It’s sometimes said amongst distance and marathon swimmers that everyone suffers (at least) one nightmare swim. The kind of swim where everything seems to conspire against you. Nature, circumstances, events, planning, details. Nightmare swims are sometimes ascribed to over-confidence by the more self-aware kind of swimmer. Rather than blaming everyone except yourself the self-aware marathon swimmer…
Following my review of Brilliant Swim’s PaceWatch, it seemed an appropriate time to do an introduction to the Pace Clock commonly seen in most pools. Along with my guide to the different types and uses of swimming googles and the perennially popular understanding lane swimming etiquette, these articles are intended (mostly) for newer and developing swimmers. While LoneSwimmer.com…
In the autumn of 2014 I picked up an injury when I got a Grade 3 ankle sprain. I couldn’t swim much due to lingering chest infection (and didn’t want to either, as open water swimming season was ending). However years of ingrained habit made me swim anyway. I thought some kicking might help rehabilitate my ankle but I found a…
It is known that people are usually more influenced by the other people they know, friends and families, than by experts. It’s from my swimming friends that I have learned most, not distant (both in geographic terms and ability) world champions or experts. I eke out my improvements incrementally, often going backward. I listen to friends, to them…
Normally I would spilt a post of this length into at least two instalments. But I wanted to give you all the information when you may need it, which for some of you may be the period between Christmas and New Year. There are two schools of thought in swimming with respect to the utility of very…
Imagine these brief vignettes: You’re swimming in the pool lane and it’s going pretty much as it usually goes. Outside the lane the rest of the pool is public recreational swimming. In the other part of the pool are a bunch of lads, maybe in their twenties. At one point you flip off the wall mid-way through a 400 or an…
Swimming is very much like the old saying about planting trees: The very best time to start was ten years ago. The second best time to start was yesterday. The next best time is today. But tomorrow is too late. I myself did not start ten years ago but I did incrementally improve my skills and technique…
In HOWTO Write a basic training system, I said we would progress from the structure of a simple one hour or more training system to devising a more comprehensive swim training plan. A long time ago I wrote a post on introducing interval training to swimming and another on heart rate zones, that one really only included…
Many swimmers are often confused about how to write a basic pool set. Many experienced but younger swimmers from a club background had become accustomed to having a coach always provide their sets, without ever needing to understand for themselves what the coach is trying to achieve or why a particular set is used on a particular…
We’ve spoken before about the importance of stroke rate in open water swimming, especially in cold water to maintain body temperature through thermogenesis and to help in rough water, where a slower stroke rate can be overwhelmed. It’s also the case that realising that stroke rate was important was something that didn’t happen immediately for…
A long time ago I wrote a couple of posts about lane swimming and lane etiquette. They regularly pick up ongoing viewers and have been read and maybe even used by a share of swimmers. Recently Simon Griffiths, editor of H2Open magazine, dropped the links into H2Open’s weekly email newsletter. He shortly received a Mr Angry…
In late Channel season 2011 I was in Varne Ridge to crew a solo. Present for that tide were a bunch of Channel Aspirants from Western Australia, advised by seven-times world open water champion Shelley Taylor-Smith. They had had a long wait with bad weather. One of the swimmers was UK-born but WA resident Paul Newsome, the…
I’ve been swimming a moderate amount recently, about 20 to 25 k per week, 23 k the week before this experiment. Enough to stay fit, sufficient for a good swim base, and just about in line with my minimum annual target of one million metres. And then I thought to myself: what would happen if…
The variety and utility of different breathing patterns for open water swimming is a subject of different concerns to pool swimming, as with so much of our side of the swimming sport. I once read an US coach who said about breathing patterns; “if they gave medals for bilateral breathing, I’d coach bilateral breathing“. I…
Amongst the essential aphorisms of swimming are; that you need to start swimming properly before the age of 16 or you will never reach your maximum genetic potential, (as Swim Ireland put it), which means fast; and that you need to train with others to get fast. That’s me screwed then. I didn’t start swimming…
Over the past few years, the first proper long pool swim of the winter usually turns out to be tougher than expected, and almost always with some discovery or other, though I’ve long been of the opinion that every single long swim teaches you something, even if that is only a re-affirmation of the difficulty,…
Edit: For all those of you who got this by email, WordPress just completely dropped all the formatting, for no reason I can understand, (but it happens occasionally), and you got a giant wall of text. Sorry! It’s with trepidation I approach this subject. I don’t have the medical background that seems essential in trying…
Every swimmer knows how the actual act of swimming can be both rewarding and frustrating. I can’t speak how it is for everyone else, but for me most of the time it’s somewhere in the middle, (like most of life). Sometimes the frustration is horrible, getting in the pool unconcerned but then the water feels…
First, Happy Imbolc, the Celtic first day of spring, more commonly known as St. Brigit’s Day and also known as Candlemas. Pool and marathon swimmers use intervals to train. One of the regular misconceptions we come across is the belief that our training involves lots of slogging up and down the pool whereas we train…
100 x 100 is probably the most famous of all distance swimming sessions. Metres of course, for my measurementally-challenged American friends. Systéme Internationale anyone?Ten fingers, ten toes, ten …. 🙂 Anyway the elegant variation is 100 x 100 x 100, that is, one hundred metres, one hundred times, each time on one hundred seconds, i.e.…
Other people talk about bucket lists, I’ll just talk about the bucket. It can be any bucket, but once you’ve used one, it becomes The Bucket, your own personal torture instrument. Mine is that 2.5 litre plastic DIY paint kettle from a hardware store, cost about €5. It has a long string tied to the handle…
There’s a somewhat bitter-sweet aspect to closing last year’s training log. All that swimming and the relevant bytes are now consigned to the position of worksheet from ago. All the locations, times, distances, temperatures, races and screw-ups are past data, now part of a trend. Even last Saturday’s sea swim, the last swim of 2011,…
Location: Kilkenny Watershed, low chlorine pool. Start time: 9:37 a.m. Pool length: 25m Cost: €5 Current pool depth of adjustable floor: 2.01 metres Time to finish first 3k: 53 mins Worst period: 4th hour Duration sun actually shone through cloud: <1 minute Distance: 20,500 Of which front crawl: 18000 With paddles: 6000 Backstroke: 1000 Kick:…
I’ve mentioned before that regular icing is a great way to address the knots and aches that build up in a swimmer’s body when they are doing regular hard training. For myself these start to occur once I start to regularly go to 25,000 metres a week and over. I’ve also mentioned the tennis ball…
Swimmers train a lot. A lot of time is spent in the water. One consequence is tight muscles. Another problem for some is insufficient flexibility for swimming, like ankles and legs. Apart from the essentials of regular massage, and probably direct icing, stretching becomes necessary if not essential. Each of us will probably have some…
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