I def disagree with you Dev, as a non FOP OWS swimmer.

Like I said, Pythagoras is your friend....you can be 5 m away from a buoy to your right and if the next buoy is only 12m away you would cover 13m to correct your path to the line. At 120m from the next buoy you can be 50m off course and only go 130m relative to the guy going 120m directly. This is an insanely extreme example as 50m off from a buoy does not happen in real racing. Likely scenario you're 5 m off from a buoy on your right 100m away from the next buoy which is a turn. By the next buoy you only went 100.12m in distance while the person right on the buoy went 100m.

No one swims as long as they THINK. We're all roughly covering the course pretty straight unless we go 5-10m past turn buoys.

At Muncie 70.3 in 2018, I sighted normally to the first and second buoys, but after the 2nd turn to the finish it’s directly into the sun. You can’t see shit if you sight anyway, so I only sighted enough to make sure I was heading into the sun, then pick up landmarks when I got closer to shore. I couldn’t tell you exactly how much I was sighting, but it was probably 30 seconds or more between sights.

17th OA and 2nd AG out of the water that day.

I def disagree with you Dev, as a non FOP OWS swimmer.

Like I said, Pythagoras is your friend....you can be 5 m away from a buoy to your right and if the next buoy is only 12m away you would cover 13m to correct your path to the line. At 120m from the next buoy you can be 50m off course and only go 130m relative to the guy going 120m directly. This is an insanely extreme example as 50m off from a buoy does not happen in real racing. Likely scenario you're 5 m off from a buoy on your right 100m away from the next buoy which is a turn. By the next buoy you only went 100.12m in distance while the person right on the buoy went 100m.

No one swims as long as they THINK. We're all roughly covering the course pretty straight unless we go 5-10m past turn buoys.

I cannot believe I never thought about this, but Dev is right. If I swam five meters off course over fifty meters and then corrected my line over the next fifty meters, I would swim 0.5 meters more than the guy who swam completely straight. If I repeated that pattern for an entire Ironman swim, I'd add 19 meters to my swim, which is about 20 seconds. But even that much time is unlikely as swimming five meters off course over fifty meters is a lot. In my pool, the lanes are 2.5 meters wide. I'm not good at swimming straight, but I don't veer off that much. In retrospect, I've been so paranoid about holding my line that I've probably undercut my swim time by sighting too often (roughly every 4-6 strokes). I think I will at least double that in my next race.

Just curious - For those that don't OWS before race - how much do you train in wetsuit and practice sighting?

I'm not a beginner, have been doing tri for 10 years now, but OWS access is definitely still a major problem for me, mainly due to scheduling but also because it's annoyingly far/trafficky for me to drive to.

I've found for myself that it's absolutely crucial for me to swim in my full sleeved wetsuit at least 3x prior to race day - the first sessions is always terrible due to early arm fatigue, but it goes away completely by the 3rd. (My wetsuit fits totally fine as well, I've tried a few, and the one I'm using definitely is not problematic for fit.)

I also have found that deliberate practicing of sighting in the pool (both with and without wetsuit) is really important for me to keep a good rhythm with swimming on race day. I don't do much sighting if practice if I'm 2 months+ out from race day, but I'm doing it every session, for a lot of the session the closer I get to race day and it also seems to make a huge difference.

Just kinda surprised it never gets discussed here, although I guess you don't have to worry about this type of prep much if you have regular access to OWS prior to race day which is obviously recommended over no-OWS.