MY SWIM IS ABYSMAL - which direction to go?

sarahz5

I am completely frustrated and need to figure out what approach I want to take. I just finished a sprint tri I have done twice before. The other two times, I panicked on the swim, and my time was in the 13:30 range. This tri was literally the first time I have not panicked on the swim during a race, I think just experience and time have taken care of that.

So I took two minutes off my time; but that still means I did a 400yd swim in 11:30. That put me at 111/160 competitors (women only race). Meanwhile, my run and bike are at 11/160 and 15/160. My swim is seriously holding me back!!! I know everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, but this is ridiculous. The women who bike and run in my range are swimming this course in the 7:45 to 9:00 range, very broadly.

In the pool, I can do 400 yds in more like 10:20. It's probably a combo of the push off the wall and sighting that make my OWS longer. I have done the OWS slightly faster outside of a race - like 10:50. Still, that's crazy slow. And this has been my speed pretty much since I started swimming more than three years ago. I've gotten maybe the slightest bit faster. Also, another issue is that I'm not really swimming faster during the sprint tri than I do when I do long sets in the pool. I can go in the pool for an hour without really stopping in the 2:38/yd range.

I did a master's swim all winter/spring, where the instructor is from the swim team world and emphasized competitive pool freestyle technique. I have fooled around with Total Immersion in the past, and I probably was using that the last time I did this particular tri. Yesterday, I took a lesson with a local guy who everyone raves about like he is magic. His technique is MUCH more Total Immersion style - he's all about the long glide, minimal kick, but he talks more about the catch and pull than I think strict TI does.

So I swam with him an hour yesterday. Last night, I went to OWS and tried his technique- I was even slower, like 12:00, BUT of course I had already done a lot of swimming that day and it wasn't a race scenario.

I have an Olympic (on 8/7) and my first Half (on 9/18) for the rest of the season. This probably isn't the best time to start a whole new technique, but I have used TI before for significant stretches of training.

What do you think? Start training with this coach using the potentially more economical TI-style, or just increase my swim time and stick with the masters' swim style.

Or any other advice? Or success stories?

jclclick

You mention two different things, one is anxiety and the other is efficiency or technique. I'm glad to hear that the anxiety is going down and with that your HR and your ability to focus goes up. Swimming really is a technical sport, your times on your bike and run suggest you are well above average in athletic ability and cardio capacity, but I agree your swimming time is not par. Ok, so I havent told you anything you don't know, here is my suggestion, nothing ground breaking but it helped me tremendously. Borrow or use a gopro camera under water, set it up on a tripod at the bottom of the pool and really analyse your technique. Better yet have a friend walk along the pool edge with the gopro on a broom stick or something. Then look at a lot of youtube videos of successful techniques. They are all different but they all do have very consistent and non negotiable basics you may be missing. What you think your are doing underwater may not be what you are doing. This was so so revealing to me, I would have sworn that my hand and arms were in a certain position and they were not. Some of the basics I would see are the following in, get this right and you should be under a 2min 100y easy.
1) head position, straight down (streamline) breath by just turning your head. do not pick up your head (except for sighting) picking your head up angles your body in the water.
2) horizontal body position. your heals should be breaking the surface as you kick.
3) kicking is not that important. Only to keep your body tight and horizontal.
4) glide, glide glide, don't just have your hand enter the water to start another stroke, catch up drills reinforce this. Do catch up drills with every session. (see catch up drills on you tube if you are not familiar)
5) your whole arm is a paddle, not just your hand, different theories on this one but bring your hand down and across your body completely for a stroke, make sure your thumb brushes your thigh before it leaves the water again.
6) did i say glide? we all spend thousands on a bike that is just a little more areo just a little less profile in air. Water is 100 time more dense than air, yet we forget to get areo in the water glide don't fight the water cut through as your bike through air.

I'm far far from a pro and I'm not an instructor, but I know this has helped a few of my training friends. Good luck. message me if you would like for me to see and help you analyse a swim video.

sarahz5

Thanks! I didn't even think of just sitting a camera on the floor of the pool. My kids have a really basic Go Pro type camera, no idea how high quality it is, but that's worth a shot.

I am just so torn with HOW to do it. For instance, the instructor I worked with talked about holding your breath for the first stroke or two - other articles I read say this is the worst sin. I just don't know how to make sense of completely conflicting info.

KathleenKP

I'm a swimmer who does triathlons. My recent Tri, I came out of the water 8th/325 overall, five places behind my high school varsity distance-swimming son. I do pretty well on the bike, too, but I will never win a Tri (or even place well) b/c I can't run, as much as I try, and as much as I actually enjoy it. We all have our abilities and challenges.

The coach seems to know what he is talking about. Acutally, they both probably do, but the 2nd one you mentioned might be more what you need right away. I believe that if you stuck with a Master's program for two years (regular attendance), your anxiety would most likely improve and you would be amazed at your speed difference.

I swim slower OWS than in the pool. It's just the way it is. About :15/100 Sometimes more, sometimes less, depends on the water and other factors. I don't think you can translate that number to you, just know that we swim slower OWS than the same distance in a pool. Even if there is a water aerobics class going on in the next lane.

I have a coach b/c she sees what I am actually doing, vs what I think I am doing.

When I am trying to change my stroke, I go slower for a while until the new technique is relearned. Just like you did after the coach worked with you.

While you may have some breakthrough and drop :20-:40 off your 400 time in the next few weeks, you probably need to look at the benefits coming next year, not this season. If you are prone to getting yourself worked up (anxiety?), putting impossible expectations on yourself is not going to help that. Just keep swimming. With a coach of some type.

KathleenKP

I re-read your question. You are wanting to know if you should stick with Master's, or go with the new guy, right? (And you may have made your decision by now.)

There's not enough info here for us to make that decision. I say - just like before - that either one could work for you. Honestly, you've got so far to go that both should be able to help you improve. Pick the one you feel most comfortable with and the one whom you see helping swimmers to improve. If they both are good, go with your schedule or cost, or whatever else sways you. Then stick with a single thing to allow yourself time to learn the changes. You've already made some big improvements over this past winter/spring.

Learning to swim in a pool helps your OWS. Don't knock the pool swim, thinking you are spending time learning how to do irrelevant things. Learning to do flip turns helps your endurance b/c instead of slowing down and/or resting at the walls (even if for one second), your are speeding up into them. You will learn how to swim straight (i.e balanced from side to side). You are developing core strength. Many other things...

sarahz5

Thank you! I know I rambled!!!

I guess my question really was, how do you make sense of completing contrary advice? The two big differences I see between the traditional freestyle type advice from coach 1 and the Total Immersion style advice from coach 2, are (1) coach 1 says as soon as your hand hits the water, pull back, while coach 2 says to reach under water as far as you can; far more turnover with the first approach; and (2) coach 2 says to hold my breath for a few strokes before letting it out, and breathe less frequently, and everything else I read says to never hold your breath and breathe frequently. There's also the difference in kick, but I can reconcile that.

I'm not worried about the anxiety anymore, that seems to be gone. And I have been thinking about what you said about strengths and weaknesses, because there are plenty of women who would be contenders if not for their slower run; but this seems so extreme and inexplicable to me. I'm not a lifelong runner or biker, I started them all at about the same time, and I've trained the bike and the swim just as much (if not swim more). I guess running translates more to biking than swimming though.

KathleenKP

I'm glad you saw my posts. I've been thinking about your questions/experience.

I'm not trained in teaching technique, so keep that in mind. But what I think is that at your current speed, there HAS to be more basic things going on that you need to change in order to improve your speed, whereas it seems these things you are listing (that they are conflicting about) may be getting more nitty-gritty. I think at your pace, you have issues more concerned with things like how your body is positioned in the water or the timing/co-ordination of your breathing in your stroke cycle, than whether you need to start your pull immediatetely, or after a slight glide. So despite both coaches going over the smaller details, and differing in their philosophies, I think they both can (and will) help you with the basic things you really need right now. If they coach regularly at all, they can see how you move in the water and will be addressing those things. So I suspect both of them actually ARE thinking of those things and will incorporate them into your workouts. Maybe you didn't notice that as much b/c they were telling you the same thing? (And you picked up on the differences?) I have one main coach, but a few others depending on the time that I swim. I get different feedback from them, because they have different theories (like the two you have worked with), and they see different things when they watch me swim. The one who helps me the most happens to be the one that I am working most consistently with - AT THAT PERIOD OF TIME.

The things you (they) are focusing on - or at least listing here, like when to begin your pull - are going to drop a few seconds off your 100 time. You need to drop a minute (or at least :45-50) off your pool time. And you will, if you keep at it. BTW, there is a lady who occasionally swims with my Master's group. She does has done two fulls and more half-irons. When she was consistently coming, I was really amazed at the improvements she made. My coach saw the same. Her clock times were better, but mostly she just moved better in the water. The funny thing was that she truly couldn't see it b/c of how she was "monitoring" what she was doing.

I very much understand where you are coming from with having such drastic placings across the sports - FWIW, I think mine are worse than yours, especially with Oly distance and above.

And, since you mentioned it, I breathe out slowly and mostly continuously while I'm swimming. And I am a bilateral breather. If you can, learn how to do that. It's VERY handy as a triathlete to be comfortable breathing on both sides. I taught myself as an adult, and it took about a year (and I was already a good swimmer) until I was comfortable. There were lots of headaches, I had to go slower for a while...but I've never regretted the time I took to learn that skill. It was more than a decade before I knew I would *need it.

sarahz5

Thank you!

Bilateral breathing is something I have done from the word go. I think I have a few advantages from having learned to swim formally as an adult, for triathlon purposes, and that's one of them.

All good advice. With my masters coach, I felt like I had a very hard time either understanding or implementing his advice. I would think he was telling me one thing; practice it; and by the time he got back around to observing me, he would tell me it was wrong.

In comparison... coach 2 "stalked" me at the gym the other night, LOL. He was asking me when I wanted to train again and then we both ended up there at the same time. He jumped in and worked with me for free for half an hour. I totally get what he is saying and I can feel it making a difference. Between some reading and his instruction I have realized that I have a big issue with my rotation and breathing timing, and I can feel the difference already. So I think I am going to stick with him.

This is the sentence that jumped out at me: "But what I think is that at your current speed, there HAS to be more basic things going on that you need to change in order to improve your speed, whereas it seems these things you are listing (that they are conflicting about) may be getting more nitty-gritty."

YES. So much this. This is the thing driving me nuts - I know I must be doing something WRONG that I need to fix. That's all I want. And I think your point that it is a big deal, not a nit picky thing, is a really good one.

wmeyerbill455

It takes time to perfect good technique, so I wouldn't get discouraged if the first couple of times you try what the new stroke coach suggests and your time doesn't improve. The other aspect is it also takes conditioning to improve your speed in the pool. The new technique may be activating different muscles than the ones you normally swim with. You might think that last comment a bit crazy, but you would be surprised at how many different groups of muscles come into play in perfecting good swim strokes.

To give you an example, my kick was fair and my coach said I needed to get my chest down in order to improve it. Well, in order to get your chest down which in turn brings your hips up the skill-builder I have do is to over-accentuate my reach with each forward free-style stroke. After doing 200 meters of this I was sore in places I have never been sore before but it also really improved my body position and in turn allowed me to flutter kick much better with less drag. Less Drag!! That is the key to going fast when you swim and perfecting each stroke takes a lot of practice and long, long hours in the pool.

If your new guy is that kind of coach, stick with him but be prepared to work hard and put in some long hours in the pool. You might not see the results for a while like for 3 months but you should have improved by then.

I work with a University level adult swim for fitness group and we swim 3 times a week, 2 -1 hour sessions and 1-2 hour session. Our 1 hour sessions avg 2500 meters and the 2 hour 5000 meters. At the beginning of the class I hadn't done any real swimming for 18 years, and my 400 was 12:30 at the end of three months after my first Sprint Tri my 400 was 9:07. Good Luck, it will get better. Bill

sarahz5

Ugh, I know I should find it encouraging, but I have been swimming so long and have seen so little improvement, hearing about other people shaving more than three minutes off the bat is rough. I definitely need to pick it up to 3-4 hours a week I think.

I am *so* much faster in a wetsuit, and in salt water, I think that it is clearly drag and heavy legs holding me back. I'm about 20-25 seconds per 100yds faster in a wetsuit and another 20-25 seconds per 100 yds faster in salt water.

There are just so many moving parts. So much more complicated than running and riding. Still love it though.

emb369

I'm a great pool swimmer, and terrible OWS swimmer. Finally after 4 70.3s I had a close to good swim this summer. But I also put myself far away from everyone and basically swam in clean water.

Personally, unless you are a DNF risk, it's not a huge deal to shave 3 minutes off your swim so maybe until you are more comfortable, just "let it go." I think of OWS as 20-25 minutes out and 20 minutes back...I'll get there when I get there.