Swimming In A Straight Line

Last week I participated in my first ever Olympic triathlon in Lake Stevens, Washington. Swimming. Biking. Running.

I’ve always enjoyed running, I had that down. And ever since I got a road bike 6 years ago I’ve loved biking, check that off as well.

As for swimming, well… I learned to swim in my youth and I’ve got the Boy Scout swimming merit badge to prove it! But by far this needed the most work. It actually seems to be the main reason people don’t do triathlons. Nearly every person I discussed my triathlon goals with gave me almost the exact same response:

“I’d love to do a triathlon someday! But I don’t feel I could do the swim portion.”

So I started swimming. I joined the local YMCA and I started going back and forth in the pool. Or at least I tried. No goggles. Normal baggy swim trunks. No idea what I was doing. But hey, “I’m young,” I thought to myself, “if these old people in the lanes all around me can go back and forth for 45 minutes without stopping to rest, I’m sure I can!”

Nope.

After 2 or 3 laps I was exhausted! I couldn’t believe it! I thought I was in shape! I ran every other day! I had just completed a Ragnar race! I rode my bike 20+ miles every weekend! How are these old people doing this?

I’ll tell you.

One: They’ve been doing it for 50 years.

Two: They have that old person super strength ignited by a life of healthy choices and enduring time spent with their great-great-grandchildren.

And three: They’ve decided that even though they’re retired and haven’t worked in 20 years, and could easily sleep in as long as they’d like and go swimming some time during the day when young fathers like myself are working, they’d rather wake up at 4am, huddle outside the front doors of the YMCA with their walker posse at 4:30am, burrow through the doors like it’s Black Friday when they open at 5am and with quantum inter-dimensional lightning speed be in the pool at 5:01am taking up all the lanes before young fathers like me, who have a job to get to by 7am, have a chance to barely emerge from the locker room, get tired of waiting for an open lane, and eventually end up just sitting in the hot tub for 20 minutes before giving up, showering, and heading to work.

…

Regardless… I decided to look up a few freestyle swimming videos. I got the proper apparel (goggles, proper swim suit, swim cap) and practiced how to breathe properly. I’m no expert, but over the course of the next few weeks, I figured out how to rotate my head left to right, breathing out while my head was under water, and breathing in quickly when I turned my head side to side every 3rd stroke.

For anyone looking for swimming tips, you’ve come to the right place :)

Re-learning to swim in a pool was challenging but fun! My endurance picked up and I found myself swimming for 15-30 minutes without stopping to rest. I even got to the point where I could dive down, flip around, and push myself off the wall instead of stopping every lap, touching the side, and turning around! Though I was far from it, I felt like a pro.

For anyone who has swam in an indoor public pool, you’re likely familiar with the painted line down the middle of the lanes on the bottom of the pool. When there is more than 1 swimmer in a lane, this line serves as the dividing line for the 2 or more swimmers so we don’t run into each other. However when you do manage to get a lane to yourself, the painted line is a wonderful guide for keeping you swimming in a straight line. Since your head is underwater looking down most of the swim, you just can’t go wrong. There is no veering to the left or right unnecessarily. No wasted energy. It’s all very efficient and helpful. It’s so innate that you actually don’t even think about it.

Unfortunately, they generally don’t hold triathlons in pools. Most are open water swims. At my Lake Stevens triathlon, they placed 3 large orange buoys out in the lake in the shape of a triangle, and the .93 mile swim required us to swim counterclockwise around these buoys twice. No problem. I’ve swam the distance in the pool, I can do it in a lake, right?

I’ve heard it said that a good training for a triathlon swim is to swim and have people beat you with boat paddles as you go.

Spot on.

The first few minutes are chaos. All you can think about is not kicking someone in the face or getting kicked in the face. Or the arms. Legs. Sides. This hoard of swimmers in close proximity creates a bit of a fiasco, with a lot of stops and adjustments. At least that's how it was for me. Again, I'm no pro :)

Once the crowd thinned out a bit, and I could actually take a few strokes without getting kicked, I realized something very obvious that I should have thought about before.

There is no straight painted line.

Regardless, I swam confidently, assuming I was swimming straight towards the first orange buoy. But after a minute or so when I stopped to confirm where I was, I was way off course. Almost by a 90 degree angle veering away from the buoy. Wow.

Ok, adjust, and keep going. A minute later, same thing.

Every few minutes I found myself checking and adjusting. Checking and adjusting. It started to get frustrating. I was really missing that painted straight line. I hadn’t realized how sideways my swimming was without that constant guide and reminder. The buoys were large and bright orange, quite easy to see from a distance even with foggy goggles on, but when my head was down and I wasn’t looking at it, it was all too easy to get off course.

My mom taught me an old farming trick when I would mow the lawn as a teenager. She grew up on a farm, so she would know (and she’s mom, so she was always right!). She said that when farmers would plow their first row of a field, they would pick a spot straight ahead, and with eyes constantly focused on that one spot, move forward. As long as the eyes remained on that spot, the end result would be a straight line, and every row after that would follow suit. This proved to be true with mowing the lawn as well, something I’ve put into practice over the years and taught my own kids when engaging in the joys of lawn mowing.

I thought of this after I completed one triangle lap. How can I swim in a straight line without that constant guide to help me?

At this point everyone was so spread out, I almost felt like I was swimming alone. I squared my body to the next buoy and started on the 2nd lap. But with my head facing down, the lawn mower analogy doesn't work because it's impossible to keep my eyes focused straight ahead on the buoy when you're swimming! Instead I just pictured it in my mind, and as I swam I lengthened my reach towards it with each stroke. I only stopped twice to make sure I was on course (I had veered slightly, but not by much) before I reached the buoy. I rounded it and continued this until the next one and the final one before I headed to the beach.

As I hopped on my bike and began the 2nd leg of the event, I thought about the swim. I checked my watched which had timed and mapped my swim. Apparently I’d swam just a little over a mile, instead of just the .93 required. Oops. And the lack of people remaining behind me was a good indication of how I faired against the other probably more experienced athletes. If only I hadn’t had to stop so much and correct my positioning, perhaps I would have finished quicker.

If only I’d had that straight painted line to follow.

Swimming in a straight line is easy when we’re just practicing in the pool. But when race day comes and that line is gone, we may have to stop and adjust every now and then to make sure we're still on course.

How well we visualize our goal, or how far we lengthen our reach, may help for a little while. But for me, especially as a husband and a father, having to stop and re-position myself is almost a daily task. The orange buoys in my life, my wife and my children, as well as my beliefs and my values, keep me focused on my goal. Even though most days I feel like my head is face down in the waters of work, schedules, kid activities, car troubles, toilet cleaning and weed whacking, I try to take a moment, usually as I’m putting the kids to bed and say good night to them one by one, or saying my prayers, or writing, to re-calibrate myself. Re-focus my aim. Square my shoulders, take a deep breath, and dive back in.

If I'm lucky, I'll still be working on swimming in a straight line until I'm the old person in the pool. Future young fathers beware.