Adapting To Training In Open Water

[Mat Hudson]

Here is a Total Immersion value: “Today, I want to leave the water a better swimmer than the one who entered.”

There is a lot of meaning in this little statement. One of those meanings relates to the fact that the conditions you find in the water today may not be close to the conditions you faced yesterday. And so your expectations for performance need to be adjusted to today’s reality, not just based on yesterday’s results.

When practicing in the pool, usually the pool conditions are quite steady, other than the crowds. But things in your body and mind do change from day to day, and you should make some account for those factors, both positive and negative.

Within a good tune-up (a.k.a. warm up) time you can read a lot about how your body is doing and what it may be ready to work on today, or not.

 

Adjust Your Expectations

When practicing in open water, there can be a great deal of variation in the conditions from day to day, in addition to any changes in your own person. When those conditions change, your expectation need to change also.

So, one way of setting up better expectations for the day is to use the first minutes in the water to run some measurements on those conditions and come up with a plan for how to use those daily numbers to set some improvement goals for your practice this day.

For example, you come to the sea and find the wind is blowing to the west and that means you will have a head-on wind-driven current while you swim to the first point, a side current while swimming to the next, and a tail-current pushing you as you come back to the starting point. You cannot easily compare stroke counts or performance between the three sides of this route, but the first time around you can count strokes and set some expectations for improvement unique to each side of that route.

Or, let’s say you come to the sea and there are waves today, but you normally don’t swim with waves. They may be stressful and straining on the body, more than you are used to. You can adjust your practice plan to remove the agenda that requires smooth water and pick up the task to work on a skill you need for improving your competence and confidence in wavy water.

Rather than set a certain time requirement to swim the route in wavy conditions, you simply set the goal of achieving the distance peacefully, at any pace required by those conditions. And in achieving that, you will in fact leave the water a better swimmer than the one who entered – one with more experience, more skill, more confidence.

And that is a successful practice that takes into account the realities of each unique day.

 

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