Find a longer pool so you are doing more swimming, less turning. Don't push off the wall as hard.

How is your sighting in open water? Can you swim in a straight line?

Don't push off the wall as hard.


I've seen people make that comment before. how does that help open water swimming?

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first off, define "poorly" and over what distances are you talking about. It could be a training issue, it could be an OW skills issue, or it could be that you're just too conservative in the water, or the people you're comparing yourself against are too aggressive. Or it could be that the people you compare against are tapering better, or are just those types who are "racers" as opposed to "trainers".

Clearly defining the problem, if there even is a problem, will lead to a better solution.

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The only thing that that piece of advice will do is mess up your shoulders.

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Executing a tri swim takes a little practice and I'll do that with friends at the lake.

When I do that my goals are:
1. Making sure I start off hard enough but not too hard.
2. Feeling comfortable with bumping people.
3. Sighting so I can swim straight.
4. Drafting faster swimmers.
5. Getting a quick exit to set myself up for the run (or in my case "Labored Jog") to transition.

Work on those things and I'm sure you'll pick up 30 to 60 seconds in a sprint swim, maybe more in longer races.

I would second the questions that Jason asked and would add:

What does your warm-up routine look like before a race?

Do you pull harder to one side versus the other? - Easy to figure out, swim 1x25 right arm only and then 1x25 left arm only. Do they feel different?

Are you better at short fast repeats in practice or do you do better when the sets are longer repeats? (25x100 or 5x500)

How is your kick?

Tim

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Oddly enough I have the opposite experience: I'm usually a slower swimmer in the pool but among the faster swimmers in a triathlon. Over the years I think I've figured out that it boils down to two reasons: good sighting and experience understanding how currents will affect the swim, and consistency.

Sighting and currents: I generally recon the swim start and finish so that I've figured out the easiest way to start and build speed, whether dolphin diving is necessary, what specific landmarks I should sight, and where I should stop swimming/start running. I know when to adjust my stroke to take advantage of a strong current, correct for a cross current, or chop into a head current. And sighting: swimming in a straight line - even slowly - saves you so much time. Finding good feet to draft off is one of my main objectives after I clear the first 400m of any tri swim. My biggest piece of advice in pinpointing the cause would be to look at how you adjust your swim according to the swim course. (If you already do that, then disregard everything I've just written.)

For consistency, that comes from doing long slow sets in the pool with a paddle. Sure, I stay slow through the whole practice. But I get strong enough to not tire at all on race day. I've changed my focus from building speed in the pool to not getting tired. I don't want a fast swim: I want a swim that consumes so little effort without sacrificing speed that my upper body and core are refreshed and ready for a bike and run. For me, that means paddles and long slow swimming in the pool. When you say you're the fastest in the pool, is that even at the end of a long and tiring set? Is it overall?

The above advice is peculiar to my situation and might not apply to you or anyone else. I'm more of a 'diesel engine' than a 'racehorse.' It's just something you might want to experiment with.

I would bet you are misreading the speed of the people you think you swim better than in the pool. I can do a whole workout with out showing any real speed in any of my sets or maybe just 200-300 yards of real quality that would easily not get noticed by swimmers in the lane next to me. There are a lot of gears in swimming that good/fast swimmers know how to use them

I dunno. I retract my statement.

If you can draft comfortably and know how to pick the right toes that can hide a whole host issues and make you look a lot more like a fish than your pool skills would imply.

I'm not very good at these things.

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I do mostly Ironman and HIM races. I always have had competitively poor swims, but I first became aware that there may be a pool swim ability vs race outcome discrepancy at a triathlon training camp early this year. I was started in the third lane of the camp based on my race times, and ended up leading the second lane. All the people in that second lane consistently post faster race times than I have ever done, so there's that. More recently, I did IMAZ this weekend in 1:18.xx and have a slightly slower friend who swims masters with me do it in 1:12. I actually felt as if I executed a decent race at IMAZ . . . until I saw the clock. FWIW, I swim in the 1:45 lane lcm, and 1:30 or 1:35 scy at masters (base/exit pace). I swim slightly more yards than an average AG triathlete, around 10k yds/wk year round average, which really means 12-15k/wk for most of the season. I also swim a fair bit of open water in summer. What I don't do though is swim open water with groups pretty much ever except in races.

Obviously, there is a limited set of causes: not swimming hard enough in races, not swimming straight, not swimming with the same mechanics (anything else?). I'm just wondering if anyone had a similar situation and if they solved it somehow? Without having someone that has seen me swim in the pool actually see me swim in a race situation, it isn't super clear how to debug the issue.

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Dimond Bikes Superfan

Whoa there . . . the only time I'm the fastest person in the pool is when I'm swimming laps during a senior citizen aqua aerobics class. Maybe not even then. I'm saying it is common for me to have a much slower swim split in races than people who are the same or slower than me in the pool.

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Dimond Bikes Superfan

Doh - sorry about that! Let me try again: are you evaluating your speed relative to other swimmers in the lanes next to you based on 100m intervals or (for example) 4x400m? For iron-distance and half-iron, I'd say that the person who has not lost any speed - regardless of their actual speed - after 4x400m is the one who is going to be faster on race day for the "diesel engines" like me (if you're a racehorse, I have no advice for you, only envy.) Add a lot of race recon (knowing the landmarks to sight, knowing currents, cutting tight corners around buoys) puts you in the faster groups. And I'm saying this as a slow, adult-onset swimmer without a coach.

Race dependent. Most WTC races don't allow an in water warm-up, I just try to start easy and build for the first 4-5minutes.


I don't know the answer to this. If I breath to my left I tend to veer right in open water. If I breath to my right I tend to swim relatively straight with a slight leftward veer. Or rather, this is my perception of what happens.


I am relatively better at shorter swims, but it's not like I'm great at one and terrible at the other, I'm basically the same level of swimmer at each.


My kick is very bad mechanically, too much knee bend. On the flip side, I swim much much faster than I pull, so freeing my legs must contribute somehow.

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Dimond Bikes Superfan

Depending on how good/bad your kick is, adding a wetsuit for OW can make a HUGE difference compared to swimming w/o one in the pool. For some folks like my dad, just pulling w/ a buoy in the pool is faster than full swimming w/ a kick (hard to imagine kicking itself is actually *negative* propulsion, more likely a matter of improved body positioning due to lifting the legs results in greater streamlining than what the kick adds), so using a wetsuit and minimizing kick in OW is a major advantage.

training camp could be an ideal situation to evaluate this type of issue, especially comparing yourself to others. did you talk to the coach/s about it? did you talk to the people that were swimming with you in the lane? they could notice things in your swim that would be a clue as to what the problem is

Yeah, 1:18 is way slow if you are swimming those pool paces (I'd expect sub-1:10). A couple of possible causes come to mind:

If you have a really long glide, this will hurt you more in OWS than in a pool (going into a current you are having to reaccelerate more dramatically on each stroke).

In OWS you may naturally hold a higher head position to look around more and for ease of breathing (I have to consciously avoid doing this). If your pool position is looking straight down at the bottom, your OWS body position may have significantly lower hips than in the pool.

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I definitely do not have a long glide, but I think there's a decent chance this head position issue is a cause. I'll have to be conscious of that and see if it helps.

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Dimond Bikes Superfan

When you're in the pool concentrate on what you are doing. Each step. Forceful entry/catch, strong pull/breath, recover, repeat. Do this every stroke, every second, every swim. Get use to how the Pull feels. Meaning how much pressure do you feel against your hand and when you get to open water keep repeating that process in your head and the same pressure during your pull. Whether you are in a pool or open water your process is the same. If you don't give yourself a process to think about your mind will drift into other things like the weather, the current, the splashing, the bumping, the poor water clarity, the high heart rate, the water you just choked on, etc.. Everything you should not be concentrating on because you end up swimming really slow.

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You might want to talk to the men’s 10k open water gold medalist from Rio about the long glide.

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When you do practice OW swims are your times as slow or is it just a race day thing.

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Kind of in between the two. Slower than I swim in the pool, faster than I swim in races.

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Dimond Bikes Superfan

Based on what you have written a lot of assumptions can be made. I can only put into perspective with myself who over the years since taking up triathlon my improvements in time over the 70.3 and IM distances aren't massive but now get out the water far less taxed than before. I have gone from anaerobically pushing myself with arms taking path of least resistance to now where I am strong enough to pull the water in a nicer stroke and I fatigue my shoulders if I push too hard. Are you evenly pacing your races or going out harder and struggling on the back end. If you don't have the motor to swim 3.8km and can do it faster in training sounds like you need to go out easier and work on endurance/strength.