Now what?
With all of my work and personal events getting tossed this year, and 3 months of social isolation with a 3 and 5 year old under my belt, I’ve gone through several rounds of mentally coming to grips with: what do I do now?
With regard to my swimming, most recently I’ve settled on speed work. Since I’m not building distance for any specific event, I’ve decided to let go of my one long training swim a week and focus my swim time on maintaining efficient form as I increase speed. A mantra that I developed to translate efficiency to speed is “reach with your hip”. It sounds funny, but it brings awareness to exactly the the right place. Think about “reaching with your hip” to drive yourself forward with each stroke!
A week ago I put this mantra to work timing myself for an 800 and a 1500 as part of the Open Water Virtual Grand Slam. These are distances that I haven’t timed myself at in years! And I had fun trying to increase my tempo and “reach with my hip”.
Mind you, part of my love of marathon swimming is not swimming fast so much as looooong. Both long in distance and long in stroke. But it has been interesting to experiment with ways to dial in different speeds and try to maintain efficiency. I like to use the analogy of having tools in your tool belt. Anything can happen during a marathon swim; it pays to stock up on tools.
How much do you “go through the motions” when you swim? Do you incorporate drills into your practice? Lately, I’ve decided to focus more on awareness and less on drills. The goal of drills is simply to isolate parts of your stroke and focus on what you’re doing. If you don’t want to take the time to slow down and actually focus, then there’s no point to doing drills. But you can easily tune in your awareness. No matter if you’re warming up, cooling down, pacing off your swim buddy, or sprinting. Swim aware. To better understand where to tune your awareness and how you can facilitate that with drills, try my self paced, virtual Efficient Swimming Basics course.
Are you new to distance swimming and wondering how train? Unlike pool swimming where training often involves swimming many times the length of your event, in marathon swimming, training focuses on cumulative yards over the course of a week. When I prepare clients for marathon swims, we focus on efficiency and incorporating tests of endurance into our training plan. Part of my Quickstart for Marathon Swimming program covers Efficient Swimming Basics to improve efficiency, as well as how to create a training plan to build distance over time, plus tips on mental preparedness.
Is your events calendar sparse this year? Since we can’t get together at the waters edge, join us for the Build to Marathon Virtual Open Water Swim Series to simulate marathon training by building from 2.5K to 10K. Together we can encourage each other to push a little distance and virtually share your local waters through the Facebook group. If you’re a seasoned marathon swimming, recruit someone who’s marathon intrigued and you’ll be entered in a special raffle!
We’re all in a Marathon now! With no end to the pandemic in sight, you may need some inspiration from people who make a habit of testing their ability to endure. Subscribe to Marathon Swim Stories on your favorite podcast provider or watch us on YouTube!
If you’d like to participate in an open conversation about inclusion in marathon swimming, we will be facilitating a discussion on Friday, July 10 at 3PM Pacific/6PM Eastern. We will provide topics to ponder and small groups to discuss them in with the hopes that we can identify some of our own blind spots when in comes to inclusion. The conversations will not be recorded. Email me for details.
