Spend time with “real” swimmers and sooner or later you will hear someone complain about triathletes wearing watches in the pool. More than complain, more like belittle, disparage, and denigrate. “Use the pool clock,” is their advice. More like a commandment.
I confess, when I was learning to swim I used a 25 yard pool and wore my Garmin swim watch. Why? Because my eyesight was so bad that even with corrective goggles I could not read the pool clock. Besides, I was terrible at counting laps and all of my workouts were designed around standard pool jargon, like 4 x 25 alternate focus on catch position and kick timing. My watch would display how many laps I had done. Most of the time. It was designed for real swimmers doing flip turns, which I have never learned to do, and my feeble push off the wall was sometimes not enough to register a turn. Most of the workouts wanted me to record stroke count per length. Like I said, I had trouble remembering lap count, so strokes per lap was impossible. My Garmin would record that, too, except it was no more accurate at counting strokes as it was laps.
When I moved to training exclusively in open water I knew that the usual pool-based metrics - lap counts and stroke counts – were not available. I was excited to hear that the new Garmin watches did much better at tracking open water swimming, but it did not take me long to see that even with those improvements the data was not accurate enough to measure progress. I have had some success at sighting stationary objects functioning as start and finish lines and using my watch simply as a timer.
Swimming is in many ways different from biking and running. For one thing, getting wet is a sure thing! Swimming is a great way to build aerobic capacity. Biking and running work well, too, but the higher impact loads, especially in running, are much more likely to cause an overuse injury.
Another way that swimming stands apart is the importance of proprioception, the sense that allows you to know where your body parts are in space without needing to look at them. Another, equally important capability does not have a widely used name, that being the feel of the water as you move through it. Hydrosensitivity? No, that sounds like a disease. Proprioception certainly has a role in running, and cyclists trying to be as aerodynamically efficient as possible should certainly cultivate a sense of the air moving around them, how lifting their head increases drag.
I am currently of the opinion that the best tools for improving swim speed are proprioception and that other thing. Hydrosensitivity, I called it. Sure, spend enough money and you can have a personal coach at your side offering continuous corrections. Some people find value in having a friend video them and sending the result to a swim coach. Even with that, I believe that mindful swimming is the key. After all, if you are told your feet are too wide, how do you correct it? By paying close attention to where they are.
Frequency is another key factor, but I’ll save that for a future post.
Don’t forget to have fun while your training.