On Swimming...

Let's face it. Everybody can run. Most people know how to ride a bike. But the main reason why more people don't try triathlons is because of the swim. Either they flat out don't know how, or can't fathom having to swim longer than a length of a pool in one go. It's intimidating.

I came into swimming very late. This year, actually. Ya, I was able to simulate a poor approximation of the freestyle stroke. But the fact that I was only ever able to go 25 yards at a time before completely running out of breath meant only one thing. I was doing it wrong.

[Literally doing it wrong. Swimming is less about fitness than it is about how efficiently you can pull your body through water. It's a very technical sport... kinda like how golf is a technical sport. A nice effortless golf swing, when done right, will send the ball hundreds of yards. Swimming is like that. A nice efficient freestyle makes you tired like walking makes you tired. You gotta swim a loong time before you need to stop. Any extra effort put into your stroke will only be wasted energy if your technique is not right.]

I've always regretted never really learning how to swim, so late last year I finally decided to do something about it... and signed up for my first triathlon in March. Huh? See, that's how I roll. Commit to the crazy goal first, then figure out how to do it. This race had a very short 150 meter pool swim, so I figured I should be able to go from 25m to 150m in 4 months. 16 swim classes and 3x a week practice sessions later at the gym, I was there! Barely. I wanna say that I swam those 150m nonstop on race day, but let's just say I was very glad the pool was only 50m long!

So naturally, I signed up for 3 more triathlons with swims of 500m in April, 1000m in May, and 1500m in June. All open water swims in a lake, so no stopping this time. When the farthest you're able to swim is 150m, 500m seems pretty daunting, while 1500m might as well be the entire Pacific Ocean. Again, it was one of those instances of commit first, figure it out later.

I did figure it out! I "found" my stroke, the stroke I could maintain almost indefinitely, sometime between the 500m and the 1000m races. Problem is, it's ass slow. How slow? In the last Olympic distance race with the 1500m swim, I came in 289 out of 295 men and women of all ages (some well into their 70s) in the swim. That's the bottom 2%! And get this. At 42 minutes, it was the fastest 1500m I had ever swam. You know what? I'm not even embarrassed because I knew I had come a long way. I'm now past the point of simple moral victories, though.

The Ironman swim distance is 2.4 miles, or 3862 meters. With the way I swim in open water with no pool lanes to guide my way, I'll prolly get lost and end up swimming some extra... let's call it 4000m. That's 2 hours at my current pace. The swim cutoff for the IM is 2:20, so 2 hours is cutting it close. The top age groupers swim it in an hour. Something is still obviously not right with my stroke. I'd love to be able to swim 4000m in 1:30 or less by next November's IM.

Time to get to work.

[For those of you who need more inspiration, a friend of mine did not know how to swim *at all*, and ended up finishing an Ironman with the 2.4 mile swim less than a year after taking his first lesson. No excuses, guys. Just do it.]