Preparing For An Open Water Swim

If you had three months to prepare for a long open water swim (5-6 miles) and couldn’t spend hours and hours swimming… what would you focus on?

We get asked this a lot – especially by swimmers targeting events like the Coniston Swim.

It’s easy to overcomplicate things. More sessions. More metres. More “stuff”.

If you haven’t got the time to add more sessions – or the chance to extend sessions beyond an hour – what should you do?

For me, I would still break the sessions up into smaller chunks – rather than do continuous swimming. For all the reasons I’ve mentioned many times before (holding form, technique, focus).

I would design every session to be comprised of a short warm up and a big main set.

Can you hold your pace, rhythm, technique over a set of 25 x 100m / 12 x 200m / 6 x 400m? Can you find a pace that you can swim at – and hold – over this type of set.

Linked to that point, can you hold your technique together when fatigue strikes? I would include some sessions where you deliberately fatigue your muscles – and then aim to hold form as the session wears on. 

Something like 4 x 200m pullbuoy & paddles, followed by 16 x 100m swim, holding form and pace (with tired muscles). 

Whilst you don’t need to think too much about fast swimming during your build up to this type of swim, sessions where you swim a little bit faster can be useful training sessions. I would aim for some swims where you try to increase pace as the set wears on, swimming your strongest during the last portion of the session. This teaches patience, pacing, control … and then some resilience as you push through the last part of the session. 

20 x 100m at 6/10 effort followed by 10 x 100m at 7/10 effort for example.

If you only have an hour in your session, can you swim on consecutive days? You will be swimming with some fatigue on day two – a nice test for you to try and maintain form and pace

And then, of course, some open water swims where you practice skills such as sighting or drafting – and do some longer swim intervals e.g. 500m or 1000m laps. 

What do you think? Would that work for you? What would you do?