Open Water Swimming Tips for Triathlon
Become an expert in Open Water Swimming!
Swimming is swimming right? Well, actually swimming in itself is a true adventure. We are still learning something new each time we jump in the water, be that in the open-water or in the pool.
There are many things you need to keep in mind and skills that you should practice if you are going to compete in an open-water swimming triathlon race. It’s such an exciting journey to go on, and we have grown to love it more and more as time goes on and as we gain more experience and our knowledge deepens.
We want you to love open-water triathlon racing too. So skip the challenging parts by reading our 10 secrets and you can immediately start to enjoy this journey. Let’s say, we’ve done the suffering for you, so you don’t have to!
Here’s one important thing to note. Maybe for the first time you don’t enjoy it. You are worried and anxious and so you immediately don’t think that open swimming, is ‘your’ sport. Well, that is exactly the moment to keep at it. Keep going and give it chance for you to fall in love with it. Just ask Dora who wouldn’t even touch the sea on holiday. Now she’s the first to be at the lake ready to swim like a fish in the sea 🙂
These 10 tips open water swimming tips will show you what you should start to consider when practicing open-water swimming. You can also start to integrate some skills into your indoor swimming training so that you’ll be super prepared and confident when it comes to race day, but we’ll leave that for another blog post. Let’s go…
Become A True open-water Swimmer
1. Swim and Sight
Let’s start with what is ‘sighting’? It’s basically a term used to express a swimmer when they look up out of the water to see where they are swimming. This is an essential skill if you are going to compete in open water. Most of all because you can train so hard to get faster to knock off a few seconds, even minutes. Then you realise at the end of a race you swam an extra 300m because you drifted in another direction. Now how many minutes was that lost?
Learn how to sight properly with the right technique and save your energy. Global Triathlon Network have explained this well, so it’s well worth taking a look at their video here. Practice these skills in the pool until it becomes a ‘natural’ movement without having to think about it too much. You’ll be thinking about many more things during the race, so let’s remove this from your worries.
OPEN WATER SWIMMING TIP 1.
Don’t trust the others – they might well be swimming in the wrong direction too. Learn to sight and feel empowered!
OPEN WATER SWIMMING TIP 2.
Finding goggles that fit you right are going to help you see! You don’t want goggles that let water in and you don’t want goggles that steam up! There are different types for outdoors, so try different ones out and make sure they’re a good fit for you.
2. Learn how to swim in a straight line
Unwanted milage in open water can make a huge impact on your swimming leg and we all want to save energy so we can use it for the bike and run. So apart from sighting regularly, it’s important to understand which direction you tend to drift towards when you swim. Try to understand why this happens. Most likely there will be an imbalance in your swim stroke. If you can learn to swim evenly on both sides, you’ll definitely find it easier to swim straight even when you can’t follow a line at the bottom of the pool. You’ll also need to sight less often if you are able to swim straight, again, saving yourself energy!
3. Swim around the buoys
How often do you swim up to a big orange float (ie. a buoy!) in the water and swim turn around it? Well, if you’re like us, it’s a very rare occasion. But if you can learn to swim quite close to it whilst keeping your space with the other swimmers around you, it’s a good way to cut out the extra distance of the swim.
Increase your arm pace and kick a little harder when getting closer to the to the buoy, and when you have turned around it. Once you have finished the ‘turn’, it’s best to look up a little more often to be sure you know exactly which direction you are going in.
4. Draft other Swimmers
Are you a lover of drafting with cyclists (ie. getting up close behind them so you are in their slip-stream)? You are clearly saving much more energy, whilst going faster than you could ever go by yourself? Well, now it’s time to enjoy in the swim section of the race.
Drafting on the swim section is always allowed in open-water. If you get lucky and see a swimmer going a little faster, you might want to try getting behind them and see how much easier it is to swim at their pace whilst saving a lot of energy. Learn to love drafting and give it a go. Grab yourself a swimming buddy and take turns to be the lead swimmer.
OPEN WATER SWIMMING TIP:
If you are going to take that sneaky slip-stream behind the swimmer, just try not to tempt them to drown you. I’m sure they wouldn’t but if you continuously touch their toes, they probably will be enticed to!
5. Open Swimming with a Group
Swimming alone and swimming in a group is really different. You’ll need to get used to swimming with others around you, maybe bumping into you, touching your feet, or even swimming into you. It all creates more SPLASH and discomfort trying to swim. Sighting and breathing are going to be even more challenging. Sometimes you come up for a breath of air, but instead, you take in a mouthful of water. It’s all part of the game, and something you should try to practice so that you aren’t alarmed when it comes to the race. So grab a friend or two and have fun with some drafting exercises and go a little crazy in the water now and again splashing around and swimming into each other (obviously keeping safety in mind at all times!)
6. Swim with an open-water technique
It’s true, there is a different swim stroke required for open-water swimming. It’s a little more vicious and direct, rather than the clean, smooth style we see of the professionals swimming in the pool. You’ll need to consider the waves and other swimmers around you. Check out this video by GTN.
7. Swim with and without a wetsuit
In open water races, wearing a wetsuit can be made obligatory on race day due to low water temperature. However, a race can also prohibit wetsuits if the temperature of the water is over a certain temperature. This is of course all for the safety of the triathletes to avoid extreme overheating. So we recommend, practice open-water swimming both with AND without a wetsuit (if it’s safe to do so!) and you’ll be more confident if these restrictions happen to occur on race day.
OPEN WATER SWIMMING TIP:
If you are heading out without a wetsuit, why not take a safety swim buoy!
8. Put your wetsuit on and take it off
We have all been there. And maybe we are still there (Dora is) – getting that wetsuit on is never easy. We know, we feel the pain too. There are some sneaky tips to help make it that little bit easier and we’ve written a blog How to put on your wetsuit fast and How to remove your wetsuit fast. The more you do it, the more you get a feel on how best to put your wetsuit on your body as everyone finds their own little tricks. However, the more you practice, the more you’ll improve so when it comes to the day of the race, you won’t be wasting so much energy trying to get it on and off! Trust us, it can really sap the energy out of you.
9. Use your watch for open-water swimming
With a watch you can know your average speed which might be required when signing up to a race. You then use it to measure your distance, so you know how far you are swimming. You can then use it to compare previous swims – when you see improvement it definitely boosts your confidence and gives you that motivation to keep going! It can also be useful to see if you are good at swimming in a straight line, or if you are more prone to create beautiful zig zag lines like a snake 🙂
Not all watches have open-water setting, so you’ll need to understand if your watch has this functionality. Make sure you let it find GPS before you set out otherwise it won’t track anything correctly!
If you don’t have a watch that has this specific sport, you could try out a sport similar if it has one, like ‘Outdoor Rowing’, for example, and see how that records your swim.
If you don’t have a watch, well hey, that’s great too! Why not go with the flow, swim as you can and concentrate on everything else like technique, direction, breathing, sighting, drafting…oh man, we could go on!
10. Relax and stay calm
It’s probably happened to everyone at some point, even to those classed as ‘strong’ swimmers. You may be a little anxious by how far you are from land. You may have a shock when you turn around and realise it’s windy, or when the wind decides to pick up whilst swimming.
Staying calm is going to help save your energy and keep you focused on swimming back to safety. Keep calm and if you’re with a friend, just let them know that you need them to stop swimming and stay with you. Put yourself in a floating position face up and breathe deeply a few times. Find a point on the land that you can focus on for your return and make that your objective.
Enjoy the Journey
So here’s our 10 open water swimming tips to help get you going and feeling a pro in your next tri swim or triathlon race! Remember, it’s YOUR swim journey. For some who are already confident swimmers it will take a few months, and for others, it may take quite a bit more time to really feel good swimming in open water. But stick with it, keep trying and go with people you can trust and honestly, if you do this, you’ll soon start to love open water swimming!
