3, IM 70.3 World Championships - South Africa, IM North Carolina 70.3

In April I stared swimming at 40 years old.

When I say "started," I literally had to take lessons on how to float and tread water before I could go to the deep end of the pool. I had never been swimming.

In May, I hired a coach to learn freestyle.

In the beginning it was the suckiest, most horrible thing I had ever done. It took weeks before I could swim 25 yards. But I kept focusing and practicing three times a week. In the beginning, my sessions were 600-900 yards cause that was all I could manage.

Here we are 6 months later and I swim 8,000 yards a week, with sessions that go from 2500 yard straight swims to 3,000 yards of drills. I feel great and I only had 3 lessons in May-July.

At night when I lay down to go to sleep, I am constantly thinking about strokes and focusing in my head on different aspects of the stroke. I then try to focus on those in my swims. That was the single biggest factor in learning how to streamline. I find that when my mind is at rest, I can see and feel the bigger picture. 6 months later, and I was doing this last night even.

All that to say, yes it is frustrating but you are very close to a breakthrough that will have you swimming. Then, it is about just constantly dialing in the little things like rotation and balance and all that for the rest of your life.

JasonHalifax will pipe in here soon haha

also, how do you people grow up not swimming? Like never had or been to a pool, or hotel pool, or friends pool, or lake, or river, or? How is that possible?

I really shouldn't be offering advice, and you really shouldn't listen to me. I'm just starting my second year as an AOS (sorta...its really my second time learning as an AOS). That said....here's my advice. :-) In order of preference:

1. Find a GOOD local swim coach who offers private lessons---like maybe that previous coach you worked with??? Sign up for a package deal. I pay mine about $60/hr. Early on we would meet about once every 2-3 weeks, he would film me, identify flaws, and give me drills to focus on those flaws. I'd run through those drills as part of the lesson to make sure I knew good vs. bad. Then he would email me my before/after videos along with a couple of workouts that incorporate the drills we worked on. I'd mix those into the rotation for a couple weeks, and then go back for more.

2. Take Dave up on his offer above. Heck, I considered PM'ing him and asking if the deal was open to anyone else. I only put this second because I don't think there is any substitute for someone local actually watching you swim and giving you realtime feedback.

3. I didn't start with a local coach, though. I started by trying to teach myself. And honestly, I started with Total Immersion. I think it worked well to teach me basic body balance...the coaches I've had have indicated that my position is good, so that's all I know. But, TI isn't good for much else. You won't get "fit", and you won't be "fast". I spent too much time on TI before moving on to more just swimming. After I "gave up" on TI, I started doing the Guppy Challenge. You can find last year's here, but it should be starting up again soon.

:-)

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

:-) There's a very small "in" in Jason's handle: JasoninHalifax.

As far as your question goes...I don't know...but, my wife was in the same boat. My parents had a pool when we first got married. It made them very nervous having her around the pool. So, they paid for her to get lessons so she wouldn't drown when we would come down for vacations.

It's been 2 months?

Just stick with it. recognize that it can be a slow process, it's a very unfamiliar skill for you. The more you do, the more familiar it gets

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

For me I grew up around pools and lakes and learned to swim not long after I started walking.

I could swim as in "not drown" or swim back to the boat. But swimming laps free stroke was completely new skill.

I'm a shit swimmer by ST standards (+/- 1:45/100). I started about 2 yrs ago (about this time of year) and literally couldn't swim 200 yds without stopping. I joined masters and swam with the PB almost all the time, so that I could do the workouts. I literally swam some whole sessions with it.

I weaned off the PB little-by-little and did 8 tris in 2016......2 of them being (wetsuit legal) HIMs. I did another wetsuit legal HIM in May of 2017 (Choo) and just did IM LOU in October (just under 13 hrs).

I'm not saying my route is the way to go. I'm saying it worked for me. If I had it to do over again, I'd have bought the buoyancy shorts and worn them, exclusively (in lieu of the PB) - because they still allow you to kick.

You'll hear these "band-aids" are the devil.

Yawn.

Good luck.

There is a BIG difference between being able to play in a pool or save yourself if you fall out of a boat and swimming competitively.

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"...the street finds its own uses for things"

I could swim as i have a pool in the backyard, but i couldn't swim for distance or laps when I started in August. I got down and back on my first lesson and was completely out of breath because I didn't no how to breathe. I will keep plugging along as I am determined to get this down and improve

Its difficult but not complicated. You need two things: technique and volume.

1. Find a local coach who can work with you one on one. once a week, once a month, whatever you can swing. It is important that you build a solid foundation by getting your stroke technique correct now. The more of these sessions you can do in the beginning the better.

2. Swim volume. You need repetition and lots of it. The average age group kid is doing 10,000+ yards a week for years on end. You have no hope of besting someone with a swim background, but you can limit the damage. If this is something you're serious about, find a masters team and get to as many practices as you can. Give up some bike and run time for now, you can get that fitness back comparatively easily.

Banging out straight 800s is no way to start. It is an excellent path to go down if you want to get discouraged, frustrated, and bored.

I do break it up in sets when I go to pool. I do some work with fin, pull buoy , kickboatd, and started with some with tech swim paddles

You are lifting your head to breathe. Breathe with one eye in the water and one eye out.

Getting yoru head low when stroking, is relatively easy, except for when it isn't obviously.

but keeping your head low when breathing is where the damage is really done. Fixing it is rarely easy.

I'm just gonna share my personal swim experience given to offset any of the "I got fast QUICK" posts that invariably show up here on ST by the talented fish, and since I have a background pretty much identical to yours.

I tried really hard to improve at a good clip at swimming as an adult swimmer. I took a bunch of lessons early on, read total immersion, studied swimming seriously (videos, books, forums), and did both drills and also tried to swim moderate-effort swims (I couldn't go harder without falling apart formwise) with as much volume as I could handle. My shoulders were actually quite limiting for me - I'd get severe sharp right shoulder pain in those early days after 7000yd/wk - swimming for me was NOT a totally injury-free endeavor!

Sad to say, I made very, very slow progress despite trying quite hard. I was BBOP in all my races in the swim for 2 years, like bottom 10% overall, and then I'd finish top 10% on the bike and run, which felt ridiculous to me.

I even did a fair amount of open water training as I lived in LA, so I was in the ocean group swims nearly once a week at minimum, in waves and chop.

It seriously took me at least 3 years of continued work to get to the BOMOP. Granted, I was not purely swim training, but it would have been nearly impossible for me to do significantly more pool work back then due to life, pool hours, and other logistical limitations.

The good news - I haven't given up, and have been slowly chipping away at the swimming (without dedicating my life to it) and while I will never be a fish, I finish the swim routinely in the top 10-15% of local races, and 15-20% of competitive national class races, which I'm pretty happy with.

Honestly, even if I had a time machine to go back and coach myself on my errant ways, it would have made almost no difference. There were no sudden 'aha!' secret moments where I magically gained 5sec/100. For me, it was a slow grind with small seemingly meaningless technical improvements with no big speed jumps aside from the initial ones when I was slower than 2:20/100.

Worst advice I got ever by FAR though as an AOS swimmer, which was espoused heavily on beginnertriathlete a few years back by several coaches actively, and even here on ST (but has since changed remarkably much more toward my current attitude in the past year or two) :

'Swim easy to get faster! Streamline your way to the FOP in swimming!"

Man, that's the biggest load of steaming bull--p I heard. Practice streamlining and technique when you're swimming yourmoderate or hard intervals. Skipping the hard work and hoping you'll get to the FOP by mainly focusing on decreasing drag is a pipe dream for the typical AOS swimmer.

Unless you're in the pool 5 days a week throw this crap away. Maybe a little pull buoy time, but you need to focus on swimming, not on toys.

Haha I apologize - I didn't mean that as an insult. I was really curious. I have a friend who is from India (city on the southeast coast) and he does not know how to swim at all and that was unusual for me. He said he just didn't have access to a pool or sanitary body of water.
I can't remember when I learned freestyle or the age I was in a pool.

I do remember being all of 8 years old or so and surfing some hurricane days in Florida and having my leash break and having to swim in 300-400 yards through 8-10 foot waves to the beach. I recall being pretty scared on that one. Not of drowning, but of the critters that were probably swimming around me haha

Funny story Lucha: I actually grew up *in* Coeur d'Alene, and I couldn't swim either. I think it's just more about the 'type' of swimming you knew how to do. We'd go to the Ironman swim spot all the time, but it was never 'swimming.' Just wading in to about 4-5ft, maybe 'swimming' a stroke or two with the head above water, never owning goggles, etc. I wasn't afraid of the water at all, but I had no idea how to 'properly' swim.

Just chiming in as another slow-as-shit STer here (about 1:45/100) adult onset learner. I took six one-hour adult learn-to-swims, then did the Ruth Kazez programs and grew from there. I'll never be as fast as most of the people on this forum, but I'm good enough to never worry about cutoffs or anything and can swim long enough to get onto the bike. For the non competitive athletes, I like to think of the swim more as a barrier to entry than anything else. It's like, "Can you make it through the swim? Congrats, now you can race." But it does get better, OP. I went from being unable to swim 3 strokes without choking to an Oly in about 3.5 months. Totally comfortable in that race, zero issues. Just keep at it and get in the pool as much as possible. Once a week isn't good enough.

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JustinDoesTriathlon

Owner, FuelRodz Endurance.

Not to split hairs but my understanding is that current age group middle D and D swimmers typically do 10 workouts per week averaging around 6000 yd/workout, or around 60,000 yd/wk. The 10,000 yd/wk is more like a summer league team's yardage. The 60,000/wk is actually down from the 100,000 yd/wk that top Agers did in the 70s and 80s, when they swam 12-14 workouts/wk.

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

I have no business giving anyone any sort of swim technique advice, but what I will advocate any adult onset swimmer to look into is the guppy challenge here in slowtwitch, look it up under the training heading and than swimming..if you aren't joining a swim club, this is your best bet to improve. I followed it last year and took 10 min off my IM swim, so I would say it works!

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Ask me how much I love my Kiwami LD Aero Trisuit

keep at it. its been over 3 years for me I still suck but not as bad. aos myself. For me it has been taking as much advice as possible and applying it to my stroke. What works for one may not work for you. I live in the middle of nowhere so I have no master swim to attend. Would recommend it if possible. Get some swim analysis from a good coach. I have made great gains running and biking but the swim is a real grind. For me its the challenge to put it all together that keeps me going. best wishes