Triathlon Swimming: Preparing To Race

Triathlon Swimming: Preparing To Race

“Success has to do with deliberate practice. Practice must be focused, determined and in an environment where there’s feedback.”

Into April and we’re getting really close to outdoor swim season and triathlon race season.

Exciting isn’t it?

Our Swim Squad swimmers have worked really hard over many months, refining swim technique, improving swim speed, building swim fitness, developing swim strength. They are in a good place.

With races around the corner, now is the time to bring into focus that race day swim.

What do I mean?

• Open water swim skills
• Race strategy and execution
• Mindset

We’ve started to think about these things in our pool-based Swim Squad sessions, so we’re well-practiced and ready to go when the time comes.

A Recent Session

One of our recent swim sessions included some sighting work, some breathing skills, and some race execution sets. Take a look and see what we covered.

Warm Up

A simple pyramid set, focusing on swimming smooth and steady.

50m / 100m / 150m / 200m / 150m / 100m / 50m

A Skills Set

Firstly, sighting. A simple 8 x 25m where I asked swimmers to sight at least three times on every length. It’s been a while since some swimmers did any sighting, so it was good to re-acquaint ourselves with that!

Next, breathing. We did another set of 8 x 25m where I asked swimmers to breathe to the left on the odds, and breathe to the right on the evens. Swimming practicing the ability to breathe both sides – so they can do it on race day if they had to.

Main Set

Onto the main set of work. We were thinking about ‘strong into smooth’ – starting fast and then settling into a smoother, more sustainable pace and recovering from the hard effort whilst swimming slightly slower. We did many sets of 50m strong into 100m smooth. We progressed this a little further, and did the same sets (50m strong into 100m smooth) whilst also sighting three times per 25m.

It was a challenging session, but one that included great swim conditioning work, a focus on some race skills as well as starting our thinking around race preparation and race execution.

Lots of fun!

We will be continuing with some race prep work in some of our Swim Squad sessions and in many of our upcoming open water group sessions.

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