Triathlon swimming made easy Read Free

energy. And the 2.4-mile Ironman swim is 250 percent farther than any Olympic swimming event. The opportunity to waste energy—to misspend heartbeats you badly need to bike 112 miles and run a marathon — is astronomical. And as we have heard countless times from TI workshop alumni who have chosen to apply most of what they learned from us to swimming easier, rather than faster while their times for the swim leg have indeed improved markedly, their race splits in cycling and running have also improved dramatically, because they "save heartbeats" in the water for use on land.
    From a tri-swimming perspective, in this book I'll show you how to
    1. Drive with a lighter foot (swim with a lower HR and energy cost).
    2. Avoid unnecessary trips (get more benefit from fewer and easier swim-training laps).
    3. Acquire a "smart" car (retool your stroke for efficiency).
    The effect of all three will be to turn the "cost of fuel" — your time and energy — back to those halcyon days of 30-cent gas.

Chapter 3
    How to Start Swimming Better Immediately
    Perhaps you didn't start out thinking "I'd like to be a swimmer," but as soon as you mailed your first triathlon entry, swimming became a necessary evil. Or as most triathletes perceive it: "something I have to endure in order to do the two other sports I find much easier and more satisfying." And you probably began by applying what you had learned from cycling or running: mileage equals improvement. You may even have seen some modest progress in the beginning. But if you're like 98 percent of triathletes I've met, you soon reached a state one described as "Terminal mediocrity:no matter how much I swim, I never get any better." There's a logical reason for that. Unlike running or cycling, which you probably did reasonably well from age 7, with little instruction or "practice," swimming well requires lots of both. Thousands of athletes who can run or bike long distances with ease, find themselves exhausted after a few laps of swimming. They know they're in shape, but swimming seems to require its own special kind of fitness. So they do yet more laps, hoping it will come. But if you're an unskilled swimmer, all those laps do is make your "struggling skills" more enduring. No matter how many laps you do, you'll never have enough fitness to compensate for the energy you waste.
    This is why triathletes have responded enthusiastically to the simple logic of Total Immersion. We explain your difficulties in a way that makes sense. We suggest simple approaches that even inexperienced swimmers can confidently practice in a way that they know will make a difference. And, finally, we've replaced boring workouts with purposeful and interesting practice. The result is a style of swimming that, among its many virtues, always feels good It looks good, too. TI swimmers are instantly recognizable to other swimmers by their unusual flow and ease.

    The Water Is Your Swimming Problem
    The reason you're not swimming as well as you'd like is because you're a land animal in water. Humans are "hard-wired" to fight the water rather than work with it. There are literally only a few dozen people on the planet who have almost totally solved this. Swimmers such as Ian Thorpe (and former Olympic medallists such as Sheila Taormina) have learned to overcome the "human-swimming problem" because: a) they're gifted with a rare sense of how to be one with the water (coaches call this "feel of the water") and b) they've spent millions of yards (typically guided more by that intuition than by their coaches) developing a preternatural grace and economy.
    You, on the other hand — along with virtually everyone else on the planet — probably swim more like "Eric the Eel," the athlete from Equatorial Guinea who won our hearts and admiration at the Sydney games for finishing the 100-meter freestyle, despite the fact that every stroke seemed like agonizing struggle for him. Human swimming looks like this mainly because water is