I got it into my head that I wanted to be a triathlete. So I had to learn how to swim. Oh, I could swim across a pool, but across a lake? So for some time I dragged myself over to the YMCA and did my laps. I didn't look forward to it and didn't enjoy it, but I was determined. I'd swim 50 yards and then hold on to the side of the pool and pant for twenty seconds before once again launching myself into the weariness of it all. I promised myself that when I was finally able to swim continuously I'd buy myself a music system I could listen to in the water. In the end, I never did buy that music system. Instead I discovered the fascination and fun of learning to swim well.

I did this thanks to a fellow named Terry Laughlin. He's not the only one teaching this approach to swimming, but I think it's safe to say he's the most visible. The premise here is that the resistance of water is such a huge obstacle to overcome, that the quality of your swimming (the ease with which you can slip through the water) is ten times more important than your strength and stamina.

Have you ever put your hand out the window of your car and felt the air pushing your hand? Of course you have. Pretty forceful, isn't it? Well water is 784 times denser than air. So trying to fight your way through the pushback that water provides is quite a feet. But think back to your hand in the air out the car window. If you could keep your hand very flat you robbed the air of its power. Same with swimming. The flatter you can float through the water the better you'll do. Now think about floating, if you're just lying face down in the water, which part of you sinks? The legs, right? They don't have a lot of natural buoyancy. Your buoyancy is in your chest. Now imagine swimming through the water and your feet are trailing behind you a couple of feet below your head. You're offering the water a great deal to push against. That's the problem in a nutshell. We're not really designed for swimming. Come to think of it, how the heck do fish swim? They don't even have arms or legs to propel themselves forward. But they're obviously shaped to offer a minimum resistance to the water, and they manage to twist their bodies through the water at remarkable speeds. Now it's hard to believe this until you've experienced it, but people can swim in a fashion that is remarkably similar to what a fish is doing. But it doesn't come naturally, and it takes some learning.

Let's get back to floating. You're face down in the water. How do you counteract the weight of the legs and keep them from shifting you into a slanted position? How do you stay flat in the water? What's above your chest? Well, your head. Anything else? Well, if you move your arms overhead so they're pointed out in front of you, you've sort of created a counterbalance to your legs. Plus they add length to your body and long ships can move faster through the water than thick chubby ships. It's a mathematical formula. Think of the difference between how they design raising ships and tugboats. This business of extending the length of your body is critical to how easily you'll slip through the water. So now we've got you lying flat down with your face in the water and your arms overhead. What happens if you lift your head? Your legs will drop down. If you think back to all the times you've been in the water, you'll realize this truth. If the head comes up, the legs will go down. However, if you keep your face low in the water, maybe even pushing your head down a little bit, it acts as a counterbalance and the legs will stay up. One of the easiest ways to spot a good swimmer is to check out their heads. If all you can see of their head in the water is a little slice of the back, they're doing a lot of things right. It's on my list of things I think about, keeping my face looking straight down, immersed in the water.

So what else do I think about?

I swim with my body tilted at a 45 degree angle, first left side down with left arm extended and then right side down and the right arm reaches forward. I'm rotating side to side. The arm on the up side lifts, elbow in the air, and the hand slides forward, very relaxed. It enters the water at an angle, entering just beyond my head and in front of the shoulder. If you reach out way front of you before entering the water, you're putting unnecessary stress on the shoulder joint. Overuse injuries can result. The hand enters at perhaps a 45-degree angle and then slides forward directly ahead of its shoulder. And the game is to do this with as little disturbance of the water as possible. Excellent form results in very quite swimming since you're not attacking the water but sneaking through it. When the arm reaches its destination it is directly in front of its shoulder maybe 6 inches to a foot beneath the surface. (I'm actually just guessing about the depth of my hand since I can't see it. If I can see it my head is looking too much forward and not directly down.) The hand does not cross the centerline. I keep the hand a little stiff as I try and knife my way through the water, but once in position it relaxes, palm down and fingers hanging. And now it waits. It does not want to pull back too soon. It wants the other hand to take its place and keep the vessel long before it leaves its post. So not until the other hand is knifing forward into the water does the forward hand begin its pull back through the water. And this is the moment where the magic happens. You'd think it's the arm pulling back against the water that propels you forward. And I'd be an idiot to deny that that's part of what happens. But it's not the magical part. Your body is rotating from side to side as you swim. If your left arm is stretched out before you and the right arm is lifting to enter the water, you're tilted maybe 45 degrees onto your left side. And as your right arm enters and replaces the left arm you'll rotate over onto your right side. And that moment of the corkscrew when you shift sides has the most amazing effect on your speed. If you do it right, you'll seem to spurt forward. If you just pull you hand through the water, not so much. I'm not sure I can explain it, but I know I've experienced it. It reminds me of what fish do. They swim from their core.

That bit about the fingers hanging down loosely is a Terry Laughlin suggestion. I at first decided it made more sense to keep my hand stiff and pointing straight ahead. I figured I was cutting back on the amount of resistance I offered the water. But then I noticed that the flat hand was a huge temptation. If it any moment I felt out of balance that hand was in the perfect position to push down and lift my head out of the water. Exactly what I'm trying to avoid. I found that when I let the hand relax, the desire to push down went away. The pull with the hand must be back, not down.

The last bit of learning I had to do involves the elbow. You need to think of you entire arm as what pulls you through the water, not just your hand. If you pull your elbow back first with the rest of the arm following, you're presenting the knife edge of your arm to the water instead of the broad blade. Keep your elbow a little wide as you pull back and you'll have a better purchase on the water. That way the whole arm pulls and not just the hand.

Breathing is tricky. The tendency is to lift your head to breath. But we already know what a bad idea that is. You've got to roll the head. Turn the chin up toward the shoulder. I even think about pushing the back of my head into the water as I do it. Yes, you risk getting a little water in your mouth if you do it this way. But one of the most important lessons you have to learn in the pool is that water won't kill you. It's just water. Maybe if you're afraid of the water, it can get you in trouble. Panic a little bit and the next thing you know you're gagging and sputtering and coughing. But when I get water in my mouth, I hardly notice. My breaths only take a second and before anything bad can happen I've got my head face down in the water again. Do you think you can choke on water when your head is face down in the water? Can't happen. The water falls to the front of your mouth. Breath out even a little bit and the first thing that exits is the water. You can open your mouth underwater and if you're face down in the water, the air in you mouth will keep the water out. I sometimes notice that my mouth is open underwater. It's no big deal. So how do people get in trouble? When you're afraid you're about to drown the most natural thing on earth is to lift your head. And then the water really can go places where you don't want it. Of course, if you're afraid of the water all the logic in the world doesn't help. But there are exercises you can do to overcome the fears. I also tend to exhale continuously while my face is under the water. (I blow water out my nose and imagine that those bubbles are propelling me through the water. This is obviously lunacy, but I still like the idea.) My goal is to not have anything left to expel when I rotate my head to breathe. I don't have a lot of time to breathe, so if I start out with a full breath, there'll be this choppy out-in that really won't make for a complete recycling of the air.

So what about your feet? Well, the feet can help propel you forward. Unfortunately, they don't make for a smooth propulsion system. A huge part of the energy expended by fluttering your feet gets lost to all the turbulence you're creating with them. If you're trying to break the pool record, efficiency be damned. You better kick like all get out. But for triathletes, Laughlin has an odd suggestion. Don't kick. Or at least kick very minimally. I kick once per stroke. If the right arm is entering the water, I give a little kick down with the left foot to help with the corkscrew rotation effect. And vice versa when the left arm enters the water, kick with the right foot. But otherwise let your arms and your core muscles do most of the work. You're legs will have to peddle and run for miles when you get out of the water. Let them start the bike leg in good shape.

Laughlin has another odd suggestion for triathletes: Don't push for endurance when you swim, work on your skill. In the pool you're a student of swimming. The endurance will happen as a natural byproduct of being in the water. And heck, your running and biking will get you in shape. Don't focus on that in the water. So I still stop every 50 yards to catch my breath. I want every lap I do to be pleasant and done well. That happens best when I'm not struggling and tired. I'm trying to imprint quality swimming into my nervous system. As Moshe Feldenkrais once said, "Practice doing something poorly, and you'll get very good at doing it poorly." The point isn't to mindlessly put in the miles, but to practice swimming well. (Though I will admit that before I sign up for a race where the swim distance is longer than I've done before, I make sure I can do it in the pool first.) But normally I take my twenty seconds of serenity between laps, all the while thinking about what I'm going to work on for the next lap. Where should my focus go? I pick something to work on. Just one thing:
Keep your head down.
How quietly can I sneak my hand into the water?
Make good rotational kicks.
When rotating the head to breath, keep it low in the water. Don't lift the head.
Is the forward hand relaxed with the fingers hanging down?
Feel the corkscrew.
Make sure I don't start my hand pull until the hand entering the water is ready to take its place. Maybe I'll exaggerate that and have the hands touch before the pull back.
When I breathe, glide on my side for a second. Work on my balance.
These last two ideas are not how I'm really going to swim, but drills to help me learn. Because the whole thing is complicated. And it's hard to just decide to do everything right all at once. It helps to break things down into manageable sub skills. (Reminds me of the way Moshe Feldenkrais talked about chunking learning into manageable pieces.) And the man who's made a living out of that for swimming is Terry Laughlin. He markets what he does under the moniker of Total Immersion. There's a web site with DVDs and books and training guidance. Check it out at TotalImmersion.net. If you're frightened of the water, they have a DVD called Happy Laps which shows you some drills you can try. If you're comfortable in the water and simply want to swim better, they offer a DVD-Book combination called Easy Freestyle DVD/ Triathlon Swimming Made Easy Book Bundle. But there's all sorts of stuff you might want to check out.

When I'm in the pool, one thing I keep coming back to is counting my strokes. How many strokes does it take to swim the length of the pool? If I'm really swimming well and not creating a lot of resistance to the water, I can do it in 15 strokes. It's a number that keeps dropping for me, and it's my best way to judge my progress.

One last point, if you're wearing baggy swim shorts, don't. That's like wearing an anchor as you swim. Burn them. Get something form fitting. Oh, and the swim toys. Get rid of them too. Practice swimming.

Based on a lot of reading, I get the impression that there are some swim coaches who don't teach swimming. They hand out assignments about how many laps their students are supposed to swim. But they just take it as a fact that some kids are naturally faster than others. But the best coaches believe that swimming well is a teachable skill. And they get to work teaching it.

All I know is it has worked for me. My last swim was actually fun. I was just slipping through the water and moving fast without a lot of effort. I was having a blast. And endurance? I still don't work on it. But I was second out of the water in my wave of my last triathlon. (In truth, it wasn't one of the fastest waves, it wasn't even a very large wave, But heh, everybody there was half my age, so I'm still rather pleased about that.) The point being, Terry's approach to learning how to swim is working for me. It could work for you.

Open Water Swimming

When you get to the open water, everything's different. My advice to someone getting into triathlon is to first tackle a sprint race where the swim portion is in a pool. There's enough to tackle in becoming a triathlete. Leave the open water for later. The trouble with a lake or the ocean is that there are no lanes, no lines, no guidance on where to go. Most of us pull to one side or the other and don't even realize it because we correct in a pool. We adjust based on the lines. I've managed to swim a distance 50% greater than the course, simply by zigzaging across the lake. Back and forth, back and forth. So everything here is offered with great humility. I still consider myself a novice at all this.

The two things I'm working on to solve this zigzaging are swimming straight and sighting. Swimming straight involves making sure I keep my catch straightforward, no kinks. Each hand goes straight out directly in front of the shoulder. I've eliminated any clever s-curves from my pullback. The hand pulls straight back through the water. And, of course, you have to develop some means of looking to see where you're going. So you'll have to lift your head. Except I've spent months and months training myself not to do that. Because my feet will go down and I'll lose momentum each time I look up. The ways you compensate are, 1. Don't lift the head too high. 2. Do it quick. Get the goggles out of the water, take a quick picture of what's ahead and then face to the side to breath. 3. Compensate with your kick. You know how I said full bore kicking wasn't needed in a triathlon? Well, I lied. The one thing that kicking really can help with is keeping the feet from dragging. If you accelerate your kicking as you lift your head to sight, it will keep your feet from dropping and help you keep your momentum.

You'll also hear advice about drafting and using the swimmers around you for guidance. (If you breathe right and see a bunch of swimmers and you breath left and see a bunch of swimmers, you're in the middle of a pack. And there are people in the pack sighting. There is a group wisdom, and the pack is probably headed in the right direction. Just stick with everyone else.) But if you go into a race and then lose the guidance of the pack, you bloody well better be able to figure out where to go on your own. Don't assume you'll get lucky.

You can alway just breast stroke for a few seconds to get your head out of the water and orient yourself. But if that's all you know you'll be loath to do it continuously, because each time you'll lose your momentum. And so you won't do it often enough and you'll (all together now) zigzag. Instead you need to learn how to sight and develop a rhythm that allows you to do it on a regular basis.

I've found a great one.

Wetsuit story.