Triathlon swimming made easy (18 page)

One more thought on SSS: Those low counts must be effortless. If you make yourself tired and breathless at a low stroke count, you're simply practicing a less-frantic form of struggle. You must have impeccable balance to make SSS fully beneficial. You need to feel that it's the complete support of the water that gives you the freedom to float your hand forward a bit farther.. .to rotate your body a bit more.. .to "skate" past another few lane markers in each stroke cycle. Remember that your "best" SL is always one you can achieve with a minimum of effort.

3. Sensory Skill Practice (SSP)

In November of 2000, I raced 800 meters at a Masters meet. Employing my usual negative-split strategy, I began with a relaxed, controlled first 200, then picked up the pace and tempo in each successive 200, finishing strongly and passing several other swimmers over the last half of the race. Checking my splits and seeing that my final 200 was my fastest, I was congratulating myself on another race plan successfully executed. Until Lisa Bauman, the coach of Aquafit Masters on Long Island (and someone I coached 25 years earlier) came up and said, "Terry, do you know that you sto
pped rotating your hips on the last 200? You rolled to your left to breathe but never rolled to your right."

Oops. Well, I
bad
felt far less smooth, but I thought it was just end-ofrace fatigue. Pondering it, I realized that I had sacrificed rotation to increase Stroke Rate, which left me swimming mainly with my arms. The touchpad came just in time; I was toast at the end. Fortunately I knew how to fix it.. .permanently. For the next three months, I spent about 70 percent of my practice time focusing on just one thing: after each left side breath, I would drive my "high" (left) hip down, ensuring that I rotated completely to my right.

When I swam super slowly, I drove the hip down slowly. When I went a little faster, I drove the hip down more briskly. Most important,
whenever I swam at near race pace — where things had broken down in the 800 — I focused relentlessly on creating that speed mostly by driving my left hip down faster and more forcefully. Two months later at my next meet, I had driven my high hip down tens of thousands of times. My narrow focus resulted in a strikingly improved race experience: fast closing splits that felt much stronger and smoother.

This is just one illustration of the value of what I call Sensory Skill Practice: a focus on doing/us/
one thing
well. I have already suggested it as a useful technique for drill practice and drill-swim sets. As you do more whole-stroke sets it's one of the easiest ways to simplify what may seem like a monumental task of coordinating all the fine skills of Fishlike Swimming. Here's a menu of sensory cues you can use in your wholestroke practice:

Hide Your Head

Lead with the top of your head, not your forehead.
Feel water flowing over the back of your head much of the time.
See the bottom directly under you, and not much that's forward
of you.

Swim Downhill

Lean on your chest until your hips and legs feel light.
Rhythmically press in one armpit, then the other.
Feel completely supported by the water.

Lengthen Your Body

Extend a weightless arm.
Be able to float your arm forward for a 1-o-n-g time.
Reach for the far wall before stroking.
Put your arm into the water as if sliding it into a sleeve.
Keep extending your arm until you feel your shoulder touch your
jaw or ear.

Practice Your Switches

Make a hole with your fingertips and slip your whole arm cleanly
through that hole.
Feel "archer timing" in your stroke.
Clear the water by the slightest margin on recovery.
Have your hand out of the water for the shortest possible time
on recovery.

Anchor Your Hands

Make your hands
stand still
as you begin each stroke.
Move your body past your hand, rather than pushing back.
Never move your hand
back
faster than your body is
moving forward.
Swim faster with your
whole body
not your arms and legs.

Skate and Rotate

Feel yourself slide effortlessly past a few lane markers
before stroking.
Breathe by rolling to where the air is.
Drive the high hip down on every stroke.
"Look" at each wall with your belly-button in each stroke.

Slippery Swimming

Pierce
the water; slip through the smallest possible hole.
Maintain a low profile, as if swimming under a very low ceiling.

Silent Swimming

Drill or swim as quietly as possible.
When increasing your speed (descending sets or negative splits) try
not to make more noise.

How SSPs Work

If you've swum with your head high forever (you know,
millions
of strokes), you have carved a deep groove in your nervous system for a high head position. You might be able to "hide" your head if you
really
think about it, but it will probably feel unnatural, and the moment you stop thinking about it — perhaps to think about extending a weightless arm — chances are your head will pop up again. But each lap you consciously focus on hiding your head faintly imprints a new groove in your nervous system. After five or ten minutes thinking only about that, it will feel a bit more natural and
you improve the chances that you'll keep doing
it when you're
not
thinking about it. Each time you devote another ten minutes to it, proper head position becomes a bit more permanent.

If you take all those focal points mentioned above and give time to each of them, the incredibly complex business of a really efficient stroke will gradually assemble itself in a pretty seamless way. With each passing hour, week, and month of purposeful practice, each piece will be polished on its own and fit a bit more naturally with all the other pieces, while you avoid ever becoming overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of it all.

How long will it take until your new stroke is perfect and permanent? The rest of your life! The polishing process should never end; you can continue improving endlessly. But my rule of thumb for getting a skill to the point where it's a "no-brainer"—to the point where you'll always do it even when you're not thinking about it — is 100,000 yards. That's not to say that you should think only about hiding your head for the next 4000 laps, but by the time you
have
devoted 4000 laps to that focus, it should be permanent.

How to Practice SSPs

As with drills and drill-swim sets, start using SSPs by choosing one focal point and sticking with it for 10 or more minutes of highly attentive practice, before shifting your focus to another one. As that way of swimming feels more natural, alternate it with other SSPs with gradually increasing frequency. Here's an example:

Block Practice

300 yards of Hiding Your Head + 300 yards of Weightless Arm + 300
yards of Archer Timing + 300 yards of Driving the High
Hip Down.

Random Practice

3 rounds of: (100 yards of Hiding Your Head + 100 yards of
Weightless Arm + 100 yards of Archer Timing + 100 yards of Driving
the High Hip Down).

Very Random Practice

12 x 100 as: (25 Hiding Your Head + 25 Weightless Arm + 25 Archer
Timing + 25 Driving the High Hip Down). Don't practice like this
until each of those skills feels like a "no-brainer" on its own.

Open-Water Rehearsal

One of the best applications of SSPs is for purposeful open-water practice. One drawback of doing SSPs in a pool is this experience: You push off and begin working on making your hands
stand still.
After 10 or 12 strokes you start to become attuned to what your hands do in that fleeting moment just before stroking and
think
you can anchor them just a bit. Then the wall interrupts your concentration and you have to start all over again. Just as you begin to feel it, you lose the flow. So a 50-meter pool is far better than a 25-yard pool for this. Better yet would be a "pool" that's
400 meters or a mile long — i.e., a calm lake or reservoir or cove.

In open water, you can "groove" that sensation and then just keep going for a hundred or more strokes of profound imprinting. Even better, you can use SSP as rehearsal. Experiment with a number of focal points and see which make you feel the best. Then, on race day, you know exactly how to put yourself in a flow state. And if conditions change (more chop or higher swells, for instance), you can try out a variety of SSPs to see which work best in various conditions. Practicing SSPs for a set number of strokes in open water gives purpose and organization to formerly aimless open-water training
and is the best possible rehearsal.

We've finished our lessons, progressed through the stage of making those formerly alien-feeling movements a bit more natural and begun to turn them into rock-solid habits. By now, you're probably itching to do a real workout. We have that for you, too, but with a critical TI tweak — time to move on to Effective Swimming.

Chapter 14

Effective Swimming: The Smartest Way to Train

Alan, a budding triathlete of enormous promise, swims in the Masters group where I train. Just a few years removed from college track, boasting impressive 10K times, he quickly became a force on the bike. When I first time met him, eight months ago, I was amazed at how beautifully he swam. I was paddling a canoe, taking my turn as lifeguard for the open-water group we swim with in the summer, when I saw a tall, lanky figure gliding through the water with long, balanced, smooth strokes. I was impressed to discover that such a good runner with no real swimming background could swim s
o beautifully. But Alan instinctively knew the right way and thus had all the ingredients for real success in triathlon.

A few weeks ago, watching him again near the end of a Masters workout, I was surprised again.. .but this time less favorably. His fluent, effective stroke had become rushed and choppy — not auspicious for open-water success. How had Alan lost his form? Very simple: Replacing nearly languorous, untimed lake swims with
workouts —
repeats, tight intervals, chasing (or being chased by) lane-mates, urgings from the coach to go hard — had shifted Alan's focus from
just feeling good in the water
to
working hard in the water.
It appeared to me as if the main dividend of eight months of fa
ithful workout attendance was lost efficiency.

Having come this far, don't let that happen to you. This chapter will give you a detailed plan for putting your energy into the most beneficial kind of training: workouts (I prefer to call them "practices") that not only increase your fitness, but also train you to maximize it with the kind of efficiency that makes elite swimmers so much better than the rest of us.

Traditional workouts are virtually always focused on racing the pace clock and/or other swimmers. As anyone who has done swimming workouts knows, the longer the set...the faster the pace...the tighter the interval.. .the harder it is to maintain your efficiency. The upshot is that even as you give your all to getting stronger and fitter, powerful "human swimming" instincts are limiting your potential because virtually everything that happens while
working out
pushes you to use more SR and less SL to make those intervals and descend those sets.

The key to training intelligently and effectively is never to lose sight of the importance of the equation V = SL X SR. The world's best swimmers are faster than you because they travel so much farther on every stroke cycle, not because they move their arms faster. From now on, if you aren't doing Learning or Practice sets, you should be doing Effective Swimming. The difference between Effective Swimming and conventional training is constant awareness of SL
and
awareness that any time you're
not
monitoring SL, it's very likely that habit and instinct will cause you to use too much SR.

Effective Swimming sets do two incredibly valuable things: (1) Encourage you to use more SL and (2) Alert you immediately when you don't — i.e., when you revert to the Human Swimming tendency to use too much SR. And all you have to do is begin counting your strokes. For the rest of your life, if you're not doing a drill, or focusing on an SSP, you should count your strokes.

Initially, counting strokes will take nearly all of your brainpower. That's why you'd find it difficult in the first couple of months to put sufficient focus on an SSP
and
count strokes. But, as you do it regularly, it will require less concentration. Before long, you'll be counting almost automatically. So automatically that you may find it hard
not
to count strokes — your hand goes in, your brain registers "One." So automatic that you'll be able to even do semi-advanced
math
in creative combinations of stroke count and time. So let's get started on constant SL awareness.