I'LL save the forum!

Triathlon Forum
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Since I’ve enjoyed this place so much as a lurker, and since it’s apparently in imminent danger of “sucking,” I figure the least I can do is swoop in and rescue the joint with some on-topic thoughts/questions.

:wink:

Let’s talk swimming.

I’m looking at last year’s results from my local Olympic tri. In my age group, the difference between third place and sixth place was nine minutes. ( 2:14:23 vs 2:23:37) You know where Mr. Six lost almost all of that time? ( clue: it wasn’t cause Mr. Three’s bike was so much more aero ) That’s right- on the swim. (22:18 vs 30:50)

Out of 23 men in that age group in that race, only four broke 23:00 for the swim. This despite the fact that everyone wore wetsuits.

So what gives? I have to say, I don’t understand the racing strategery of a lot of triathletes: Dog the swim. It’s only 20-30 minutes, and utilizes different muscles than either one of the next two legs. I don’t care if I lose 6 or 7 minutes here as long as I’m fresh coming out of the water. Hammer the bike. It lasts about an hour, and is really going to fry my legs. If I’m lucky and I push it as hard as I can, I may gain as much as three or four minutes on the competition. Survive the run. Ow, my legs. Hope I don’t lose all that time I gained on the bike. . .

It seems to me that there are a whole lot of people out there who could gain a whole lot of time by pushing harder on the swim. So my question is, why don’t they? All I ever hear about is how to swim more efficiently, how to use less energy on the swim, etc etc, blah blah blah.

I say, hammer the swim. It’s short anyway, it won’t wear out your legs, and you can bank a whole heap of time there.

Thoughts?

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HA, hahahahahaha! vitus979, we must share a brain (I feel sorry for you).

I was thinking the same thing. Most triathletes do NOT race the swim. They survive it.

I think one reason is why I (used to) race that way. I hated swim training so I didn’t do it. As you mentioned, I discounted the importance of the swim since it was the shortest duration event of the race. What I have failed to realize is that I could make up big margins of time since I was such a rotten swimmer to begin with. I could ride pretty good and run OK. The largest opportunity for improvement was in the swim.

Also, in talking to the better swimmers around here, they do hammer the swim, sprnting the beginning and finding clean water and good sighting and then staying on the front. If that strategy could be combined with a good bike and run, boom, you win.

I agree with you on all this “efficiency, blah, blah, don’t swim faster swim more economically” stuff. I don’t see that as a way to move up the ladder. Like anything else in the sport- it is about speed. Raw, dick-in-the-dirt, scalded-ass cat speed.

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That’s exactly it- most triathletes don’t RACE the swim.

You’re probably right about why, too- they just don’t like the training. ( How they don’t mind paying thousands of $$$ for the latest aero gear to save a minute over 40K, or spending 90:00 a day on the trainer the whole winter long I’ll never understand, but hey, that’s another thread. ) It’s kind of funny. I live in North Idaho, and I see triathletes out biking all the time. I even saw a guy ride past my house last night at around 5 pm- in the dark and snow. I hardly ever see anyone besides the kid’s swim team training seriously at the pool.

Related question: How many people lose gobs of time on the swim not because they’re slow, not because they’re dogging it, but because they can’t navigate, and end up swimming 2k instead of 1500? What’s their solution?

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Now we’re talking.

At Doug Stern’s Triathlon Training Camp in Curacao we did a lot of open water swimming in addition to the pool workouts. Doug and Boris, our two swim coaches, went to great lengths to teach us how to swim straight(er) in open water and even very rough water. Graduation day was the RBTT Bank/Fatum Triathlon where the swim was no wetsuits, very rough water for 3 laps of 500 meters.

Also, Andrew Kennedy, one of the best open water swimmers in the state, helped me with my open water navigation.

Basically, Andrew, Doug and Boris. showed me how to strighten my stroke and kick and how to follow my arms. Boom, swimming straight. Just like that. Doug also had us using some “cheats” or gadgets to show us where our hands entered the water and to be sure we weren’t crossing over too much. That and video taping our stroke over and over was very helpful.

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I think that there are many who are attempting to race the swim but are just not that fast yet or still learning. I can remember my first couple of years in the sport where I swam as hard and fast as I could and came out of the water in a scorching 30-31 minutes :slight_smile: I would get to my bike and there would only be a few left on the racks. I’d move up somewhat on the bike and then when I got to the run I could crank out a 32-33 minute 10k (I come from a running background). Once I was standing at the results board and a few guys were looking at the results and trying to find the fastest run split in the race (it was me) and they had to look down to around 70th overall and were saying “this guy must really take it easy on the swim to run like that” … I spoke up and told them that I was swimming as hard as I could go but that I just sucked at it :slight_smile: I still race the swim (although not in an ironman where I try to be more conservative) but after a lot of work I can get under 23 minutes.

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I suck at swimming, so I “survive” it. When I improve my stroke, efficiency, blah, blah… I’ll make more of an effort to “race it”. But if I try and go hard I generally flail around and exit the water with HR maxed out. Yeah, my legs may be OK but sure don’t feel good on the bike.

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i agree with you. there are many people that could do much better if they would improve their swim. I know that you won’t win a tri in the water and it’s not worth going all out. you build too much lactic acid for only a small margin of time. but a more efficient will set you up for a good bike and run.

but what can I say…as long as other triathletes belive that 2-3 times a week of a short swim will help them…good for them, better for me :slight_smile:

have a good swim!

daniel

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One of the first things I did after I selected the races I would enter is to look at the results from all of them going back 3 years. The folks that do very well, oviously race all 3, as they are usually in the top 10-15 in all events. Some of the smaller sprints have the same 3 guys placing top 3 in each of the 3 events.

The guys that win sprint tri’s where I live swim 8:00+ 500m’s. The winners of the oly’s aren’t much higher than 3 times that (I can post the stats if anyone else is interested). They are very much racing the swim.

I was just looking at the 03 Chicago tri, and the guy that won had rankings of 30-5-2, and the 2nd place dude had 8-17-3, the third had 6-9-24. One guy did worse on the swim, the other did worse on the bike, and the other did worse on the run. So, each knows where they can make the most improvement.

I kept going down the list looking for a fast swimmer, and at #13 I found a guy with the rankings of 3-88-13. He was a better swimmer, but his swim was only +2min on the other guys. He lost 7min on the bike and another 2 on the run and finished 7min behind the winner.

Whereas the winner, lost 1:45 on the swim, ganied almost 2 min on the bike, and then was +3min on the run, and won by 3 minutes.

Granted this is a small sample size, but the difference in time between a a high swimmer and lower swimmer is not as great as the difference between a high biker (or runner) and a low biker (or runner).

Now, if the races were set up so that you swam, biked and ran distances that took 0:45min, then obviously it would be more balanced between the 3.

I don’t think people are compfortable with being “tired and out of breath in the water”. I’m confident that if I get out of breath and tired on the swim, I can slow myself down, and catch my breath, and repeat. I don’t know if others are like that or not. It seems being comfortable in the water is a big deal for some. I guess I’m a little different b/c the swim for me is fun to train, and I enjoy it.

See Allan’s post for for how inaccurate assumptions could be made. Heck for all I know the guy that finished 88 in the bike above might have been riding Schwin.

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<I don’t think people are compfortable with being “tired and out of breath in the water”. >

So true. I’m pretty lean/dense and pretty inefficient (used to be just horrible inefficient, so I’m getting better). I need to maintain a certain speed (not real fast mind you) so I don’t sink. I’m still out of breath at this pace! And there’s no where for me to slow down to to recover.

Hence the popularity of Total Immersion…

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" "I agree with you on all this “efficiency, blah, blah, don’t swim faster, swim more economically” stuff. I don’t see that as a way to move up the ladder… " "

Tom, for a guy who I suspect knows almost everything there is to know about bikes, tri bikes, and riding fast, I am surprised. Think about it: swimming AND biking are about trying to move as fast as possible through a fluid–that fluid being water or air. You can be Lance or LeMonde and you will still get your butt kicked if you try to ride in a race with a parachute (a real one) behind you. Speed in both swim and TT bike events is a balance between watts generated and drag produced. To my knowledge, you can’t break that relationship on this planet. Obviously, if you can produce unreal quantities of watts in the water, then you CAN get away with producing lots of drag, but you probably won’t win (someone who can produce unreal quantities of watts in the water and produces minimal drag will!).

Simple training, practice, and fitness does make a difference, clearly. And there are no aerobars for the water (maybe a wetsuit). The real ‘aerobar’ for the water IS technique. You don’t tell your triathlete customers, “Bah, don’t worry about being aero on the bike, just get comfortable so you can produce ‘raw, dick-in-the-dirt, scalded-ass cat speed’”, do you? I hope not. I started out (in 1983) as a runner and biker and didn’t swim too fast (out of the water in the last 25% of the swim pack of the races of those early days). Since then, I have swum a lot, BUT what I really did was pick the brain of every single able-bodied person/coach who has watched me swim over 20 long years–a lot of triathletes and swimmers don’t seem to like being told how they can change their stroke. I seek it out CONSTANTLY. Of course, I take everything I hear through the filter of my experience. Plus, I watched a lot of videos of myself and of swim meets with world-class 800 M and 1500 M swimmers and learned a lot. To this day, I think a lot about my stroke in EVERY SINGLE workout I do. Now I swim much, much faster. Many coaches now ask me if I swum in college. I did not.

Try it. It sure worked for me.

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jhc wrote: So true. I’m pretty lean/dense and pretty inefficient (used to be just horrible inefficient, so I’m getting better). I need to maintain a certain speed (not real fast mind you) so I don’t sink. I’m still out of breath at this pace! And there’s no where for me to slow down to to recover.
This is what I feel, too. In fact, I ALWAYS swim much faster in a race than I do in practice. In practice, I’m striving to be more efficient, to be streamlined, to be able to continuously swim for more than a couple of hundred yards without getting the urge to just stop a while so I can breathe, etc. In a race, I’m getting the same feeling, only worse, but I just don’t stop. The last swim I did, I was actually 5th in my AG in a half-ironman. I bust my tail on the swim every time, because it doesn’t hurt my performance on the bike or run. I know this flies in the face of all the recommendations about keeping Heartrate in a certain supposedly Aerobic Range, but these recommendations aren’t correct. It doesn’t matter if my HR is at MAX for me (about 180) coming out of the water, nor that my shoulders/upper back hurt from lactic acid due to swimming harder than an Aerobic Range for the swimming muscles. I really think people are on the wrong track worrying about having a high heartrate during the swim. What matters is that my hips aren’t sinking at the speed I’m able to generate. I seem to have to generate a speed I don’t practice in order to have a better body position. I don’t practice at that speed, because it’s against all the recommendations I hear about learning to swim correctly. As long as I haven’t tightened my lower back, kicked way too hard, or tired out my triceps so much that I can’t rest correctly in an aero position on the bike, I haven’t hurt the rest of my race. The reason the high HR during the swim doesn’t matter, is that it is Local Muscle fatigue that determines performance in a trained athlete, not cardiac output. A higher blood lactate level isn’t going to kill my legs if the lactate is generated in my shoulders! So what if I generate lactic acid in another part of my body, as long as the benefits of going that hard on the swim outweigh the negatives? I get out of the water at Max HR. I run at a trot through the transition to the bike, HR dropping the whole time. By the time I get on my bike, my HR is down to 155-165. I start out easy on the bike until I feel the blood pump lessen in my swimming muscles, and my legs begin to get good and loose…after a few miles…maybe 5 miles at most, I’ve settled into my biking mode of pushing whatever gear I can manage that keeps my HR 150-155 without feeling any pain in my quads. I just continue this until the run, and on the run maintain a slightly higher HR, monitoring my legs for any sign of that well-know feel of lactic acid pain. It works well for me. When I have tried to go easier on the swim in order to keep my HR down, I simply lose finishing status. The races I have done the best were when I spent most of my swim at max HR…oh, I forgot to say, I always start out slow on the swim so the fast guys aren’t having to crawl over me…so I ease into the max HR state. The races where I stayed “within myself” on the swim, I simply lost time that I couldn’t recover on the bike and run. Now, when I practice the swim, I’m still going to practice at lower HR in an effort to learn how to do this stupid swimming part better, but in a race, after easing into the workload, it’s all-out on the swim for me. Usually, I’m lucky to be in the front of the MOP pack after the swim.

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"I mean to run or bike all you have to do is step out the door. It’s a pain the rear to have to drive to the pool, swim, take a shower and drive all the way back. Not the only reason but part of it I think.

Take me for example. I love swimming. I like doing laps. My problem is distance from pool and price of use."

That’s it exactly for me. I like to swim, but it’s a giant hassle to go to the pool. It would be great to have one of those Endless Swim pools at the house or to live by a lake. I did my last oly swim around 26:00 and I think I could take off another couple of minutes if I really trained, but it’s too much of a hassle. Instead I work on my running because it’s my weakest event and I can do the training anytime I want.

Don

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If God had intended us to swim, he would have give us wings…