Bricks are overrated.

How much are you actually swimming? "coming out of the water out of breath and woozy" tells me that you overexerted yourself on the swim. That can create a hole that is impossible to dig yourself out of in a sprint distance...

---

Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

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

Not too much i guess, two times a week typically, some weeks once. Most of the time i spend around 45 minutes in the pool per session, totaling anywhere from 800m to 1400m depending on the focus of the sets i'm doing. That includes the warmup, cooldown tough.
I should be getting more long distance swim time in open water now with summer arriving, but i'm still having some technique issues that prevent me from getting into an easy but steady rhythm doing long sets. After 300-400m I tend to start struggling to keep pace because technique starts to suffer badly.

And there's your answer..... You aren't swimming enough, either in frequency or the volume per practice. That lack of fitness cascades into the bike, and then doubly so for the run (because you overbiked trying to maintain the same pace you could do when you're fresh, when you were exhausted from the swim).

Just correcting this statement for you as well. After 300-400 you start struggling to hold technique because you either went out too hard, or you lack swim fitness, or both. Ability to hold technique is a "fitness" issue.

Swim more, work on technique, and build the swim fitness. In your position, the more swims you can do each week the better. Your run is solid, let that take a back seat for a little while and just do enough to maintain. Do that, and you'll be able to actually swim harder without falling apart and feeling fine when you jump on the bike.

---

Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

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

Yeah, I guess. It's just that I was thinking that on sprint distance, aren't you supposed to swim hard? Regardless of swimming ability, I'd guess a 500m swim will be at least 70% exertion rate. And the bike didn't 'feel' like a struggle. Although that might have been the racing adrenalin. There's so many mediocre swimmers getting through the rest of the race just fine, I can't get my head around why it seems to be such a delicate balance for me.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts btw

I don't think that's enough swim volume. I know there are lots of differing opinions on the subject, but I'm definitely a believer that high swim volume is a valuable part of a good triathlon training program (i.e. a minimum of 2-3x per week, 2500-3000m per session; even better would be 12-15k total weekly distance). Aside from improving your swim and ensuring you get your bike fresher (and less woozy or out of breath), swimming more will increase your aerobic fitness (or help maintain it, since you probably have a pretty high bar from running) without the physical stress that weight bearing training (bike and run) incur on your body.

yes, but if you have good swim fitness then you can swim hard and not have it wreck the rest of your race, and on top of that, it becomes less of a "delicate balance". If you're panting and woozy getting out of the water, that's killing the rest of the race. Breathing hard is fine, but you shouldn't have to slow down.

---

Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

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

Never looked at it that way, probably because I'm still structuring training around my long run and interval runs. So you'd think I'd get away with skipping the long run a couple of times, maybe throwing in a long swim or two instead of that? Without losing too much running fitness that is.

I'd still consider myself a novice at this, so take this with a grain of salt. But if your running fitness is already at a pretty high level, given everything else you've said I think you probably would get the most bang for your buck (time efficiency and ROI) from swapping out some of your run time for swimming time. I'm not sure which of your runs would be best to drop though. From my own experience, I reduced my run training over the winter/spring to make time for swimming (from ~3x per week to 1-2x per week) and I'm running as fast or faster as I ever have (with lower avg HR for the same routes I usually do). I credit that almost entirely to the 4-5 hrs per week I get of good swimming.

The other thing is I note that you don't say much about your bike training. Are you getting enough volume in there? and making sure you get in a long ride on a regular basis (25-30+ miles if you're racing short course)?

If my calculations are correct.....you are swimming 100m/3:00(sometimes 100m/5:00), biking 23mph, and running 6:25/mile for your primary training sessions? Are you sure about that?

Maybe you are eating too much before the race. Not even marathon runners will eat that much.. takes oxygen from muscles to digest

No.

What you need to do is reorient your perception of "long". All swim workouts are long, therefore none of them are. Just get yourself in the pool 3x/wk for an hour at a time at a bare minimum and go from there.

---

Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting

“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”

Forgive me if I'm ignorant. But the longest I race is a 1k swim, in about 18-20 minutes. Still 3 x 1 hour a week is the bare minimum? Year round? Mind you, I'm trying to maximize my running potential, I'm not trying to shave of 10 seconds from my 100 swim pace

That sounds hopeful. The bike probably isn't the problem. My bike run brick trainings are going fine. Even if I do over-distance on the bike

All I can do when I read this is bang my head on the desk.

What Eric said.

I'd also add this:

Why would you structure your training around any workout? What makes the long run and intervals so much more important than a 3-5h bike ride or intervals on the bike or better swim training? (bc you need better swim training as well)

Triathlon isn't about 1 workout or 2 specific workouts every week.

In fact no workout is more or less important than any other workout.

If you truly want to perform it's the cumulative effect of workout after workout after workout after workout after workout done day after day after day after day after day after day after day after month after month after month after month that will enable you to race well.

June's racing success (or failure) is brought to you by Jan-early May's training...(or lack of it).

---

Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

Ahhhhh. I love it.

The head banging. And the content.

Those swim times are way off. I can manage 1k in about 17:30 in a wetsuit in the right circumstances. A bit slower in the pool, because my turns are suboptimal and my balance needs work

Hi swimbikerunbonk,

It sounds to me like you have some technique issues with your swim that you need to address. Swimming with poor form is exhausting and will for sure impact your bike and run. A few years ago, I could swim 50 metres front crawl but was pretty much exhausted at the end of it, even though I was a fairly fit runner at the time. My dad was into "Total Immersion" and showed me some of their videos and helped me out at the pool. The first day in the water with him showing me how to rebalance my body (so that I was no longer dragging my lower body through the water like a corpse) I swam 2000 metres of front crawl non-stop! I was so damn excited to be able to swim without feeling as though I was sprinting uphill with a hippo on my back that I just kept going! I am still not a fast swimmer (23-26 minute 1.5 k) but with the TI method I can at least get out of the water feeling good enough to be able to hammer the bike/run (which I am much better at). I highly recommend taking a look at some of their videos or getting some private tuition because it might really help you, not necessarily to make you a faster swimmer but to make you a much faster triathlete as you will have so much more energy to put out there on the bike and run.

Yeah, I get the point. I guess I need to make up my mind if I want to be a true triathlete, or just a runner doing triathlons every once in a while.

But for the sake of argument. I'm looking for advice about training smarter. Training longer, more often and more consistently sounds like general advice you can copy paste to every topic asking for tips, as long as you're not overtraining. So maybe some race tactics. Maybe slow down the swim by 2 minutes on a 1k to gain 5 minutes on the 10k run.

Even with my current training volume I feel I should not be underperforming on the run as badly as I am

This is turning into a great topic btw, didn't expect this kind of response.

Thanks for that

Yeah I definitely need some technique work, I'm aware of that. Will get some coaching after the summer season for sure. But did you have any similar experiences as I described? I'm still not convinced it's the swim that's ruining my race. If that's the case I might be able to solve it by slowing down (even more, sigh) to keep myself fresh for the bike and te run

Person on fire: "I'm on fire - can anyone tell me why?"

Fireman 1 "You lit a match"
Fireman 2 "You soaked yourself in kerosene"
Firemen 3-20: "you touched the match to your kerosene soaked clothes"

Person on fire: "yeah, but what if that's not the reason?"

---

I wrote this, you should read it:
https://www.slowtwitch.com/...n_Swimming_6700.html

Yeah I know that advice seems like a cliche. The crazy thing is a lot of people (still) don't get that endurance sports are volume sports that quite typically if not most often reward those who have picked their parents rather well and can spend some time training. If you didn't do a good job on the parent front then you better train. That cliche then becomes pretty damn good advice to follow.

You want train smarter? You need to go re-read Eric's post and get to the pool 3-4x per week. That way you've not sabotaged your race with the swim.



You're underperforming the run bc from what you described, the rest of your training is shit.
Fix that.
Once that's done then you can worry about tactics.

There's your blunt yet friendly tip of the day!

---

Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

perhaps you would be more comfortable doing a sport without a swim and a bike before the run? Like running?

---

Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting

“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”

sigh

---

Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta