Open Water 301

Four reasons your OW splits don’t match your pool times

We hear it all the time: “My open water swim times aren’t even CLOSE to what I can do in the pool. It’s really discouraging.” We get it. Nothing is worse than spending so much time doing something, hoping to see improvement in that thing we are doing, only to have those hopes smashed by the reality of, well, reality. Swimming, very often a skill picked up in order to participate in triathlon in the first place, eludes many triathletes, since it’s just not a sport they are native to: they simply aren’t fluent in the language.

Today, we’re going to talk about how you can narrow the gap between your performance in the pool and your performance in the open water, in the four following areas:

1. Magical Thinking/Watch Use at the Pool

2. Pacing and Stress

3. Cadence

4. Thinking Open Water is Something it Isn’t

Magical Thinking/Your Watch Is Leading you Astray

Triathletes LOVE their devices. It’s understandable. When you’re trying to get better at something, it helps to record what you’re doing to understand whether or not you are improving. Heck, we use data and devices all the time in coaching our athletes, but there is one place that we constantly hector athletes to leave their devices at home, and that is the pool. Why are we such, well, jerks about it? Great question. Firstly, taking a watch to the pool is a little like taking a GPS watch to the track. Don’t get us wrong, we really want you to record your laps at the track, but we only need time at the track, although heart rate is really nice to have, too. Why don’t we need pace at the track? Well, if you have time, you have pace, since you know that a track is 400m around—it’s a controlled environment so we can set aside the randomness of running on the road. Heck, even if it’s windy, you’re going to have sections of headwind and tailwind on the track, so things even out a bit. Toss in the fact that GPS devices struggle with decreasing radius turns (like the ones on a standard track) and you have a recipe for inaccurate data collection if you’re relying on the pace numbers from your GPS watch at the track. So just use your fancy watch as a stopwatch at the track, along with heart rate collection. Your coach will be so thankful, we promise.

What does this have to do with the pool?

Your GPS watch (even in indoor pool mode, yes) is redundant, inaccurate, and misleading in the pool. Here’s why. Let’s go in order:

1. Redundant. Most pools have a pace clock within eyesight. The pace clock is reliable, since it’s just, well, keeping time. Read our other article about how to set and use sendoffs, but since you have a timekeeper, why do you need a watch? “To keep count,” some swimmers say. Hogwash. You can count to 16 or to 20 or 40, the number of lengths of a 400, 500, or 1000, all useful interval distances. “I like seeing the lap paces and times,” says another. That leads us to point #2…

2. Inaccurate. Most watches, when recording pool data, subtract the resting times from the overall time. This is the biggest reason we do not prefer the watches in the pool. Say that you go to the pool and do a workout that takes you 60 minutes to swim 3000m. That time includes rests and is, therefore, an accurate reflection of your effort. Could you cut down the rest and swim that distance in less time? Yeah, probably. Maybe you start shaving resting time and soon can swim 3000m in 55 minutes. That is an accurate reflection of your effort. But what does a watch do? It simply removes all of the rest, which suggests you swam the distance in less time than you did. Maybe you did a pretty boring set of 30 x 100 on a 2:00 sendoff (which would get you 3000m in 60 minutes). You held 1:40 per 100 throughout the whole set, getting around 20 seconds rest between each interval. Maybe your threshold/CSS pace is 1:40, and you needed that 20 seconds to recover enough to swim the next interval. So swimming 3000m in 60 minutes was pretty hard, pretty much as fast as you could go. Your watch, however, will tell you that you swam 3000m in 50 minutes, since it will subtract the 600 seconds of 30 intervals x 20 seconds rest, or TEN MINUTES. Your watch will cheerfully tell you that you swam 3000m at your threshold pace, holding that pace for roughly twice what you probably can hold it for (most threshold pace numbers assume it’s for roughly 1500m). This is an impossibility, and leads to our next point…

3. Misleading. If you look at your watch data over time, and TrainingPeaks (or Today’s Plan, Final Surge, etc…) will cheerfully track this for you, you’ll begin to think that you can hold a pace much faster than you actually can. We would urge you to do a workout where you use a tempo trainer and try to hold 1:40 for as long as possible. We guess it’s something shorter than 3000m, but many triathletes will look at this number and think that they’ll be to cover 3k in 50 minutes, rather than 60, and then be WILDLY disappointed when they swim closer to 2:00/100m instead of 1:40/100m. To put that in perspective, that is a 13 minute difference in a 3.8k swim, or a 6.5 minute difference in a 70.3. If you have set your goals based on the paces suggested by your watch data, you will always be discouraged after racing.

What’s the solution? Leave your watch at home and begin to build a database in your brain of what you can actually hold for given distances, and what paces mean easy, moderate, and hard. Know that information, and you’ll be setting much better goals for yourself on race day.

Pacing and Stress

If you’re going to compete in a triathlon, and you are a strong swimmer, the swim start is an opportunity. By starting quickly, you can get away from weaker swimmers and create a gap between you and them that is difficult or impossible for them to close in the water, putting pressure on them to make up time on the bike, which will hurt them on the run. This is a great tactic if you are one of the stronger swimmers in the race. But what if you’re not? Falling into the prevailing, received “wisdom” that you need to start strong at the beginning of the swim is bad advice. We know, at this point in endurance history, that even splitting or negative splitting an effort is the best way to cover a certain distance in the most efficient way possible. So why build this obvious positive split strategy into your swimming? Starting off faster than you can sustain is kryptonite to your swimming, and will usually result in a big drop off in pace. Of course, since you don’t know what pace you’re swimming out there, you won’t know this until later. The solution? We suggest splitting the difference. Start strong but sustainably, taking 60-90 strong strokes to establish your position and get a good rhythm going, and then settle into an effort that is sustainable for the distance. You may be surprised that you go faster overall by going slower at the start.

Stress contributes, too. The beginning of a triathlon is chaotic and, honestly, scary. You’re in an alien environment that can kill you. That is unsettling, and when people are unsettled or scared they rarely make good decisions. Very often that stress results in swimming too hard at the start, or getting anxious due to contact with others around you. The only way to rectify this is to practice, since we all know that practice makes progress. The more times you can expose yourself to contact and the pertinent experience of triathlon start, the better. Think to yourself “Chaos is a Ladder,” and learn to enjoy the fray of a swim start. Triathlon isn’t changing, so you will need to change yourself.

Cadence Dropping Off

We love this one. Whenever we give athletes a tempo trainer in mode three, which is the stroke cadence setting, and we ask them to swim a longer interval at a slightly higher cadence than they are accustomed to, we usually hear something like this afterward: “You’re making this beep speed up!!!” As much as we love the idea that we are Spectre-leading Ernest Blofeld figures who can reach across the pool and manipulate a simple metronome wirelessly, we can’t. The reason you think the cadence is speeding up is because YOU are getting tired. If your cadence drops, your pace will drop, too. Since most athletes never do longer intervals (like Red Mist intervals, or long time trials in the pool or open water), they haven’t prepared specifically for their event, and they get tired and slow down. The fix? Get a tempo trainer, figure out a sustainable cadence, and swim longer intervals. Figure out when you start struggling to keep up. Then target that distance and try to extend it. Sadly, using a tempo trainer in a race is against the rules, so you will have to practice this in your training and then apply it. Want a super nerdy, deep-cut expression of cadence? Listen to Steve Reich’s Four Organs and get a visceral sense of cadence slowing down.

Trying to make open water what it isn’t

Most triathletes want the open water to be what it isn’t. They want it to be simpler, cleaner, more controllable, less chaotic. They want it to make sense. Lots of music references today, but in the words of David Byrne, you should “stop making sense.” Open water swimming is chaotic. Very often the distance is not as advertised. Usually there are currents, or wind, or waves. Almost every time there is contact and stress due to other athletes. In order for you to hit the paces that you see in the pool, you need to be as comfortable in open water as you are in the pool. This is so obvious, but for some reason so unattainable for many athletes, usually due to falling into one of the three traps above (magical thinking, poor pacing and poor stress management, or cadence falling off unconsciously due to poor preparation). So what’s the answer? There are several, and they map nicely to the points we’ve already brought up:

1. PRACTICE in open water, WITH other athletes. You simply cannot say you are preparing specifically without doing this. Once you’re into race season, you need to be doing some regular open water practice. It doesn’t have to be in the open water! Find some friends and stuff yourself into a lane like sardines. Get into the contact, relish it, look forward to it. By avoiding open water skills and practice, you are dooming yourself to frustrating swims.

2. STOP using your watch at the pool. Learn your paces. Count your lengths. Associate with the workout, rather than outsourcing the counting/dissociating from the workout. Know how you feel 250m into a 400m effort. Know what you can sustain in your body, rather than in a hard drive attached to your wrist that you have to press a button on every interval. Record your workouts by the entire elapsed time and total distance.

3. PACE yourself effectively, even when getting kicked in the head, while accepting who you are as a swimmer. If you’re one of the best in the field, go ahead and be the bully and get out in front. If you’re not, don’t blow yourself up on the altar of your ego.

4. TRAIN specific cadences, for specific distances you’ll race at. If you can’t hold your target cadence for your race distance, you will always slow down in the back end of races.