So I swam in a pool yesterday for the first time since May after swimming in the lake all summer. I’ve been averaging at least four swims a week in the lake since May, and aside from the first month of that, all of my swims have been without a wetsuit. I’ve been swimming 40-60 minutes each time I’ve been in the lake and my race swim times have been good this year. I feel pretty fit and healthy right now and was expecting to have improved since my last pool swim, as I was only swimming twice a week before May.
What I found in the pool was that I felt strangely out-of-breath when swimming 200s and my times were about 10 seconds slower than when I swam the same set (8 x 200) in May. My pace per 100m was also slower than in the non-wetsuit triathlon race swims I did this summer. My overall endurance was still fine, and I swam the whole 4km that I planned to swim, my cruising speed was just slower than in May.
Can anyone explain why the lake swimming would make me so much slower in the pool and (more importantly!) suggest things I could do in the pool over the next few months to get the speed back? I’m assuming the preponderance of steady-state swimming in the lake is what caused the slowdown and that the fix will be to swim a bunch of hard intervals (25s, 50s, 75s) in the pool to get my speed back up, but is there anything else I could be doing as well? Also, it seems really strange to me that I was able to hold 1:40/100m pace in 1500m non-wetsuit swims in the lake but struggled to swim my 200s in 1:45/100m in the pool.
I do open turns (don’t know how to do flip-turns) so the answer to your first question is: pretty bad. As for GPS, I don’t have one, so I am going by the distance the race course is supposed to be… The thing is, I did 7 lake swims in races, and my pace was pretty consistent around 1:40/100m. I have a hard time believing that all of those courses were short. I would have thought it’s more likely that I swam further than the designated distance (because of not swimming a perfectly straight line) in the lake.
The first thing to do is set aside any “data” you think you have about your open water swimming speed.
Neither Garmin, nor the measurement of open water swim courses - is accurate enough for you to jump to any conclusions about how fast are swimming.
There might be some benefit to steady/moderate pace swimming.
But your weaknesses are - 1) Lack of speed, 2) Slow threshold pace (probably related to a lack of speed rather than fitness)
I am not a swim coach. But…
I think your priorities should be:
A) Fixing your stroke. (This is not an insult. The first thing every swimmer who wants to improve should ask, every practice is: "How can I improve my stroke?)
B) How might I get faster for 25 yards?
C) Lastly, what might I do to better hold my speed?
I would do more supervised drills. More sprinting with long rests. Maybe some race specific threshold swimming.
Keep your volume, but realize that this only prepares you to complete races. Doing well is about being a good swimmer. Not being “generally fit!”
lots of steady state makes you 1 speed swimmer. like budda said, dont put any faith in your ow swim pace, its just way too variable and low quality data.
i am not as fit as i was in summer but i am swimming faster on less volume, because i have focussed on doing faster speeds and tidied up my stroke a bit. i have pace ceilings i wont let myself swim slower than and do smaller repeat distances.
lots of faster swimming and doing sets of 100s with 30 seconds rest giving it a real rip
Yeah, I figured sprints and drills would be the solution here. I need to get back to practicing the skill of swimming. I was just hoping that as I had done so much (for me) swim volume over the summer, it would carry over better to the pool and that I would have a better starting-point for winter swimming. I’ve had years when (because of weather and other factors) I’ve done less than half the lake swimming I was able to do this year and it feels like my September starting-point is exactly the same as then. Frustration.
The volume should set you up for success from an injury/recovery perspective. Your body is well equipped to do the thing - now it’s just needs to work on doing it faster.
When you were only doing OWS did you just swim or do intervals? If it’s the former that’s your explanation.
I have/had multiple athletes train 3-4mo OWS. Most triathletes just get in open water and swim from point A to point B and back.
Just like pool swimming, OWS needs to be either interval based somehow be it stroke cycles - 20-30-100 strokes/stroke cycles fast then 10-20ez or treading water or time 1-2-3–4 minutes fast 1min easy/treading etc.
It’s also easier to ingrain bad habits OWS bc you don’t have the clock or the walls to refocus you. Next thing you know your feet are an inch lower, your head is a quarter inch higher and you have more drag.
For getting that speed back just do a lot of 25-150s. I’ll often have my athletes do 100-200 really fast & get their average pace per 25 or 50 or 75 or whatever. If they did 150fast then it’s be something like 20x75 holding that average 75pace on say :15-:20 rest. or if they did 200s then 12x125 holding the average pace they went through the 125 at :20 or so rest.
Hope that gives you some thoughts for next time you’re mainly OWS for training & to get that speed back! LMK if any questions
I did try to vary my pace when I was swimming in the lake and did sections where I would push harder for a count of strokes, or to a given landmark, but there was nothing structured about my approach. It was more of a “fartlek for swimming” deal.
I agree that I ingrained some bad habits that slowed me down. During my pool session yesterday I did some balance and timing drills and stroke counting and I could see that over the course of the summer my stroke has shortened by about 10% (based on the number of strokes I was taking per length). I need to begin each session with drills to establish good form, because I’m assuming that when you suggest “a lot of 25-150s” you are not suggesting I just flail up and down the pool as fast as my arms will spin.
Thanks for the suggestion of using a hard 150 to find my pace for 75 repeats, I will try that, although 20 x 75 on 15 RBI seems like an extremely tough set, something I will have to build up to over the next month or so.
Start with your swim fitness. many of my athletes can do that and hold +/- :01 of their average 75 time for that 150. Not all of them started at that. You can also do a 100 fast then repeat 25s or 50s. It’s more important to just start swimming fast and developing your speed again than worry about if it’s 25s, 50s, 125s or whatever.
When you’re doing OWS for long periods of time it might be good to set up a more rigid structure. Not to say there can’t be flexibility but maybe every week Day 1 is a short fast day, day 2 is long intervals, day 3 is whatever you feel like, day 4 is X or Y.
For example Day 1 you do 20x30 stroke cycles fast + :20 min treading water. You can also tread water working on your egg beater kick or treading water with small arm/hand movements or wide/big arm/hand movements or my fav is tread water with closed fists and only open them when I start that second stroke cycle really feeling my hands dig and hold the water.
You can do many of the drills open water that you would do in the pool. I find that OWS forces one to focus more on the drill and what you’re trying to work on since there isn’t feedback from the lane lines, walls or lines on the bottom.
Time in open water is an unreliable and inaccurate metric. You aren’t just slower in the pool you’re swimming is slower. I tell triathletes this all the time that training in open water makes you slower with a big part of that slow down coming from the bad habits that have crept in to your technique. The other part is a decline in fitness from long, straight swimming.
I hope this helps and if you have any questions, let me know.
Also was your outdoor swimming with or without wetsuit.
For context a few years ago when I had several 1500m masters swim meet races and several 1500m swims in tris WITH WETSUIT I was consistently 1 min faster (4 seconds per 100m) in the pool or 1 second per 25m. Roughly speaking the wetsuit did not negate the flat water and wall push off every 25m in the pool (and rest for upper body)
As others have said, don’t believe anything from open water. The data from Garmins is just a guestimator system relative to the pool