Ask the Swim Coach: Open Water Edition

What to know before you get in open water:

We asked a mix of aspiring triathletes, new triathletes, and established triathletes, what they would like to know, or wish they knew, before starting with open water swimming. Below are some of the most frequently asked questions:

I’m comfortable in the pool, but how do I get comfortable in open water?

If you’re new to open water swimming, it can be a big adjustment compared to pool swimming. There’s no black line to follow, no lane lines to help you swim straight, and yes, there are other things swimming in the water with you. So how do you make the jump from pool to open water?

Depending on your timeline, i.e. how soon your race is, there’s usually no need to rush the transition to open water swimming! If you’re comfortable in the pool, is there an adjustment you can make in the pool to mimic open water? If you’re allowed, try swimming in the deep end/diving well to get used to deeper, darker, water with no lines to follow.

Close your eyes! If you have your own lane, and either have a swim buddy to keep you safe or you have your stroke count down pat, try to swim a length of the pool with your eyes closed. While not the exact same as open water swimming for obvious reasons, it will get you used to attempting to swim straight without looking at the bottom of the pool.

Once you do get to open water, you can still take things one step at a time. Maybe your first open water swim is to the floating dock and back at the local beach. If you’re at an organized open water swim practice, maybe you just go to the first buoy, or swim back and forth between 2 close buoys, rather than attempting the entire course (just make sure the lifeguards/organizers know and are OK with what you’re doing, and make sure you swim with the flow of traffic).

What is sighting? How do I know where I’m going while swimming in open water?

Sighting is the act of periodically looking up from your stroke to get a feel for your surroundings and to make sure that you’re heading in the right direction. To practice this in a pool, put something at the end of your lane that you can easily identify while swimming (a kickboard, pull buoy, brightly-colored water bottle, etc.). As you swim, periodically look up just enough for your eyes to clear the water, and try to get eyes on your sighting object. If you don’t immediately see your object, put your head back down, take a few more strokes, and attempt again. If you still don’t see your object, it might be time to swim a few breaststroke strokes and reorient yourself. In the pool, you probably aren’t too off course; but in the lake, you could be going the complete opposite direction. Luckily, open water buoys are a bit bigger than a water bottle, and are easier to see. Practicing this skill in a more comfortable, more controlled environment, like a pool, is important because once we get to open water, we want this skill to be muscle memory.

ESE Coach, Jamie, practicing sighting during a recent swim practice. You can see she’s looking up just enough to spot the buoy.

How often should I sight while swimming?

Odds are, if you’ve taken swim lessons, you’ve heard your coach preach about keeping your head neutral and your eyes down while swimming freestyle. This helps to keep your legs and hips high in the water, and makes you’re body position more efficient. As you can see, we’re kind of at a crossroads between efficient head position, and sighting enough to stay on course. So, how often should you pick up your eyes to sight while swimming in open water?

The answer to this question is entirely individual. While you were learning/practicing in the pool, whether it was swimming with your eyes closed, or sighting every few strokes, how well did you maintain swimming in a straight line? If closing your eyes or taking a few strokes between sights caused you to careen into the lane line or fellow swimmers, then it would benefit you to sight more frequently. Any amount of off-course swimming that we do, just adds total yardage to our swim. So, if you had trained and were ready for an 800 yard swim at the beginning of your triathlon, you could find yourself swimming 850-900 yards depending on how off-course you get during the swim!

If you managed to maintain a fairly straight line while practicing in the pool, then you can probably get away with swimming a few strokes between sights. If you’re very confident in your ability to swim in a straight line without visual feedback, you could even swim 10 or more strokes between sights! Remember, the more you sight, the more often your hips drop (even if it’s only slightly), and the less efficient your stroke will be! Whether that’s worth the risk of swimming off-course is up to you!

How hard/often should I kick while swimming open water?

As with head position mentioned above, the speed and strength of your flutter kick also plays a crucial role in how high your legs and hips are during your swim, plus a strong kick adds some minor propulsion as well. The amount of propulsion added is still argued about by swim coaches, but for the most part, great swimmers are also great kickers.

So, if that’s the case, shouldn’t you kick as hard as you can for the entirety of the swim? If you’re open water race is just swimming, then absolutely hammer those legs at whatever pace you can sustain for the duration of the race. However, if we’re talking triathlon, we’re about to use those legs for the other 2 disciplines, and we should save them a bit during the swim.

In practice, we want to experiment with different kick tempos; 2-beat kick, 4-beat kick, and 6-beat kick; in order to figure out what works best for you. When we talk about kick tempo, what we mean is how many times your legs kick during each stroke cycle. So for a 2-beat kick, you’re kicking twice in the time it takes you to pull with both arms, where in a 6-beat kick, you’re kicking 6 times in the same amount of time! If we’re looking at what works best for you in a triathlon swim, we want to figure out which kick tempo feels the most comfortable and sustainable, while also keeping your legs and hips high enough to maintain efficient freestyle body position. Ideally, since we’re using our legs for the bike and the run, we want to use the slowest kick tempo that we can, while still swimming well, so that we have more energy in our legs for the rest of the race. If we can maintain this kick for about 80% of the race, then we can increase our kick tempo the last few hundred yards of the swim, to warm our legs up before we hit the shore for the run to the transition area.

Swimming in general has a lot of moving parts to consider, and even more so when we think about making the jump to open water swimming. If it seems like too much to tackle alone, reach out to us at Empire State Endurance for help! We currently have 2 swim practices a week, our Open Water Swim Clinic at RPI on June 1st, and our summer swim schedule is TBD but will include plenty of open water experiences!