The Lonely Triathlete
Improving the Ironman Swim
Descripción
Let's face it, swimming 3.9km is no easy feat. Let's say you can easily swim 1.9km but find the IM swim cutoff challenging, what can be done. Well, it depends on your particular obstacles so let's get into it. Head on over to www.patreon.com/thelonelytriathlete [https://www.patreon.com/thelonelytriathlete] for more lonely content! ---------------------------------------- TRANSCRIPT A few weeks ago, my awesome patron on Patreon reached out with a question. Hi Ron, hope you are doing well. Ron is turning 74 years old. He's completed four Ironman 70.3 races. Four. Let's just pause there for a moment. What a freaking inspiration! Most people his age aren't training for endurance events. Many aren't exercising at all. Yet here's a guy still swimming, biking, running, racing, and setting ambitious goals. His question to me was simple. Why can he complete a 70.3 swim, but can't seem to make to swim cutoff in an Ironman swim? It's a fascinating question because on the surface it sounds like a swimming problem. But I don't think it is. At least not entirely. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized this episode isn't really about swimming. It's about something all endurance athletes eventually face. The point where determination alone is no longer enough. The point where we have to get smarter. Not just tougher. Now before we go any further, let's acknowledge something. A 74-year-old athlete attempting an Ironman deserves respect. Period. It would be easy to focus on what isn't working. But I'd rather focus on what already is. This athlete has completed four 70.3 races. That tells me he has discipline, consistency, courage, and experience. The question isn't whether he's capable of hard things. Clearly he is. The question is whether the approach that got him through a half Ironman can get him through a full one. And those are not always the same thing. The first thing I'd want to know is whether he can comfortably swim 3.8 kilometres in a pool. Not race it. Not hammer it. Just swim it continuously. Because if the answer is no, then we're dealing primarily with swim fitness. The Ironman swim is nearly four kilometres long. That's a long way. And while it looks like exactly twice the distance of a 70.3 swim, anyone who's raced long enough knows it doesn't feel like twice the distance. Fatigue compounds. Small inefficiencies become major inefficiencies. Little mistakes become quite expensive. And if you've never developed the fitness to comfortably cover that distance, the water will expose you. But let's imagine he CAN swim the distance in the pool. NOW things get interesting. Because that means the problem may not be fitness at all. It may be EFFICIENCY. One of the most important lessons I've learned in endurance sports is that fitness and efficiency are not the same thing. And nowhere is that more obvious than in swimming. You can be incredibly fit and still struggle in the water. I've heard coaches say something that stuck with me. "The water doesn't care how fit you are." And it's true. You can bully your way through a run. You can overpower mistakes on the bike. Swimming doesn't negotiate. If your technique is inefficient, the water collects payment on every single stroke. And those payments add up over nearly four kilometres. This reminds me of something from my own swimming journey. I was new to distance swimming when I took up triathlon around 25 years ago. I had a swimming background although not comptetitive and I'd never ever swam 100M straight witout stopping because...why would I? So I self taught myself how to swim. I watched videos and read a few books. I went to the pool 3-4 ays a week and swamd swam and swam until I could cover the race distace of 1500M. My times were slow, around 3:00/100M, maybe a bit faster but not much. And I figured that as I contiued to swim over the years I would naturally get faster. I was so wrong. I could muscle myself to a 2:30 pace formaybe 1000M but then I was gassed, no way I could cycle after an effort like that. Something was holding me back and I didn't know what, so I enrolled in a Masters swim class at the local pool. During one of those workouts the coach walked alongside my lane, calling out technical issues with my stroke. He kept yelling "deeper, deeper" and at the end of the class told me that on my breathing side I tended to pull very shallow, my arm didn't go deep in the water so I was effectively swimming with one hand. Over the course of a few evenings I corrected that. Then end of one of the last sessions he pulled me aside an commended me for dropping both arms deeper in the water but he said "Todd, you tend to push down with your hands and only pull towards the back half of your stroke. Remember those high elbow drills (the ones that I did but didnt really make sense to me), we do those to encourgee you to catch the water much earlier in your stroke and to PULL yourself thorugh the water rather than push down so much." Huh. Suddenly, everything made sense and as I pulled raher than pushed, I got my swim time down to 2:00/100M. A massive improvement in minimal time. What struck me afterward was how obvious those flaws seemed once they were pointed out. Yet I never would have found them on my own. I had convinced myself that the solution was more swimming. More fitness. More effort. Instead, the solution was seeing something I couldn't see. And I think that's an important lesson. Sometimes we're too close to our own problems to diagnose them accurately. The very thing holding us back may be completely invisible to us. Especially in swimming. Now there's another possibility. And this one is surprisingly common. Anxiety. I've seen athletes who can easily swim the required distance in a pool. Then race day arrives. The water is colder. There are hundreds of athletes around them. They're getting bumped and kicked. Their breathing feels different. Their wetsuit feels restrictive. Suddenly they're swimming at an intensity they would never sustain in training. Their heart rate climbs. Their stroke shortens. Their efficiency disappears. And twenty minutes later they're paying the price. Many Ironman swim struggles aren't actually swimming struggles. They're pacing struggles. They're anxiety struggles. They're energy management struggles. The athlete is burning matches far too early. When people talk about Ironman, they often focus on speed. But for many athletes, especially older athletes, the goal isn't speed. It's economy. How LITTLE energy can you spend to move through the water? How relaxed can you stay? How efficiently can you convert effort into forward motion? Those questions become increasingly important as we age. At 25 years old, we can often compensate for technical flaws. At 74, every unnecessary movement has a cost. Every inefficient stroke carries a penalty. Which brings me to the part of this conversation I find most interesting. There comes a point in every endurance athlete's life when we must decide whether we are trying harder or trying smarter. And that's not always an easy distinction to make. Most of us love hard work. We trust hard work. Hard work feels noble. If something isn't working, our instinct is often to do more. More miles. More intervals. More volume. More suffering. But sometimes the breakthrough isn't on the other side of more effort. Sometimes it's on the other side of better information. A coach notices something. A training partner sees something. A video reveals something. An expert identifies a flaw we've been carrying for years. And suddenly progress happens. Not because we're working harder. Because we're finally working on the right thing. I don't know whether Ron's challenge is fitness, technique, pacing, anxiety, or some combination of all four. But I do know this. The goal is not to SURVIVE the Ironman swim. The goal is to become the kind of swimmer for whom the Ironman swim is MANAGEBLE. That's a different objective entirely. And I think that's true outside of triathlon too. The challenges we struggle with for years are not always asking for more determination. Sometimes they're asking for a new perspective. Sometimes they're asking for better guidance. Sometimes they're asking us to admit that we don't know what we don't know. And that might be one of the hardest lessons in endurance sports. Not that we need to work harder. But that we might need help. If you're listening today and you're chasing a goal that's been stubbornly out of reach, maybe ask yourself this question. Am I missing effort? Or am I missing insight? Because those are very different problems. And one of them is often easier to solve than we think. Thanks for listening. And remember, whether you're training for your first sprint triathlon, your fifth Ironman, or simply trying to stay active and healthy as the years go by, you're not training alone. You're just another lonely triathlete. Until next time, Peace
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