For a lot of people the swim is by far the most difficult skill, because it is very technical. Let’s face it the other two disciplines in Triathlon tend to be more natural. As children, we typically do lots of running and cycling making them easier to remember. Swimming is slightly different. I used to do lots of swimming when I was young. In fact my claim to fame is that I used to have the same swimming coach as Danyon Loader who won two gold medals at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. His coach (and mine) was Duncan Laing. Duncan was a legend in my home town in Dunedin, New Zealand. He was responsible for just about every child in Dunedin learning how to swim and even when Michael Phelps (8 Olympic gold medals in Beijing 2008… need I say more!) visited New Zealand in 2003, he trained under Laing.
To be fair, I only spent five years at swimming school between the ages of 5 to 10 years old. With that type of background you would expect someone like me to be able to get in the water years later and be able to swim quite competently. Not so easy, I’m afraid. You see, during my teenage years and in my twenties I spent a lot of time in the water, but that was surfing, windsurfing or just generally playing about diving into pools, lakes, rivers or the sea. Unfortunately, it was many years later before I decided to do proper front crawl, swimming lengths and start training again.
I had always assumed it would be easy to pick up and even though it was a long time, I still thought I would be a well accomplished swimmer. After all it’s just like riding a bike right. You don’t forget how to do that do you? Well, I can tell you from first hand experience you do! Don’t get me wrong, I could still swim, but my technique was appalling and after completing a couple of lengths I was out of breath. My body felt tense going through the water, my arms got tired very quickly and the thought of swimming nonstop for 750metres, let alone 1,500metres seemed like a million miles away.
That’s when I decided I needed a swimming coach and it was money well worth spending as straight away he identified the areas that I need to focus on and from there it was just putting my technique into practice.
The moral of the story here is to get yourself a swim coach, mentor, or training partner and enter your first triathlon today!
This article is written by Mike Kirkman http://www.triathlon2win.com