WINDS OF HAWI
| Winds of Hawi | Date: 2020.06.02 (2020.05.24) |
My approach to swimming is based on the work of the late Terry Laughlin. His Total Immersion teaching method has helped countless athletes, including me, achieve success in triathlon in spite of not growing up in a traditional swim program. The freestyle stroke is the one used in triathlon. As simple as it appears, there are many different schools of thought on the best way to execute it, and just as many teaching methods. I urge you to avoid confusion and stick to the TI approach. To put it simply, it works well for just about everyone.
Here are some key points that form the foundation of TI swimming. Each will be expanded upon later.
Terry's self-teaching videos are a great way to learn the TI way. A good place to start is the Effortless Endurance Self-Coaching Course. Although TI training videos are shot mostly in pools, there is very little to prevent you from applying them in open water. All you need is a stretch of calm, waist-deep shoreline. Fifty to a hundred yards should do. Here in Honolulu, Kaimana Beach and Ala Moana Beach are perfect.
Nearly all triathlon swim races are held in open water. Many athletes experience a significant level of apprehension at the thought of being out in open water with nothing to stand on or hold onto, and waves tossing them around. I cannot imagine a better way to become comfortable in open water than to practice in it. Begin closer to shore where the water is waist deep, then as you progress, venture out a bit deeper. Eventually you will reach the point where you do not care that the bottom is nowhere in sight.
Once you have learned the basics and can swim continuously for a hundred yards without having a near-death experience, you will want to do even better. It is not enough to just go out three days a week and swim. To improve as a swimmer you must set focal points, break apart and reassemble your stroke with drills, and measure progress through assessments.
Terry never got around to publishing swim workouts -- what to do after you have learned the basics. A group of TI coaches has done just that, in a book entitled Fresh Freestyle. This book is a perfect follow-on to Terry's videos for pool workouts done the TI way.
Fresh Freestyle is perfect if you train in a pool. My goal is to have my athletes do swim practices at the beach. To do this requires a little adaptation. Swim workouts are designed for pools, with common lengths. If you swim in a 25 yard pool, the instruction 4 x 25 with 10 sec rests means swim a length, wait a bit, swim back, and repeat this cycle one more time for a total of four lengths. Pace is monitored by how long it takes to swim a given distance. The most important metric for TI swimming by far is the number of strokes expended to swim a length (SPL). At a given pace, a lower SPL indicates greater efficiency. The goal of many TI workouts is to shave one or two strokes off your SPL.
This methodology does not as useful in open water. There is no accurate SPL. How then do we measure improvement? I suggest two possibilities, technology and feel.
There is one piece of technology that has been used by generations of swim coaches. The stopwatch. What were they measuring? The time it took to swim one or more lengths of the pool. A few years ago a new tool appeared, the waterproof sports watch with GPS. With this device we can measure distance, even in the open water. Sounds like a dream come true.
As it turns out, there are a lot of problems with GPS sports watches, especially in open water.
Point #1 results in a recorded path consisting of zig-zags rather than a straight line. Distance is overstated, and therefore pace is overstated. My Garmin 935 does an admireable job of filling in the gaps, but the best it can do is still an estimate. DC Rainmaker suggests putting the Garmin in your swim cap. I have never tried this. Point #2 exacerbates this problem, by a considerable amount. Does this make GPS data useless? Not at all. We just need to keep in mind the inaccuracies inherent in the system. And about point #3, Form have announced an open water version of their goggles that will link via bluetooth to a suitable GPS watch, such as the Garmin 945. The zig-zag issue is not solved. I would love to try this when it becomes available but A) Form does not make corrective lenses, B) even if they did I might not be able to see the display, and C) I will need a new Garmin, but my 935 is still like new.
In recent years a few long time fans of European professional bike racing have advocated for returning to the good old days, doing away with power meters and team radios. As goofy as that may sound, some athletes prefer to pace themselves by feel. Years of practice have taught them what a 6:30 run pace feels like. They do not need a power meter to tell them they are working too hard, or not hard enough.
Even before coaches had stopwatches they used subjective terms to prescribe effort. Words like hard, moderate, and easy. Runners often describe effort in terms of race pace, like run 400 meters at your 10K pace.
This does not mean to break out a stopwatch and check yourself every quarter lap. Just run about as hard as you would in a 10K, judging by feel.
Swimming is different from running in two important ways.
To a swimmer who has never cultivated a feel for the water, any suggestion that they go by feel will produce a blank stare. What my old boss described as the Stunned Mullet expression. And, to be sure, we can expect inexperienced swimmers to be in the same boat. No pun intended.
It should come as no surprise that a feel for the water begins with the arms, during the propulsion phase of the stroke. This is tremendously valuable, as feedback from the feel of the arm and hand rowing the water can guide the swimmer to a more efficient stroke. What is of equal if not greater importance is the feel of the water as the body glides through it. The head, torso, legs, and opposite arm. The more we are aware of our body moving through the water, the more streamlined we will become.
Water is 800 times denser than air. Because of this, a large increase in effort only produces a small increase in speed. But, for the same reason, even a small improvement in streamlining produces a significant improvement in speed. This is why you must place more importance on how you swim rather than how fast you swim. Triathletes are all in on getting aero on the bike. The rewards for reducing drag in the swim are just as great.
Counting strokes per length in the pool is an effective way to measure efficiency. I propose that developing and refining a feel for the water through mindful practice can be equally beneficial in open water. True, there is no hard data point, but even when such data is available, as in power on the bike, it must be tempered by how the athlete felt.
In my open water practice I have developed three methods for measuring performance. None is spot-on accurate, but better than nothing. I must stress right up front that currents must be taken into account. When we do a time trial on the bike to assess performance we ride an out-and-back course to cancel the effect of the wind, and we do not test on days with strong or gusty winds. Same with open water. Swim an out-and-back course and if the current is strong the results could be meaningless.
In each of the three methods presented below my intent is not to have you do just one lap. You might be able to swim a single lap with method #1; this would be like a race. But for training purposes you may be get better results by shortening the length and swimming several laps. One hundred yards is a good length. You will not be doing kick turns, just a smooth stop, turn around, and start again. Time lost should be insignificant given the amount of time of continuous swimming, much closer to race condictions than laps in a pool.
Regardless which method you use there is some relavent data you should record.
| Time of day |
| Wind strength |
| Wind direction |
| Current strength |
| Current direction |
| Tide (high/low, rising/falling) |
| Surface conditions |
This method requires you to have regular access to a location with buoys that are safe to swim near. I must emphasise safe. Do not swim in a channel used for boating. Two examples of suitable locations are Ala Moana Beach and Kailua Bay in Kona where the Ironman swim is held. At Ala Moana you want to stay on the shore side of the line, as SUPB riders tend to stay on the ocean side. But not always, so sight often. In Kona, you will enter from the little beach alongside the pier, then stay on the shoreline side. Boats are supposed to stay on the pier side.
The basic process is to use your watch to time an out-and-back loop. Press the lap buttom at the turn around. Don't forget to note conditions for your log.
This method is a lot like using buoys only you set a start and turnaround point using landmarks on the shore. If you have mastered bilateral breathing you can sight the chosen landmarks on both the out leg and the return leg. If like most swimmers you have not mastered bilateral breathing, use the following modification. Swim the out leg in the direction so that when you breath you can see the shoreline. Count the number of strokes it takes to reach the turnaround. (Don't forget to press the lap button!) On the return leg you will not be able to spot your landmarks. Just swim the same number of strokes. If there is much of a current you will not end up at the exact same point, but since your speed in the water was constant the time it took to swim the course is useful for comparing to other swims done the same way at the same location, with the same landmarks.
What do you do if there are no useful landmarks? You count strokes. Basically this is the same as method #2 except you do not have a fixed length for the outbound leg. It will take a bit of trial and error for you to work out how many strokes to take in each direction. I would start at 150 and go up or down depending on how you feel and the physical constraints of your location. Once you decide on the number of strokes, always use the same number so that you can compare results over time.
Once you have settled on your measured course, swim it often enough to get really comfortable. To get started, do not concern yourself with pace or multiple lengths. Just swim one length, counting strokes as you go, and when you get to the far end, stop and rest. Look around. Then swim back. The effect we want is a very long pool, 100 - 200 yards, maybe more. Too long and I am afraid you will lose count. A little practice helps. I like to do performance testing every three weeks, and this swim time trial is usually on the menu.
Total Immersion places great emphasis on focal points. I do too. But there is a different way of categorizing swim workouts. I want to call these focuses, too, but that would be confusing so I borrowed the terminology used by Joe Friel. Limiters are specific techniques or actions the athlete can focus on to improvement performance. The three swim limiters described by Terry Laughlin are Balance, Streamlining, and Propulsion. Let's go into each in more detail.
My concept is to rotate through the swim limiters weekly. In many cases the same workouts can be used, just move the focus. Visualize a fancy car at an auto show with spotlights that highlight the feature being described. It is all the same car. Same thing applies here. One swimmer, one swim stroke, moving a spotlight to focus on distinct parts.Oops, there is that focus term again. That's why I call them limiters.
Here is an example of how we might rotate through the swim limiters in a long course training plan. I happen to use a three week cycle, so week three is skipped. That way week four is always a recovery week. The second column, labeled "Sub," is to allow some variation during the extended Base 3 period. Again, this is just an example. A real training plan should take into account the athletes abilities and adjust the progression to work on the actual limiters, without getting too lopsided.
| Wk | Sub | Limiter |
|---|---|---|
| Base 1 & 2 | ||
| 1 | Balance | |
| 2 | Streamlining | |
| 4 | Test | |
| Base 3 | ||
| 1 | A | Balance |
| 2 | A | Propulsion |
| 4 | A | Test |
| 1 | B | Balance |
| 2 | B | Streamlining |
| 4 | B | Test |
| Build 1 | ||
| 1 | Propulsion | |
| 2 | Propulsion | |
| 4 | Testing | |
| Build 2 | ||
| 1 | Propulsion | |
| 2 | Streamlining | |
| 4 | Testing | |
| Peak | ||
| All propulsion | ||