The swim in an Ironman is only 1.7% of your day

So why focus so much time getting in the pool and swimming yards and yard and yards?

There's this one triathlete you may have heard of named Lucy Charles-Barclay. Saying she's a good swimmer is grave understatement. During her run up to the 2023 Ironman championships in Kona, she was putting in 50,000 meters of swimming per week. Fifty. Thousand. Meters. Per week! Who on earth would ever want to swim that much in a week? Well, the pros. And a pro that led the race from tape-to-tape for 140.6 miles and was crowned a champion. 

She's a fantastic cyclist and a great runner but her swim... her turnover, form and sheer power are something to which we should all aspire.

Most of us are not professional triathletes who can focus full time on their training but there's something we can all learn from Lucy's manner of training. And that's focusing on the swim more. 

First, if you're swimming with less-than-efficient technique, swimming more will only reinforce those same habits. So if you need work on your form (and we all do) I suggest something like TriDot's pool school. I enrolled in Pool School and saw a 7-second drop in my 100-yard all-out effort. And, my form has improved.

So about swimming more; The cardiovascular benefits from swimming are plenty and those benefits are realized in your biking and your running.

    If you swim more consistently, you build cardiovascular endurance which helps you build muscular strength during the bike. The muscular strength and endurance you build on the bike, helps you during the run. This is also why more zone 2 work is critical. Want to be a better cyclist? Swim more. Want to add some more depth to your running? Swim more. Swimming more isn’t just about the benefits of swimming more like getting faster on your swim. Sure, with improved form you could gain some faster times but more importantly it sets you up for the rest of your day. As one triathlete I spoke to said about race day and doing all three portions of the triathlon, “you have to float from the start to the end of the swim to the beginning of the actual race. Then you have to make sure you eat at the all-you-brought buffet on your bike to set yourself up for a good run.” Too many triathletes think the swim is so short (see the title of this post) and therefore don’t really have to train a lot for it.