Make your Long Swim a Walk in the Park

By Amon Emeka, Ph.D.

The first sunny and “warm” days of the year, along with the massive vaccination campaign that is afoot has me dreaming of our next mass start… A few hundred of us lined up on the edge of a mountain lake waiting to dash into to the water to churn and slice our way through the traffic and complete the first leg of our favorite triathlon – or perhaps an open-water swim like the amazing Betsy Owens/Terry Laughlin Swim.

If the scene I just set leaves you more terrified than titillated, you are not alone! I know many strong runners and cyclists who would love to compete in a triathlon if it were not for the swim. Others have horror stories about some combination of “getting clobbered” and “nearly drowning” and “just surviving” the swim in the one triathlon they attempted. I have heard seasoned and very accomplished triathletes say that they “just try to make it through the swim!” Is this you? It need not be!

You could probably walk, run or ride all day if you had to, but the very thought of swimming a mile in a lake makes your stomach turn. This is because you know that if you are out on the road on foot or bike and find yourself struggling, you can simply take it down a notch. If things go really badly you can stop and walk or gear way down, complete the run or ride, and try again tomorrow. You can do something like this in the pool too, but you are less certain about the lake. But you need not be. Distance swimming is, just like anything, a matter of preparation. You must do workouts that prepare you to swim a long way comfortably no matter what water you are in and who is in it with you!

How I came to this: the dreaded Speedo bin… I was a late comer to competitive swimming at the ripe old age of 15. My high school required everyone to take a trimester-long swimming class in our sophomore year. I loved to swim, but this was terrible!  

First, we had to wear school-provided Speedos – no exceptions! Every day, we entered the pool vestibule to rifle around in wooden bins full of skimpy suits marked 28, 30, 32 and so on. God only knew who had worn your suit the day before! We learned early on that going up a size or two from the ‘W’ measurement on your Levi’s did you no favors. The suction created upon exiting the pool in a too-large Speedo rendered the suit even more revealing than a “properly fitting” Speedo brief – a lesson that has stuck with me (or to me, as it were)!      

Second, while most of us were comfortable in deep water and could get around fairly well, learning to swim all the competitive strokes properly for more than a lap or two was hard work. Through it all, I learned to swim the same way I had learned to run the year before – comfortably, for a long distance. Learning to swim correctly is one thing, learning to “settle in” to a swim pace that you can maintain for a long distance is something else entirely.    

In high school P.E., we regularly completed a 12-minute run on the track to cover as much ground as we could in that time. We might make it five-and-half times around, six-and-a-quarter or eight. But no matter how far we went, many of us learned the hard lesson that no one gets a prize for having the fastest first lap. In fact, a really fast first lap might bring about terrible self-inflicted suffering five to ten minutes that felt like they would never end – legs and sides cramping, throat and lungs burning, stomach roiling. Most of us eventually learned to settle into a pace we could hold for about 12 minutes. This takes some thought and experimentation, but when you are running you can just stop and walk without fear of drowning! The pool is a different story.

At some point my classmates and I were required to complete a 12-minute swim, and the prospect of this was much scarier than being on the track for 12 minutes. We all knew we would survive the track. We knew that we could walk or maybe even jog all day if we had to because we had all had occasion to do something like that in our everyday lives. In the pool on the other hand, it was “sink or swim” – if you stopped swimming you might sink! Without the confidence that we could keep ourselves afloat and moving through the water all day, the 12-minute swim was daunting to say the least. In the end, no one drowned, many of us learned to swim for 12 minutes without stopping, and some of us began to think that we could swim all day if we had to. That is, we began to zero in on something like an “all-day pace.” What is yours?

Principles of Preparation for Long-Distance Swimming – Whether you are a casual runner or an Ironman triathlete, you probably know the pace per mile at which you can run for an hour or more easily. You probably also know your average mph on several bike routes that take an hour or more. At what pace per 100 yards can you settle in and swim comfortably for 20 or 30 minutes or more? If you are an active or aspiring triathlete or open-water swimmer you should be able to answer this question, but many of us cannot.

I was a collegiate competitive swimmer, continued to swim competitively most of my adult life and coached as well. I often find myself in friendly conversations with fellow fitness swimmers at the local YMCA. Sometimes our conversations turn to the workouts they have zipped safely into a sandwich baggie and stuck to the lane marker. I am almost always surprised at the absence of pace work. Whereas I am doing 5 x 400 yards freestyle at a steady pace with short rest – trying to stay in shape in the little time I have – they are doing the same amount of yardage but broken up into shorter swims interspersed with kicking and stroke drills. You can cover many yards in a broken-up workout without getting bored, but there is little connection between that approach and a typical triathlon or open-water swim, other than the fact that they all get you really wet!

Many of the pool workouts to be found online are written for competitive swimmers who are trying to shave seconds or less off of their best 100- and 200-yard times. This is not typically what triathletes and open-water swimmers need. The biomechanics and physiology of swimming 100 or 200 yards really fast are different from those of swimming 1,500 meters really efficiently. No triathlete has ever won their age-group because they kicked really hard at the end of the swim! In a triathlon, I just want to get through the swim quickly and comfortably with lots of “fuel left in the tank.” Once I find my way to open water, I settle into a pace that I know I can hold all day, and negotiate as straight a line as I can to the finish line.  

About this time of year, I start trying in earnest to identify my all-day pace and improve on it month by month. Not literally, of course, as I have little occasion or inclination to literally swim all day. I am talking about identifying a pace that feels like I could swim it all day – something like a comfortable jog. 

I do this by swimming a main set that is 20 to 30 minutes long almost every time I go to the pool. If I can hold 2:10 (minutes) per 100 (yards) fairly consistently and comfortably all the way through a 20- to 30-minute set in March, I might hope to be swimming 2:00 per 100 comfortably through such a set by June. Or I may start at 1:30 per 100 in the spring and try to get to 1:20 per 100 by summer. In a triathlon this improvement will have you on your bike two minutes faster with your fuel tank still close to full! Improvements like this are entirely reasonable if you can get in the water for 30 to 40 minutes three or, ideally, four days each week. Such improvements are all the more likely if you have been perfecting your stroke fundamentals over the winter.

Zeroing in on your all-day pace in the pool – Fortunately, there are several good ways to discover your all-day pace that do not involve jumping in the pool and swimming as far as you can in 30 minutes with no stops. That may actually be the worst way to find out! Instead, you should do it as a set of repeats on a set interval that adds up to 20 to 30 minutes of swimming with several short breaks interspersed to regroup mentally. The breaks are NOT meant for you to catch your breath. When you are swimming at your all-day pace you should never be out of breath!

As an example, if based on experience you think your all-day pace is 1:45 per 100, you could warm-up for a few minutes then try this set: 15 x 100 @ 2:00 – That’s one 100-yard swim every two minutes, 15 times. Using a wall-mounted pace clock or a watch, you would push off on :00. If you are right about your all-day pace, you will easily complete your first 100 close to 1:45 on the pace clock – giving you 15 seconds to collect yourself before leaving for the second one on the 2:00. You should easily complete the second one not much sooner or later than 3:45 and leave for the third one on the 4:00 and so on. Your all-day pace will often feel too easy for the first few repeats. If all goes well, you might find yourself finishing your 100s comfortably with a luxurious 20 seconds to spare, rather than just the 15 seconds a 1:45 pace would get you and toward the end of the set – you might even finish your last one in 1:35! 

If you can go even faster than that, it may mean that your all-day pace is faster than 1:45 – maybe, maybe not. Next time you would need to try: 8 x 200 @ 3:45 – You would try to swim them at the same pace per 100 (1:45), but with half as much rest swimming each 200 in 3:30 (two 100s in 1:45 with no break between them), leaving 15 seconds of rest between your 200s. If 1:45 is your all-day pace, getting less rest over the course of your 30-minute set should not affect your ability to complete it comfortably – going a little faster on number eight than you did on the first seven. 

If the 200s are doable, next time you might try: 5 x 300 @ 5:30 OR 4 x 400 @ 7:30 OR 3 x 500 @ 9 – Once you can do sets like this comfortably, you will know your all-day pace is something like 1:45 per 100. And when the time comes, you can be confident that you will be able to swim your half-mile in 14 minutes; metric mile in just under 29 minutes; or half-iron man swim in just less than 37 minutes – and get on the bike with lots of fuel in the tank.

If, on the other hand, you find that that initial set of 15 x 100 leaves you struggling to get back in time for your 15 seconds of rest and struggling to catch your breath between repeats, you will know that 1:45 is NOT the correct pace for you right now at that moment. Next time you might try: 13 x 100 @ 2:10 – This time, swimming your 100s in a time of 1:50 or so and getting 20 seconds rest, you might find yourself able to sail through much of the set and go a little faster toward the end. From there you can experiment with 200s, 300s, 400s and so on. 

Remember, for the purposes of triathlon or open water swim training, you should be most concerned with swimming a 20- to 30-minute set at a consistent pace with little rest between repeats. Once you have identified the pace at which you can consistently and comfortably swim for a long time, you should turn your attention to pushing that pace downward by continuing to swim 20- to 30-minute sets with little rest. You want to train yourself to swim faster without swimming harder. With time, you will find yourself swimming 1:40s or 1:35s that feel a lot like the 1:45s you started with.

I find that just a few minutes of easy swimming, kicking, and stroke drills leaves me feeling adequately warmed up for the 20- to 30-minute set, which itself feels like a continuation of the warm-up for the first few repeats. Unless I really “cut loose” on the final repeat just to see how fast I can go, I only need a few minutes of warm down to get on with my day.

As your thoughts turn to summer and lining up on the shore for the next big swim (can you feel the excitement now?!) be thoughtful about how to spend your precious few hours or minutes in the pool. See you at the lake!

Amon Emeka (amon.emeka@gmail.com) is a professor and Director of the First-Year Experience at Skidmore College and holds several state and regional records in masters swimming. He is also an avid mountain biker and off-road triathlete who hopes to one day (c. 2058) dominate the 90-94 age group!