Thanks for the input. My wife has been my de-facto swim coach these first few years but she feels like she is taking me as far as she can. I'm a decent swimmer but have a long ways to go and of lot of things I could clean up.

Some quick background - I swim nonstop for an hour, 3 times a week, and knock out 4,500 yards or so each time between a 1:19 to 1:21 pace /100yds. That equates to somewhere around a 56 or 57 minute Ironman swim, no skinsuit. My point being that I'm a perfect test monkey for trying something different to see if it's faster since I'm basically in a swim wind tunnel for an hour and I'm pretty consistent. I tried TI style and was shocked - I swam the exact same speed but probably with 20% less effort. I finished the hour feeling far fresher and simply happier, more relaxed, and much better off if I was about to bike.

I do want to be clear though- I didn't swim faster, it just felt easier. And I didn't get to the pace I'm at by doing TI in the first place. You have to do things hard to get better, so don't get caught in the trap of swimming TI so it's easier. You won't get any faster. If you do TI, make sure to mix in hard efforts just like you would if you were swimming classic style.

This is the absolute key to avoiding the TI-rut once you're a past-beginner swimmers.

'Swim easy and get faster' works great for raw beginners who SHOULD do that, and even works for talented folks who rapidly improve on very little, much like the very real HS kids who can run sub 16 5ks de novo after a single short season of x-country running with no run background. Talent does that.

Otherwise, you gotta work hard to drop the time, no way around it. Every single swim coach, from Gerry Rodriguez, to Dixon, to Sutto, say you gotta hammer it while not ignoring technique, but all the workouts are farrrr more focused on the hammering and have very little light-effort drilling.

I also find it weird that sub 60 IM swimmer would find the TI approach 'new' - I dont' find anything groundbreaking or new about it. I'd summarize it as, 'streamlining is priority #1,#2,#3 to reduce the huge drag of water', and 'make sure you reach far and glide a little to get full extension' which works for those with short underreaches, but slows down a fast high-turnover swimmer. There's literally nothing I can point to about it that is novel in any way; I think of it more as a great way to introduce green NOOB swimmers to swimming in a gentle, structured way, with easy drills and gentle expectations. But for those trying to swim faster than MOP, I struggle to identify a single thing that's novel about the method or technique.

For all my critiques of it, it's still the #1 book by far that I recommend to my noob swimmer friends who are trying to survive their first triathlon OWS or pool swim. I don't recommend it to anyone faster than MOP though! 'Swim easy and go fast' is NOT the secret to an avg-ability AGer to getting faster!