Funny enough for triathletes I push flip turns not to be faster in a pool but for the added breath control + comfort it builds into your swimming (which imo is likely one of biggest impacts on open water). So at min I tell them warm up and warm down to work it in with each swim and on main sets do whatever feels most comfortable / fast.
(Eventually if your doing it every set in wu/wd you’ll get hang of it to do it more often and get default faster from it)
How fast are you swimming the OLY? Are you swimming it in 20’, 25’, 30’, longer? When swimming these OLYs where they’re beating you, are you swimming 1500m, 1600m, longer? How far are they swimming? Are you “going hard” or saving some for the bike and run? Are they “going hard” or saving?
Saying “I’m +3/+5/+7s faster in a pool” doesn’t mean much. I’m slow in a pool, about 1:50css, but can swim 26’ in OWS in lakes if I’m “going hard”. But I don’t “go hard” in the swim anymore, and I don’t care who’s finishes ahead of me. I just want to come out in the top 1/3 of everyone, which seems to position me well for the bike/run in my AG (now 65-69).
He maybe training within himself, when you are going all out.
He may gain more from the wetsuit bouyancy.
You may have taken a poor route, he may have missed a buoy.
What time was your oly and what’s your average?
I’m the opposite. In the pool I come in ahead of my tri-mates but in open water I’m usually behind. If it’s a wetsuit swim then I’ll be even or ahead, otherwise, I believe I’m better in the pool because of the flip-turns and keeping my head down. The other thing working against me the last few years is that I’m just scared to go out hard at the start of a swim because I don’t want to be “that” guy that will be posted and anaylsed on here.
I average 27-29 for Olympic distance swims. Some of those Olys have a 2-loop course with a short beach run, but I swam 27 twice in a swim-run series that I think was the same swim distance as an Oly tri.
I wish I could say I take a great straight route, but that seems to be something I can improve every single time despite practice it quite a lot in OWS before race day AND trying my best to keep the best line possible on race day.
How are you practicing in ows? I was just having this conversation with one of my athletes who was doing OW practice. It can be hard to actually swim “straight” when you don’t actually have some type of marker within 300-500 yards. I know many people go to ow and just swim and sight off the pine tree that’s way out in the distance, and you will just naturally move in the water without even noticing it. I used to lead a sunday swim every week and if I didn’t put out swim boys we’d just you could naturally see them just veer off line. My moto was always sight more, swimming an extra 100yds or whatever sucks. Hell in your case if your getting beat by ~1 min, that’s only about 60 yards of difference potentially.
Most people’s ow setup is just much more go to a lake and swim for X mins, sighting off the various trees or whatever. I’ll forever love the Clearmont lake Mineola that has I think 800 yards of swim boys all in a straight line about every 50 yards a new boy, only about 100 yards from shore. The “wednesday worlds” swim set was always fun thing to do when your training down there. That makes for easy sighting. So generally I’d say more times than not just going out in a lake will certainly help your comfort level (which is hugely important) but unless you actually know specific distances and correlated time, swimming straight is very very hard to do. Sight and sight often.
I think I’m pretty good about this in practice. While there are no buoys, I’ll sight on a big marker in the distance, and then I’ll swim first 4 L-R strokes then sight, and if still on-track, will up it to 6, 8, even 10+ strokes and then re-sight. I’ll really push the number of strokes I take before I pop up and get significantly off-track. It usually ends up around 6-8 L-R stroke cycles, 10 if I’m lucky but that’s really risky on race day since I found you can get really disoriented if you’re off after than many. Once race day I’m around 4 L-R cycles while in a scrum, but 6-8 typically when out in the clear on my own.
This is actually the main thing I focus on during OWS, and the main reason I practice it. I also try to make my sight/breath combo as economical as possible but that often gets thrown out the window on race day when there’s chop and you have to lift the head more than minimally.
I still however def have some navigation issues on race day - a lot of it is due ot errant swimmers in front of me even though I try to sight the buoy predominantly, and having to swim around a decent number of slower swimmers.
You have a sighting issue. You should do the opppsotie, push soghting more. I will only offer your own evidence in this thread with any rebuttals you will have.
It’s my coachmg experience after about 6 strokes you will see people start to veer. So if your going 9-10 strokes before sighting your adding micro yardage every time.
It’s possible but again in race day I’m not doing the 10 stroke cycles I’m doing 4 in a scrum and 4-6 if I’m clear. I’ll do 4 or less if I’m in a current that needs redirecting.
Still as admitted it’s entirely possible my navigation needs improvement. Wish my gps trace could help but I’ve seen pros with worse gps lines than mine.
I’ve tried sighting more like every 2-3 cycles the whole way and I always go slower, like a lot slower. Sadly my gps trace and even perceived navigation was no better.
One of my totally unproven theories as to why those slower pool swimmers beat me, is that I swim with a minimal 2-beat kick in the pool, whereas all those slower swimmers have a more normal pool kick. (I’ve video’d myself so I know for sure my kick is less than theirs from that rear view). It’s entirely possible that they get a much bigger wetsuit assist than I do, if they are expending some of their kick energy to maintain their flat body position in the pool. I am able to swim with an ankle band no problem (slower of course) so it’s possible the wetsuit benefits me less.
Still, the wetsuit is -7 to -10sec/100 faster for me in the pool when testing, consistently, which is in the range of what most people here have posted.
if you sight more and you go slower means your having body alignment issues when you swim (increasing drag).
So are you kicking the same in ow vs pool during non wetsuit swims? I cringe every time I read someone doesn’t kick as much so they can save their legs for bike or run. Is that you?
In my experience it’s hard to self diagnosis your own swim. They’ll say they are or aren’t doing something and then video contradicts them. So unless you have video of yourself you may not actually know what you’re doing in ow. If your going closer to 6 strokes per sight I think your likely making micro corrections that sighting more would solve. Think of it more as a connecting the dots line, vs an “straight” line. But if your that much slower your bringing in alignment issues. You shouldn’t be that much slower w adding more sighting ie swinming straighter.
Based on those times, I don’t think you’d benefit from starting on the front line of races. I think you’d get swum over a lot. After reading your how often you sight, I’d say to take fewer strokes between sighting. None of us are swimming as straight as we think we are. Next time you have a lane to yourself, try swimming with your eyes closed for 8-10 strokes and see how far you veer from the black line.
Yeah, I wimp out on the kicking in the pool, sadly. I did try doing normal kicking for a 4 week block, but it didn’t seem to help on anything over 100 yds, but I’ll admit that’s some pretty paltry weak practice, and real swimmers absolutely destroy me in kick sets.
I’ve video’d myself in the pool, not OWS. I don’t think I have a major lateral alignment issue (side-snaking), and I swim very straight in a pool (which I do practice occasionally with eyes-closed swimming for many strokes). I do worry about losing time to drag if I’m sighting a lot and popping my head out of the water, especially in chop where you really have to lift that head to look over the chop. But again, I practice this a good amount too, and try and minimize it.
I’m always surprised that swim coaches/experts never talk about sighting technique optimization given how much drag that head-pop costs. (Sure, it’s less with a wetsuit, but still, it’s definitely more than any technique flaw that I’ve seen on my videos given how slow I swim tarzan style.)
I just did a whole post on sighting issues (why you get worse with more sighting). It has nothing to do with your head popping up. It has to do with you likely have a weak kick that causes you double harm by dropping vertically every time you sight more. So yes when you add in the kick you have, and then you add information that you get slower with more sighting, the issue is your alignment in the water. IE every time you pop up your head, your hips drop because your lack of kick. So by doubling your sighting, by default you go “slower”. IE- work on your kick to improve the ability to stay more horizontal in the water, and thus swim straighter by being able to sight more.
So when you are calling out the swim experts, your case isn’t an sighting optimization issue…it’s an body alignment in the water from lack of kicking. Fix that and suddenly things become much easier in open water especially with sightiing. Of course that’s not necessarily a “easy fix”. And again this is all on the information and contexts you’ve provided throughout the thread.
This may be true. But to be honest, I never have had an issue with keeping my head up when I sight, and I actively practice to keep as flat as possible when sighting.
With a wetsuit, I don’t even dip at all. I seriously doubt my kicking weakness is the reason - if it were, I should be markedly worse in the pool rather than in OWS where the open water ‘fixes’ it due to buoyancy.
I don’t go backwards or anything like that when I kick, it’s just not a strength of mine. But I admit I should work on it more! And to be fair, those guys I know who beat me in OWS but whom I beat in the pool masters can’t kick any faster than me on kick sets.
What is this based on? video evidence or your “perception” of what is going on with your stroke? As I said more times than not, what an athlete thinks they are doing isn’t always what they are actually doing, most especially with adult onset swimmers, who never had the 10k hour practice time to “work” with their stroke that year round swimmers had as kids.
If your sighting more often and going basically extra slow it means your dropping too much in vertical position. Add in the context of your lack of strong kick and a 2 beat kick in pool, detective work highlights the more often you are lifting your head w your poor kick your going way more vertical than you realize and it’s not just because your sighting more. Your already getting beat by people your out-swimming in the pool where basically your only doing 20 yards of swimming before you gain time on others cus they do poor turns. So in ow your losing out cus your a) probably not swimming as straight as you think b) sighting likely only as much as you can do due to poor body position due to that kick that only causes more time lose when your sighting more but due to body alignment issues causing more drag. The pool especially SCY allows for way more less swimming and thus key issues impacting you less than in an ow or lc pool where actually swimming is basically all there is.
So back to the original question. I would stage you at like the 25% group, or essentially let the top group go, and then filter you in there. I don’t think you want to go truly in the MOP cus I think you’d get more congestion to deal with.
It’s based on my perception for OWS. While I have a lot of self-made low quality pool video of myself from one angle, I don’t have any OWS video (who does?)
I’ve swum a lot and analyzed my own swimming enough to be fairly certain I’m not getting significant drop while breathing with a wetsuit. I don’t even have to kick to pop my head out with the wetsuit, and I know from an ankle band if I’m dropping. I seriously doubt I’m that off here. If I were a beginner, maybe so, but I’m def not a beginner.
I don’t see how people could ‘not’ go slower if I made you sight every other stroke, compared to somebody doing like 5 stroke cycles and then sighting. Make it even more extreme, swim Tarzan head-out-of-water, and there’s no contest. The more you sight, the more time you spend Tarzan swimming. (To be fair, in a wetsuit I go decently fast for myself - I’ve Tarzan swam half the distance of a freezing cold sprint triathlon where I wanted to DNF the swim at the start since I was freezing my tail off in a sleeveless wetsuit and no cap which was super dumb, but I only ended up losing 48 seconds total by the end compared to my normal time in this race year after year!)
I do agree that poor turns of the other guys could be the main source if THE source of the difference. Although for at least one of those guys, it’s not the turns - with him in particular, I’m easily catching him on the straightaway when I lap him and have to ease up the gas a lot to not collide - I have no idea how he’s beaten me in 3 races in OWS (by over a minute in one of them!) I have to do fisty-swim to make it a fair fight in the pool if I’m behind him!
You only need to sight about once every 20+ strokes, the rest of them are looking at bubbles and the bottom of someones feet.You swim at a speed where there should be plenty to choose from too, no excuses…Probably why your slower pool friends are kicking your ass too…
That’s what you work on first, the lowest of the hanging fruit. Worth up to 5 seconds per 100 and a fresher exit from not expending all that course plotting energy…
Incorrect
The more you sight the more you go in the correct direction, The less you sight the more off course you go. It’s not that fucking complicated. But you’re always right, and anyone else is always wrong. You’ve been this way for years now with anything swim related.
So there is not an absolute number, many factors come into play. In your case if your beating your mates in the pool and they are beating you in ows, id look at your navigation skills primarily. Which is where body position comes into play, which is where it’s like 1+1 =3 imo. It’s all factors that you look at.
Even just find his mates, and sit half way up their arse the whole course. No need to sight at all. A free minute. The only thing you’re looking for are their feet. Say to them, sorry buddy I may touch your toes a few times but you’re my Gandalf around this course and I won’t overtake you before t1