Tag: open water sighting techniques

Posted on

How To Not Suck At Swimming – The Ultimate Guide To Open Water Swimming

Triathletes and swimming often don’t mix, but Crushing Iron Triathlon thinks that should change! Yes, swimming can seem complicated, but Crushing Iron Swim Coaching gives you ways to make it easier and more enjoyable. And let’s face it, standing in line to start a triathlon is a lot more fun if you are confident and don’t have open water swim anxiety.

Crushing Iron has now over 125 podcasts and has released a Four Part Swim Series designed to make you a more powerful and purposeful open water swimmer. We believe pool swimming and open water swimming are two different sports, so it’s important to train for race conditions so anxiety and fatigue don’t destroy your best race before you get to the bike.

Below, you’ll find four podcasts focused exclusively on being a better open water swimmer. We recommend starting with How To Not Suck At Swimming – Part 1 and work through to Part 4. Dozens of athletes have not only become better swimmers, but have begun to love swimming in general because of this podcast series. You can love the water, too!

Don’t be one of those triathletes that think the swim doesn’t matter because it’s only a small percentage of the time you’ll be racing. Having a solid swim that warms you up instead of sucking your energy is the first solution to having a great race.

We’ve kept it simple, sort of like the Rosetta Stone of swim coaching, but if you can’t seem to grasp the technique we offer an excellent personalized Swim Analysis that can save you hours of wasted practice. We also offer general triathlon coaching and will be happy to connect you with current athletes to see why they are so happy with Crushing Iron Triathlon Coaching. You can also check out our Swim Specific Camps located in Nashville, TN that are sure to up your comfort in open water, make you faster, and more confident.

As always, thank you for listening to the Crushing Iron Podcast. If you have any questions about coaching or a personalized swim analysis, feel free to contact Coach Robbie at [email protected].  Happy Swimming!

  • Are Swimming Tools like a Drag chute right for you?
  • How many days in pool to see faster times?
  • How to avoid bending at knees while kicking?
  • Need to bilateral breathe?
  • How to stop crossover arms? Drills?
  • Importance of stroke cadence… what to measure and wis it important? why? confused about speeding up stroke
  • The Truth about Total Immersion swimming?
  • Strength work outside of the pool?
  • What muscles should we target?
  • When and why to use stretch cords?
  • How to practice sighting in a pool
  • Master’s Swimming Rant?
  • Beating Drag. What to do about Sinking Legs –
  • How do you beat periods of Breathlessness in a race?
  • Fixing incorrect kick timing after years of doing it wrong
  • How much kicking is ideal to “save legs” vs. going faster
  • Is your kick actually slowing you down?
  • How to get into cold water? inch in, use ladder, jump in?
  • Benefit to using other strokes? breast, back, butterfly?
  • How to beat goggle fogging?
  • Flip turns? Beneficial?
  • What’s the ticket to speed?
  • Proper breathing – How and When
  • Body Positioning and how to get it right
  • Hand entry and exit – How and When
  • How to deprogram from bad advice, including workouts that get you there
  • How to structure a swim week of workout
  • Should you join a Master’s Team?
  • Swimming square and why you swim crooked
  • Why drills are a waste of time
  • Why building swim fitness should be powerful and purposeful
  • The bigger your mesh bag, the slower you are committed to being
  • The correct and most effective way to use paddles
  • Why pool swimming and open water swimming are two different sports
  • What an expensive wetsuit really does for your swim
  • The power of the Pull Buoy
  • The tools you need and the tools you don’t need

The Crushing Iron Podcast releases every Monday and Thursday. We have over 125 Episodes, including several that focus on the journey of our athletes. Please subscribe to the Crushing Iron Podcast on iTunes or sign up for the Crushing Iron Newsletter on this page.

Posted on

Open Water Swim Sighting

Ironman New Orleans 70.3 has a “Z” pattern swim course and before we started a local coach gave me this advice:  Swim toward the levy, swim toward the boathouse, then swim back toward the levy.  It “sounded” good on the surface, but I kept asking “to which part of the levy?” and “to which part of the boathouse?”  To which he responded, “Just swim to the levy and the boathouse.”

This was ringing in my ears yesterday for our first Open Water Swim practice but obviously not loud enough.  Our lake-sky started with a dark tint before parting to a beautiful sunrise and it was symbolic of the lesson I needed to remember.

GroupEntryOWS

We swam a bit to warm up in the cool water, which was nearly the orgasmic temperature for a wetsuit.  Then we lined up to analyzed each others strokes.  It was an enlightening process.

Coach imitated my form and my first thought was he looked tense, which I believe is the biggest reason people struggle with swimming.  My stroke was right-hand-dominant and I had a tendency to come too far out of the water when sighting (which I was also probably doing too often).  Having a “high head” isn’t necessarily bad, but mine was lifting to ridiculous levels and I quickly figured out why . . . obsession with sighting the buoy.

That’s when I remembered my swim in New Orleans (which was pretty good by my standards).  I DID just swim toward the levy and the boathouse.  It was a “general sighting” that “guided me” in the right direction.  I didn’t pick a certain place or a buoy at all.  I just went in the right direction and trusted the flow of the world around me.

I don’t wear contacts when I practice swim, so my vision is definitely hampered.  This makes sighting more stressful, and is a likely explanation for why I “spaz” and lift my head so far out of the water.  I always want to swim at ONE OBJECT when I should be swimming at a GROUP OF OBJECTS.

When you’re doing IRONMAN distance races, you are so damn far away from your target that you just need a general area to attack for the first part of your leg.  It’s better to swim straight than continually over-correct.  Then as you get closer, and can actually see that one object without effort, zone in more specifically.

It takes a lot of faith to swim toward a a group of trees, but it works.  The more I practiced the more I relaxed and kept my head down in the water.  I was sighting with alligator eyes, rather than a Tarzan torso.

You don’t need to SEE your target, you just need a glimpse.  A reminder.  A general guide.  And that’s sort of like doing little things in life that lead you in the right direction as opposed to “expecting” a specific outcome.  Trust the process.

————

Post script:  This lesson also applies to my swim at Wisconsin.  I was largely disappointed in my sighting and it had a lot to do with my inability to get a grip on the buoys, of which there were many.

I found myself self-correcting every time I saw one which probably led to a bunch of zig-zagging rather than a general straight line.  This is bad for distance and energy.

I remember thinking I needed to aim at a bridge on the first leg, which would have set me right at the first turn buoy.  But I couldn’t always see that bridge and in retrospect think it would have been much more efficient to just go “toward” the bridge with an eye on the shoreline.

The second leg was short and really more about untangling the mass of humanity than sighting, but once I got to the third leg (around 1,700 yards) I should have just trusted the flow of the swimmers instead of trying to sight a specific smoke stack in the distance.  I was disorienting myself by trying to stay close to the buoy line and it caused a lot of confusion.  Honestly, sometimes I feel like I was taking a 45 degree angle toward the buoy just to stay on course.  But, I was ALREADY on course (even though I may have been 20 yards off course . . . if that makes any sense?

The short of it is, I think I thought about sighting way too much instead of just swimming.  That’s easy to say now because it was very choppy and I was afraid to end up in no-man’s land.  But the truth is, I should have relaxed and swam in the general direction of the that 3rd turn buoy and thought about it more when I was in range.

These are the little things that are so huge in triathlon and why I ultimately love the sport.  I wouldn’t say I had a “bad” swim at Wisconsin (1:20) but I could have saved some energy and a few minutes if I had just relaxed a little bit more and trusted the flow.