Open Water 101/201

Refining your skills for better open water days

 What did your last open water swim workout look like? We’re guessing it went something like this:

1. Drag self to lake, ocean, or ditch suitable for OWS

2. Struggle into wetsuit, getting sweaty and/or exhausted in the process

3. Resolve to “just swim the distance” in your workout

4. Dutifully do just that, enjoying yourself (we hope) but not gaining any skills or improving your race day readiness

While that isn’t bad in any way (and kudos to you for going to the open water in the first place), you’re leaving new abilities on the table. With just a few tweaks, drills, and changes to your open water swim sessions, you’ll arrive on race feeling ready for the swim, instead of showing up to a trail run after only training on the track (which, to be honest, is pretty much what you’re doing if you only train in the pool).

What’s the BIG change we’re asking you to make? Well, the answer here is specificity. While in many other places we’ll tell you not to make workouts rehearsals, open water swimming (or any skill-based sport) provides a counter-argument. It’s rare that your triathlon will feature a relaxed, steady effort, uncrowded swim. You need to experience the wild changes in pace, proximity, and direction of your goal effort, so let’s graduate from 101 to 201!

Vary your effort in open water

Part of being race ready for an open water swim is practicing how your body responds to varying intensity in the water. Too many athletes treat their open water swims as long steady state efforts that aim to cover a certain distance. We highly recommend treating at least some of your open water swims as workouts. While you don’t have the helpful walls and lane lines of the concrete box, you can still find ways to include high intensity intervals. Count your strokes or use fixed points on shore as a guide. Practice swimming at a higher intensity and then settling into your race pace so you’re ready for the nervous energy of the swim start.

Get used to swimming in a group

Triathletes are told to draft off the swimmer in front of them to capitalize on the forward momentum that they are creating. When done correctly, drafting can result in a faster swim at a lower effort. The reality, however, is that many swimmers are uncomfortable in groups in open water. We get it: contact can feel aggressive even when it is unintentional and space can be difficult to navigate. Add to this the fact that many of us are reserving our own solo lanes right now and you get a situation where swimmers are acclimated to an environment in which they have plenty of room to swim. This just isn’t the case with races. Whether you’re passing or being passed, it is important to practice swimming with other people so you know how to safely make and interpret contact. Since you shouldn’t be swimming alone in the open water in the first place (right? RIGHT?), you’ve got a ready made contact dummy at your next workout—it’s OK, you get to be their dummy, too. Add in 5-10 minutes of literally leaning in to make contact with each other while swimming. Rub shoulders, hips, mid-section, and thighs and see that it’s really not all bad!

Bring your pool toys

CBCG athletes are well acquainted with the FINIS tempo trainer. In the pool, we use the gentle beep in your head to keep you on your prescribed pace during intervals. In the open water, try using the tempo trainer to keep your cadence up when you fatigue. Set it to mode 3, enter your normal stroke rate, and go for a swim! How long can you maintain that stroke rate? How far do you get before it starts to fall off? Can you get through your goal distance without sacrificing your turnover? Not using the FINIS tempo trainer? Follow this affiliate link for a 20% discount, courtesy of The Endurance School.

Practice starts and exits

Part of your course recon should be identifying what the swim entrance/exit protocol is at your next race. Is it an in-water start or do you run from shore? How many people start at once? What is the terrain like? There is no substitute for swimming in the body of water you’ll be racing in, but sometimes that just isn’t possible. Do the best you can to identify a safe and similar alternative and practice the skills that you’ll need on race day. Dolphin starts can help get you out ahead of the pack, but they also cause an acute escalation of your heart rate. Try them before race day to make sure that you can recover to a sustainable effort. If that isn’t in your wheelhouse right now, you’re probably better walking or running in. Practice your exits as well - far too many people stand up as soon as their feet can touch the bottom. You’re better off swimming as long as you can before you have to stand. Walking is much easier in shallow water!

Know when to hold, know when to go

Understanding your level of effort while racing in the open water (whether in a triathlon or a open-water swim race) is crucial, since you don’t have any reliable way of determining your current pace. One problem many swimmers face these days, in rolling starts for triathlon, is that they end up in a group of swimmers either slower or faster than their ability level. To fix this issue, you need to be able to recognize quickly that you’re in the “wrong” group. To build that ability, regularly perform drafting work either in a pool or in your open water practice sessions (see below). Proper pacing is very often about your ability to feel the correct effort, and that ability only comes with practice. Often you’ll find yourself swimming on another athlete’s feet, thinking “this feels too easy,” only to discover, upon trying to pass, that the pace was good, and leaving that athlete behind will cost too much effort. We’d say that if the effort feels very easy, or only two-to-three out of ten, you should experiment by trying to swim past the leading athlete. Remember the points above that contact is expected in open water swimming, and you aren’t committing a faux pas by passing! Try to be quick and clean with your pass.

If you are swimming on an athlete’s feet and the effort feels “very hard” (we would call that eight out of ten effort), we would suggest backing off, as you are likely in a group that is a bit too fast. If you try to stay there and blow up in the second half of the swim, you’ll lose even more time.

Your effort, whether drafting or not, should always be around the following for different race distances. While doing your practice sessions, try to really associate your effort with how your body feels, so you know what sensations to expect on race day. Not sure what your threshold pace is? Contact us for a consultation and we can help!

• Sprint distance/Olympic distance: 7-8/10 effort or “hard to almost-very-hard”

• 70.3/half-iron distance: 6-7/10 effort or “moderate-hard to hard”

• Iron-distance: 4-6/10 effort or “moderate to moderate-hard,” very dependent on ability and experience!

One session to rule them all

This workout is a classic, but we’d like to credit Gerry Rodrigues at Tower26 for the general shape of this workout. Workouts aren’t rehearsals...unless you rehearse the race several times within one session! We can’t mimic the exact physiological conditions of your body during an event, but we can provide a stimulus so your body changes to accommodate the race. By performing the circuit below four times, you’ll get four “reps” of a swim leg, making for a very efficient workout.

Necessary materials

• A partner (or two)! You really shouldn’t hit the open water alone, anyway, so if you’ve got a swim buddy, preferably close to your own speed, this workout will be more productive AND safer

• An open-water course with three water legs and one beach leg (ideally, this is a long-sided rectangle with one long edge being the beach, the other in the water, and the two short edges of around 100 yards/meters. If you don’t have a course that has some markers or buoys already in the water, agree upon some landmarks for the corners of the course—don’t let perfect be the enemy of good!

The session

Warmup: swim the box once or twice, tossing in the following ladder at some point in the warmup (this is a great routine, by the way, to include on race day as your warmup…it’s like we planned that or something):

• 30 strokes hard, 30 strokes easy

• 25 strokes hard, 25 strokes easy

• 20 strokes hard, 25 strokes easy

• 15 strokes hard, 15 strokes easy

• 10 strokes hard, 10 strokes easy

• 5 strokes hard, 5 strokes easy

Main set: flip a coin between you and your partner. Whoever calls it gets to pick whether they start on the inside on the beach, or on the outside. The goal on each lap is to beat your partner to the inside corner of the buoy. No, it’s not always faster at the inside due to traffic, but the goal today is to incite contact, so get to that inside corner.

1. First short leg (beach to first corner): swim HARD but not all-out—if you sprint to the buoy and then are gassed for the next leg, your partner will probably pass you right back. Be strong but not 10/10 effort.

2. First long leg (first corner to second corner): settle in to a solid 6-7/10 effort, or moderate-hard to hard. Your pace (if you have a reliable manner of tracking it) should be 2-3” slower than your threshold pace (your rested 1500m pace). If you made it to the corner first and you’re in the lead, your goal is to hold off your partner and get to the second corner holding your lead. If you were second to the first corner, try to get on your partner’s feet or hip and then get around them to claim the points to the second corner.

3. Second short leg (back to beach): swim HARD back to the beach—the goal here is to be the first standing up with your wetsuit zipped down (don’t take the whole thing off, but this is a nice first step of wetsuit stripping to practice)

4. Second long leg (back along beach): jog EASY back to the start, zipping your wetsuit back up as you go. This is your RECOVERY, so take it easy, but note how high your heart rate is as your body goes from horizontal to vertical.

5. SCORING! Gamification is a tried and true method of making boring and repetitive tasks fun. Here is how you score each round:

   • First to each corner or buoy = one point

   • First to beach = one point

   • First with wetsuit zipped down = one point

   • Figure out who won the round and keep track of points. Whoever lost the previous round gets to pick their starting position for the next round.

6. Repeat the circuit at least one more time, and up to five more times, depending on goal race distance, length of the circuit, your available energy, goals, and level of continued fun.

Wrapping up

Go out for ice cream! Every open water swim session should have some kind of treat, to suggest to your unconscious that open water swimming, although it requires some effort, results in a tangible, immediate reward. Here in the Pacific Northwest, open water swim sessions end with a trip to Burgerville for a milkshake.