How to train for triathlon and long distance swimming

Finally back. I have been really busy making my family grow…. yes I am the proud father of a another wonderful baby boy. You can be sure you will read about how I am going to get him to love the pool, soon. I apologize for the forced interruption but family has to come first, sometimes!

Now let’s get back where we left our conversation on endurance training. In my last post I tried to explain why training your lactate threshold is a crucial component in preparing for endurance based performances. Training to increase your lactate threshold, I wrote,  boils down to develop your training volume and then workout in a steady state fashion just below your lactate threshold and/or in a interval training fashion with boosts of effort above lactate threshold followed by a resting period.

Now I would like to discuss how you can design your own endurance training plan to improve your open water swimming, long distance swimming or your triathlon swimming leg.

Let’s say you want to compete in your first triathlon event and you feel weak in your swimming overall. To improve your confidence and your performance you need to work on three key factors:

– Lactate threshold training
– Swimming technique
– Performance measurement

Lactate Threshold Swimming Training

Before aiming at improving your speed performance you need to get volume. What does that really mean is to increase your overall training distance constantly week after week. It does not need to be any special training for your lactate threshold or aimed at getting you stronger on your legs, you just need to swim longer. This is going to be  the base to your ability to cover the long distance of your competition even before thinking about you swimming speed. You want to constantly add few hundreds meters every swimming session even if only swimming slowly. Get in the pool 15 minutes earlier and get out 15 minutes later. Aim at reaching 10-15 kilometers a session four times a week if you need to go for competing on a 10k and 4 kilometers twice a week if you want to run an olimpic triathlon.

To swim long distance at a fast pace, you need to train to increase your lactate threshold above the intensity level required by your target performance, that is, to make sure that your body can keep that speed without accumulating lactate and ions.

To train your lactate threshold you need to know where your current LT is. Perform a RPE test before starting to plan your training sessions, and re-iterate the measurement as you improve your physical conditioning. In our previous post we have identified two different ways for training your lactate threshold. You can alternate or choose between Interval and Steady-State Training.

I suggest to include some interval training sets every week and use mostly steady-state training for the rest of your swimming workouts for long distance. Follow me through my reasoning and you will discover why. 

Steady state training involves working out at constant intensity as close as possible to your lactate threshold for a period of time. As the athlete proceeds into the training plan the intensity and length of the workout need to be adjusted to take into account the improvement on the lactate threshold. The intensity and the length of the steady-state training depend of course by the conditioning level of the athlete.
Start by doing some repetitions of 400 meters and up. Your aim is to gain endurance and go for longer repetitions, 800m and 1000m should be a good goal to aim for.  A good way to increase the lengths of your repetition is to use what I call the ladder. The ladder is a set of repetitions with increasing distance, on the way up and decreasing on the way down, that is for example, 100m 200m 400m 800m 400m 200m 100m.

In training this way not only you strengthen your cardiovascular system and improve your lactate threshold but also learn to control your effort and to gain confidence on your ability to perform well on long distance swimming in open water or during your triathlon competition.

Triathlon Swimming Technique

I extensively covered the freestyle swimming technique in few posts, Most of the drills explained there will help you improve your overall swimming technique and get your freestyle more efficient. Remember that the drills are an important part of your weekly training and that you need to include them on every session. Some specific drill for long distance training can be added to your workout plan and will be discussed over the next section of this post. As you might understand some of the drills used for training your technique for competition in short distance are less relevant in our case here. For example, long distance swimmer or triathletes do not make use of the leg kicks as much as a 100m swimmers. So skip the specific leg kick training in case you need to prioritize. Also, add more water polo drills since in open waters is more difficult to glide, because of the waves, and the need to look for the best direction. The water polo drill makes you train the ability to develop a fast traction when you enter your hand into the water and makes you able to swim raising your head looking for the shortest path to the final line.

The bottom line for your freestyle technique to swim in open water your long distance competition or your triathlon swimming leg is to have a quick time to full traction and a low leg kick rhythm. Your technique will be affected by the use of a wet-suite. Some open water competition require you to use the wet-suite, so the best you can do is to add some training session wearing one. Do it either in the pool or even better in the closest lake or open water location.

Swimming Performance Measurement

It is much easier having a notion of the performance you are putting forward in a swimming pool than it is in open waters and in long distance swimming. In the pool you have your competitor in the next lane and he is supposed to be performing approximately as you should do, your trainer might try to communicate to you how fast you are doing and sometimes you can even give a glance at the huge stop watch hanging from the wall and have a look at your timing.

While swimming in open water, in a triathlon competition for example, it is much more difficult to have a sense of how you are doing. In this case it becomes crucial to be able to control your speed and your fatigue just by feeling your body and knowing your swimming by heart. Imagine yourself competing in an olympic triathlon event and you happen to be swimming just next to a very good swimmer which might put up all he has in the swimming section because he knows that is the place where he can take some advantage. Well, you certainly do not want to go after that swimmer or you will risk to burn much of the energy you should be using for the next sections. You need to trust your feelings, your internal clock which is telling you that pace is too fast for you right now, slow down or you’ll pay back big on the bike. Well, the question now is, how do you build that trust?, how do you establish that tight connection with your body which will allow you to measure your performance as you swim?

Let me give you some advices in this respect.
The main goal is to know how fast you are going and how much energy you are consuming to swim at that speed. Several swimming training techniques can be implemented to achieve this goal. One excellent on is to train counting your arm strokes per lap. Remember that your rate should feel natural and easy to you. Use the swimming drills explained in this series of posts to achieve an efficient stroke techniques and then try to allow yourself to  perform training at constant stroke per lap. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you do 13 strokes per 25m. Make sure you do your set of 4X400 m always at 13 strokes per 25m. Then try to increase the rate and get a feeling if that rate is sustainable for you on a long distance. This will teach you to control your rhythm.

The same concept can be applied to time. Try to do a 50m at a pre-defined time, let say at 40 sec. Now duplicate distance and time, do a 100m at 80 sec. Go on in the same way up to 800 m, always keeping the same basic time. This will teach you to keep the same speed as you get more tired. This is crucial for swimming long distance and triathlon swimming legs.

Now the last step. In the pool you have a good reference for the distance, but in open water you do not, so you must have a sense of distance measurement. Well you actually have. You know that you can do 50m in 26 arm strokes. So put together fixed time and fixed number of strokes in your training, in the same way we did before. Do a 50m in 40 sec with 26 strokes. If you can teach your body to keep this rhythm no matter how tired you are, you can easily have control on your performance in a open water competition. Counting your arm stroke you will be able to know approximately how fast you are going and you will know that at that effort you can last the whole swimming triathlon leg, for example, and get some energy left for the rest of the competition. In this way you can plan your triathlon swimming performance leaving energy left for the next legs.

That’s all folks for the moment.
Keep healthy Keep swimming.

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Tags: long distance swimming, triathlon swimming