Solving Your 10 Biggest Triathlon Swimming Problems

TriDot Podcast .216

Solving Your 10 Biggest Triathlon Swimming Problems

Intro: This is the TriDot podcast. TriDot uses your training data and genetic profile, combined with predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to optimize your training, giving you better results in less time with fewer injuries. Our podcast is here to educate, inspire, and entertain. We’ll talk all things triathlon with expert coaches and special guests. Join the conversation and let’s improve together.

Andrew Harley: Welcome to the TriDot podcast. This is the start of a three week series where we aim to solve your ten biggest swim problems, your ten biggest bike problems, and your ten biggest run problems and boy oh boy do I have the right coaches here to act as our Sinseis in the swim. Our first coach joining us today is Will Usher. Will is the head coach and founder of the Precision Race Team, a top ranked team in the European rankings, formerly a captain in the Royal Military Elite Close Protection Unit. Will has been coaching triathlon for over 20 years. He has competed in over 200 triathlons and duathlons ranging from local events to world championships. Still competing, his current focus is Ironman and Ironman 70.3 and most importantly for this conversation, Will, your background is in the swim. So thanks so much for coming on to talk about it.

Will Usher: Yeah. Thanks very much. It’s great to be here again. Really looking forward to talking all things swimming which as you say is actually where my sporting life began. So yeah, it’s a bit of a home point for me.

Andrew: Also with us is Coach Joanna Nami. Joanna is better known as Coach JoJo and has been coaching athletes with TriDot since 2012. She is a co-founder of Hissy Fit Racing, a member of the Betty Design Elite Squad, and has double digit Ironman finishes on her accomplished triathlon resume. She is a two-time Kona qualifier and is racing on the Big Island for a second time here actually very, very shortly at the point this episode goes out. As our director of TriDot Pool School, her passion is getting athletes faster and more comfortable in the water. Coach Jo, I love swimming. How about you?

Joanna Nami: I love swimming. I’d rather swim every day than run one more step in my life. Everybody knows that. Glad to be here with Will. Haven’t seen him in a while so this is going to be awesome.

Andrew: I am Andrew the Average Triathlete, Voice of the People and Captain of the Middle of the Pack. As always we'll roll through our warm up question, settle in for our main set conversation, and then wind things down with our cool down.

RACEQUEST: We are over the moon excited to partner with RaceQuest for a new initiative we are calling TriDot Trips. RaceQuest specializes in endurance sport race travel, camps and experiences and they will be helping us put on multiple top-notch trips for the TriDot family in 2024 and beyond. At every TriDot Trip you can expect totally rad training opportunities, clinics with our coaches, special guest presentations, and so much more. All set in picturesque, train-cation worthy destinations. For 2024 we have five opportunities to train and race with other TriDotters on the schedule. For 2024 the locations are Boulder, Asheville, Roth, Kona, and Costa Rica. Lots of great stuff. So head to Race-Quest.com and click on TriDot to check out all of these options. The password for that webpage is TRIDOT in all capital letters and of course reach out to the team at RaceQuest for more information and by the way, you can reach out to RaceQuest if you are interested in their help to plan the travel for your own triathlon trip as well.

Warm up theme: Time to warm up! Let’s get moving.

Andrew: “Different strokes for different folks” definitely applies to triathlon gear. We all have our preferences for what we like and dislike in our stuff. As we shop, we all know certain features we have to have in our gear and we all know certain features that are total deal breakers for us in a piece of gear. So Jo, Will, for our warmup question today, what is a feature in a piece of gear that just ruins it for you? You will not buy it with this feature. Joanna, what do you think?

Joanna: Two fold. One plays into nutrition. Anything coffee flavored…

Andrew: Okay.

Joanna: …is a heck no. I can’t stand coffee nor the flavor. Secondly, this is going to play into what you say Andrew, but built in sports bra into a top. That is a no-no. For a tall woman that becomes a midriff in about five seconds. So the answer is no on that.

Andrew: Okay, yeah. Two great answers. If you see that, it is a no go for you. You’re just simply not going to buy it. I like coffee flavored gels myself and so again this plays into the idea that something that works great for me that I enjoy is a total deal breaker for Coach Jo. Will, what’s your answer here?

Will: Yeah, okay, so it’s not really a feature, but latex swim hats. Like, we have moved on. Latex swim hats were done by the early 90’s and we still see them at the races. I’m like come on, man. You spend maybe three cents on this thing and it tears apart as soon as you put it on. Like, let’s be realistic with that. But otherwise, I guess products and brands on the market that are selling poorly researched gear. I can’t be too specific about this story, but there was a very large international meet, a gathering of countries should we say, and one of the medical staff was finding this same injury in a lot of the athletes and a lot of the sprinters and the middle and the long-distance runners. I’m like, okay, what’s the common denominator and what they said was it’s the shoe. They went with this new shoe that was issued to the team and what they found out about the shoe is the medical guy phoned the rep up and said “what’s new? What have you done?” They said “Well, what we’ve done is we’ve looked at a gazelle and we’ve seen how they run and we’ve applied it to the shoe.” So the medical professional goes, “Cool. You know a gazelle’s knee points backwards, right?” And there was just silence on the other end of the phone.

Andrew: What a miss.

Will: And it just knocked an entire team’s opportunities on an international stage. But anyway, so they quickly changed the shoe after that and discontinued that. But, yeah, so poorly researched gear.

Andrew: Yeah, some marketing guy thought that sounded really cool and just didn’t think about the application for the athletes. But yeah, I agree with the swim caps. These days the latex ones, they just, they pull at your hair, they’re tighter on the head. Silicone ones if you can get one they’re not that much more expensive and your head will be happier for it. This answer for me, it is a total deal breaker when a pair of running shorts has a brief liner. I know I am the anomaly here. I know for pure runners especially, standard top of the line run shorts all have brief built in liners for men. For me, absolutely not. It doesn’t do nearly enough to secure the things I want secured. I’ll just put it that way. I feel way too loosey goosey in any brief liner I’ve ever tried. I really like kind of compression liners that go a little bit further down the leg, keep everything a little bit more in place. So I go out of my way to buy shorts that have that built in. A lot of like gym shorts have that. Not too many running brands have really, really good run shorts with a compression kind of trunk liner and I had a brand that I really liked and all of a sudden they went out of business and they stopped selling them and so I very, very recently stumbled upon a new brand that has a phenomenal, proper run short with a longer more compression liner. The brand is called Bandit Running. Brand new brand. I have a couple pairs of their shorts now and just a brilliant compression liner. A lot of trail shorts, honestly, for brands that are putting out trail running materials have longer liners and not the brief liners and so I really look to those to keep everything in its proper place. The brief liners is just an absolute no for me.

Moving on from me alluding to that one more time, I want to hear what the TriDot family has to say about this. So make sure you’re a member of the I AM TriDot Facebook group. I’m going to ask you this question, what is a feature in a piece of gear that when you see this it’s just absolutely not, I will not buy it, does not work for me? I can’t wait to see what you have to say.

Main set theme: On to the main set. Going in 3…2…1…

TRIDOT POOL SCHOOL: TriDot Pool School is the best way for triathletes to learn proper swim form. The TriDot coaching team spent years on the pool deck crafting functional freestyle and it has already helped hundreds of triathletes improve their swim by an average of 12%. As soon as an athlete registers for TriDot Pool School they are given access to the TriDot Academy where a series of dryland exercises help build crucial muscle memory long before the in-person weekend. The weekend workshop is an engaging blend of instruction, demonstrations, and drills with frequent breaks to rest and reflect. You’ll be grouped with swimmers of similar ability and taught step-by-step how to turn your muscle memory into full stroke swimming that’s smooth and fast. TriDot Pool School is for everyone. We’ve had entry level triathletes, back of the packers, mid packers, some elite age-groupers, and even a couple of pro triathletes attend. Ready to jump in? There are Pool Schools available all over the country and around the world. Head to TriDot.com/Pool-School and sign up today.

Andrew: I had some swim talking points already lined up for this discussion, but just to make sure we were hitting the biggest issues that you, our athletes, actually face, I threw a post out to the I AM TriDot Facebook group asking our athletes “What do you think is your biggest problem in the swim?” There were loads of great responses and in less than two days it had over 100 responses to this question of people very, very quick to tell me what their biggest problem was. So I’m excited for us to help out some folks today. I tried to capture what you said in your posts in these ten problems we’re going to work through and solve today. So Will, Jo, let’s solve some swim problems.

Big swim problem #1 is getting in the pool. This is 100% a problem for me. I procrastinate going down to the pool so hard, so I’m glad other TriDotters were reporting that this is an issue for them. Coaches, give us tips for getting out butts down to the pool and getting our butts in the pool without faffing about too much. Will Usher, what do you have for us here?

Will: I hear this quite a lot actually. It’s not a normal surprise. 85% of triathletes don’t come from a swim background. You would think it would make them hungry to learn, but actually sometimes–

Andrew: It doesn’t. No.

Will: So one of the best ways, I think, to get down there consistently. If you have a time that you can do it and you have the friends who can do it at the same time, to get a friend to go with you and agree to meet them there. But go tech free. Go 90’s. Go 80’s even, right. Because it’s too easy. You’re only allowed to contact each other in an emergency and so you know that if you’re not there, you’re letting that person down.

Andrew: Wow.

Will: Equally if it’s somebody who also doesn’t really like swimming maybe, you know, because you’ve just made it a whole lot harder for them. So that’s a pretty good way to do it. I appreciate that a lot of people swim on their own. Some things like prep is super important. Sort out all your gadgets, your various swim toys and store them all in one place. Have your bottles ready, your goggles. There’s no procrastination time, right? Because although most of the swims are only like an hour long, it’s the stuff before and after.

Andrew: Absolutely.

Will: It’s the logistics of it. It’s a lot harder than popping out for a run. So yeah, that really helps. What else? One thing I think people forget is, and particularly this is one for the runners and cyclists, right? Is that actually the swim has a direct impact on your capacity to compete in the triathlon itself. One of the reasons for this is the deep core. So if we take the example of throwing a javelin or when you throw a baseball or whatever you hear the expression being thrown from the feet and it comes through, transfers power from your legs through your core into your arm. That’s great. In swimming you don’t have that fixed platform. The fixed platform is your core. That’s how you’re able to generate power for your arms and what happens is an intermediate triathlete will do a stroke a meter roughly. So on an Ironman, broadly 4,000 strokes. There’s about six different muscle groups that get involved in swimming. So in an Ironman swim you’re talking about 24,000 reps.

Andrew: Wow.

Will: That’s not something you’re going to do in the gym in about an hour, right? It’s just not going to be there. So you need to be swim strong and not just gym strong. But because of that, that deep core strengthening, it will really help your run. It will help the bike as well, help your position on the bike, but it will massively help your run and you can always tell with the pure runners who have struggled through the swim and blown up their core in the swim and they can’t compete or do nearly as well in their best discipline and the swimmers are slightly bent over running along the run course because their core has collapsed and they can no longer transfer power from the upper body to the lower body. So you know, think about the big picture. The juice is worth the squeeze.

Andrew: For me I’ve found keeping a race on the calendar really helps with this. If I have races on the calendar, even if it’s C races, local sprints and Olympics, like I’m much less likely to skip going down to the pool because I’ve got to swim in a race soon and if I don’t have a race on the calendar, man it can get real easy to allow myself to skip a swim once a week or something like that. Coach Jo, what is your advice for your athletes on getting yourself in the pool to get that swim set done?

Joanna: I’d say great minds think alike as Will and I had two exactly the same. You know, I talk about with my athletes a swim partner and like reaching out, make a friend, your swim friend. You’ll be much more accountable and secondly, night prep like he discussed. But lastly, bribery. I do this with all of my athletes. You set a prize for the end of the week. You have to do this. It’s a bargaining game with yourself. Do you want that purse? Do you want that purse? Do you want to get a massage on Monday? You can only have it if you go to the pool twice this week.

Andrew: Okay.

Joanna: And it really works for athletes. I mean, we have to turn ourselves into children and like, do you want the candy? Do you want the candy? You have to go to the pool. Okay.

Andrew: Big swim problem #2 is our legs. Our stupid, good for nothing legs. Many people say their legs sink and it causes poor body position on the swim. Others have a weak kick that just doesn’t do very much to propel them forward. Coaches, how can we get our legs up and kicking productively during our swim? Coach Jo, you first on this one.

Joanna: Well, you know, this is interesting because what Will referred to is that 85% of people did not come from a swim background and they’re what we call early– is it “early onset swimmers?” No that’s not right.

Andrew: Late onset swimmers.

Joanna: Late onset swimmers. That’s what it is.

Andrew: Delayed.

Joanna: Delayed.

Andrew: Adult onset swimmers.

Joanna: Yeah and in doing that most triathletes don’t know what proper kick is. It’s not something they incorporate into their swim workouts every day. They don’t– No one has taught him that you know, you’re supposed to have a tiny micro kick. You know, I use the reference from when I taught kids swim lessons that you’re kicking in a shoebox. Those feet cannot come outside the shoebox and so having my athletes, you know, are some of the attendees from Pool School teaching them to have that tiny micro kick and where their feet are going to be in the water. That their heels are going to peek out. So I always ask my athletes to incorporate about 100 to 200 meters of kicking with a kickboard into warmup and to listen for that rapid boiling water sound from a kick. If we can get your feet where they’re supposed to be and doing what they’re supposed to be doing, which is create propulsion, they’re going to be much more set to have proper body position and balance in the water.

Andrew: Yeah, and that’s kind of why I grouped these two together as the problem being our legs because sinking legs and poor kick often go hand in hand. I know for me, I have horrible hand-eye-foot coordination and so for me in my swim sets even if TriDot doesn’t have a kicking drill in my warmups, I almost always do some form of just 100, 200 a little bit of kicking in the start of my swim set just to kind of remind myself like, hey, think about your kicks. Stay intentional with your kicks. If I’m not, I’ll get half way through a swim workout and realize I’m not even kicking unless I kind of give myself that reminder early on in a set. So I totally relate to this when people are reporting this problem. Coach Will, what do you say to people when it comes to our stupid legs not being in the right spot and doing something to help us swim forward?

Will: I mean, head position is everything, right? It’s the cheapest way to bring your hips up or your legs up. It’s really important to do. Swimming is a function of maximizing propulsion and minimizing drag so your body position and balance are key. So if your head is up, it means your hips are down and you’re creating a huge amount of frontal drag. But if you keep your head down, your hips come up and you lose that frontal drag pretty quickly. It’s actually the theory behind some wetsuits out there. They have thicker 5 mm around the legs and 3 mm on the chest. It used to be they actually used to have more lift on the chest but of course that exacerbates the problem and it’s actually much more important to have you in that balanced position. I think also something Jo alluded to there, but remember weak kick doesn’t need to be an inefficient kick. Right? It takes a lot of time and practice. Long-term runners, actually the more running they’ve done, the more weight bearing stuff they’ve done, the more fused their ankle is and less flexible their ankle is and to some point in running you want that degree of inflexibility to create that sort of spring effect. So there is a balance to be met, but the kicking that you should be doing should be efficient– now look, don’t expect to hear a six beat like fast sprinters leg kick the whole time. Even Olympic swimmers on a 200 meter swim rarely hit a full six beat leg kick for the full 200 meters, right. Just 200. They’ll do the first and last 50…

Andrew: Wow.

Will: …but in between that will be four beat efficient stabilizing kick. Something to practice. I’ll just say it doesn’t need to be necessarily fast, but it can be efficient and help stabilize you.

Andrew: Uhh, big swim problem #3 is breathing. Yeah, we need to breathe. This is a crucial thing in every sport, especially swimming when our face is down in the water. Some athletes asked about how often we should be breathing– how many strokes, every other, bilateral, three strokes, four strokes. Others asked how to breath more smoothly to where you’re not interrupting your stroke as you’re coming out of the water for that breath and a few athletes reported always feeling out of breath by the end of their intervals. So coaches, solve our breathing problems for us pretty please and thank you. Coach Will.

Will: Uh, yeah I agree. Breathing is necessary. Apparently we don’t do too well without it, so definitely recommend breathing while swimming.

Andrew: Strong, 10/10 recommend breathing while swimming.

Will: Yeah, so there is a problem and as humans we’re just naturally programmed to hold our breath under water. It’s why you can take a young baby and hold them under water safe knowing that they won’t try to breathe in for a time. You know, looking a few seconds here…

Andrew: Wow.

Will: …don’t try minutes at home please. But as a consequence, people will often take a breath, but they’ll hold it when they put their face back in water. But then when they come to breathe again, they have to breathe out and in in the time they previously had just to breathe in. Consequently, they’ll start becoming hypoxic and/or their stroke falls apart as you’re rolling your head too far to try to get some more or extra time to breathe. So how do you fix that? I’d get used to being under water and slowly breathing out. If you relaxed you should be able to flap your lips, alright, and if you breathe out you should basically be able to make your lips vibrate hopefully. This has other benefits as well which is sort of not tightening up the shoulder girdle and make sure that you’re relaxed in your body, but the main thing is that you relaxed. Okay. Think about walking down the street. You don’t walk down the street taking a breath in, holding it for five steps, and then quickly doing an in and an out. You want to replicate as close as possible normal breathing in the water and actually, you know, you can start by holding your breath for a little bit longer by doing six strokes where you normally do two and as you become efficient with that process you can drop it down because you know you have to speed it up and everything else. But no, it is important to get a decent amount of air in. So when you’re racing you’re looking at two to three strokes per breath trying to make it as regular and as normal as walking down the street.

Andrew: Okay, yep, yeah. Very, very helpful and yeah just trying to stay relaxed and when I first heard that and I would try to apply that in my swim sets it definitely makes a huge difference in a lot of areas– breathing and form if you can kind of get your body to relax into the water, not fight the water, work with the water. So great stuff there, Will. Jo, what do you tell your athletes when it comes to breathing in the swim?

Joanna: Breathe more often. That is something we work on. My athletes and I are constantly working on form and proper stroke. I’m like, you have to be fully oxygenated. You cannot be deprived. That heart rate goes up when you hold your breath. I like what Will was saying is that we are constantly breathing. We’re constantly in some form of the process so we take the inhale– the moment that face toes back in the water I tell them that, this is what I told kids in swim lessons, “Slow bubbles. Blow those bubbles out slow.” I’ll even have some of them practice humming as they blow out the bubbles because it makes them think of actions they have to do and so they’re not holding their breath. So that little bit of hum, blow out the bubbles, slow seep of bubbles that works. I also tell athletes there’s too much emphasis put on bilateral breathing. There’s a lot of great things about bilateral breathing, but as you are working on your stroke and learning proper form, balance, body position, let’s breathe. Let’s breathe every stroke. If you are doing something where you are working on upper body or head position as Will was talking about, put that snorkel on. I know y’all hate them, but put it on. Take the breath out of the equation so you can breathe freely and be super relaxed. You know, you’re not worrying about taking the breath and then you can work on your stroke.

Andrew: Big swim problem #4 is trying to swim at the right speeds. This is usually a big problem for people when they come to structured training for the first time and they’re not just getting in the pool and clocking laps anymore. Just not knowing what each zone should feel like or many people even reported just kind of having one or two speeds in the pool, not really having three or four different gears to swim at different zones. How can we get a better feel for different swim paces? Jo, over to you.

Joanna: This is probably one of the number one questions that I get from athletes. You know, how do I hit these zones? How do I hit my pacing? I don’t know what the difference between zone 2, zone 3, zone 4 feels like. I’m going to take it way back. We’re going to go old school now, really old school. I talk to my athletes about rate of perceived exertion. So I say, “You know what all out feels like.” That’s 100%. That hurts. That’s pain. That’s I can’t– you know, I’m having a struggle breathing. So when we talk about zones, I’ll tell them zone 1, super easy. That’s drilling. That’s not focusing on any type of speed. Just focusing on form. Zone 2, you know we may be focusing on catch, pressure against the forearms, strong pull. We get to zone 3, I always tell them 50% of all out. When I can give them a number of like what full exertion would feel like and only doing half that level. Then zone 4, now you’re about at 75% of all out. Five or six, go hard. Putting it more into an RPE, rate of perceived exertion chart, level of exertion really I think helps people understand what that’s supposed to feel like.

Andrew: For me, honestly, using a pull buoy initially as a TriDot athlete really helped with that because it took, honestly, my sinking legs out of the equation. I could really get a feel for different paces and then I kind of removed the pull buoy and got better at doing it with the full body, but over time. And you kind of have to relearn it. If you take a long break from swimming which I’ve done in certain seasons and you get back in the pool, like for me that’s one of the first things to go is that feel for different paces and you kind of have to get that back again. Thankfully it comes back faster each time you kind of get reacclimated to swimming in the pool. Coach Will, anything to add here on hitting our paces, getting a feel for different paces in the pool?

Will: Yeah absolutely. I mean I’m sort of picking up on what Jo was talking about there. Like, you’ll notice those being diligent with their swim sessions on the TriDot platform, you’ll notice there’s some heart raisers in there always at the end of the warm up. For easiest– say four 50s descending one to four. The first one is easy, the last one is all in. You need to be able to create a clear change of pace with each one and over time you’ll be able to align those to your different zones. To practice to start, just start really easy and make sure that each one has a clear definition of difference. Then one of the other elements actually which can be a problem is the watch. I recommend swimming without a watch and being much more present in the water. So when you’re relying on the watch for your time keeping and everything else that goes with that, there is sometimes a bit of a tendency to zone out and let the watch tell you what you’re going to do where as if you are trying to swim at say RPE 7 and then you get a much better feel if you’re totally dialed into how that’s feeling and then using a wall clock to line up that time. But I guess one of the biggest problems in terms of people swimming faster or they feel like they can only have one sort of speed is not reducing yourself to a chaosly splashing version of the Tasmanian Devil, right.

Andrew: Sure.

Will: We used to use the idea of a speed limit and that’s the point at which you can still swim fast, but hold onto your form and if you do that repeatedly you will get stronger in the right areas and the speed will come. If you thrash inefficiently, you’ll end up going the same speed or even slower.

Andrew: Yeah, I’m glad you said that Will, because we did have a couple athletes ask that specifically as a problem they have is hey, I’m getting faster, I’m improving my form, I’ve been to TriDot Pool School, but as soon as I try to go all out, as soon as I try to swim fast all those bad habits of just flailing my arms, working too hard, not holding the right form come back and so that’s a really, really interesting point there about kind of earning that speed, right, by just kind of over time getting where you can push the speed faster and faster and maintain your form. That’s a really interesting take there to kind of address a problem some people voiced that I didn’t necessarily have on my list of ten here. So great stuff there.

Big swim problem #5 is translating pool speed to the open water. We do our TriDot workouts, we see our fitness improve in the pool and then we hit the open water and our paces are not what they are back in the pool. How do we fix this? Coach Will.

Will: So many of you will see in your programs doing like these big aerobic blocks, right, in the pool. It’s super important because it helps you to gauge your speed and get used to that long consistent swim that you’re going to do on race day. But one of those sort of areas of specificity for being in the pool, but training for outdoor is your tumble or flip turns. If you can learn how to do those, they’re really useful because they exclude the micro recovery from a cardiovascular perspective. They always add a little bit of hypoxia to a session which again really makes you more efficient ultimately in the water and they’re really not as hard to master as some might think. We’re going to have thousands of TriDotters around the world breaking their noses on the pool now. It’s really not that hard, right? Just keep it simple and it’s a good way to learn. Also remember the very act of turning for most people– and this is to give some sort of context to you swimming open water to in a pool. But the very axis of turning for most people gives you a boost. Swimmers learn that your at fastest either off the block, off the start, or off the wall and everything else is trying to slow down the deceleration from the wall, right? Of course, you don’t do that in open water so bear that in mind. For example, converting 100 meter swim time from long course, 50 meter pool, to a short course, 25 meter pool, set by FINA is 1.6 seconds over a 1:30 hundred and that’s because there’s two less turns. So if you take all the turns out, it’s 2.4 seconds per 100. So a 3800 meter swim at 1:31 before you even factor in sighting, swimming straight, cold water, swimming in a bunch, etcetera, etcetera.

Andrew: Yeah.

Will: So even if you were in a perfect scenario with no one around you, perfect– you’re just swimming down a lane line, but outdoors, you’re still going to be 1:30 slower just because you’re outdoors and there’s no turns.

Andrew: Yeah, that’s a great perspective, right. Just it’s okay that you can’t hold the same pace outdoors. There’s more variables. There’s everything you just said. You don’t have the benefit of pushing off the wall every so often. The flip turns is interesting because it’s come up on the podcast before. Some coaches feel strongly that if you can get it down you should work it into your sessions. Some coaches don’t value it as much. I at the moment have been doing an open turn. I’m interested in kind of getting the flip turn back into the rotation. I just haven’t taken the time to really brush up on that skill. Coach Jo, what do you say here to athletes in addition to what Will has said about taking our pool speed and trying to get as much of that as we can out into the open water?

Joanna: I think it comes down to, I think you both will agree with me is how comfortable we are in the open water.

Andrew: Yeah.

Joanna: Is this our normal environment? I always relate it back to if somebody put me on a gravel bike and put me in a gravel race, would I have the same speed? Is it the same environment? Is it the same conditions I have in the pool? We get in the habit of swimming, oh two, three times a week in the pool never going out to open water and then throw ourselves in the middle of an open water race and think we’re going to do the same thing. Totally different environment, less comfortable, and what are we doing differently in the open water? Well, #1 now we can’t see. If anybody has swam Ironman Texas you can’t see your hand in front of your face in the water. You know and so now we’re sighting, changing our body position as Will referenced. You know, now we’ve got head up half the time, feet dragging, legs dragging, we stop kicking, all of it goes south quickly, you know. So honestly if we want to maintain similar speed or increase our speed in open water we have to get super comfortable. That has to become our norm and we need a lot of exposure. We need to be out there, you know, once a week a couple months leading up to our big race. That’s where we’re going to have our most success is if we’ve practiced in our wetsuit, if we’ve remembered that we’re supposed to be kicking, if we master sighting. If that’s not a possibility, if we don’t have that availability there are a number of drills that you can do in the pool to simulate being in the open water, but I have as my athletes are approaching Kona right now, I have them doing sighting drills like mad women. In the pool sighting something low on the deck, something high on the deck, becoming masters of that so that when they hit the water in Kona, they have those skills to not lose full propulsion in the water every time they sight forward. So those are just some thoughts on it. I always talk about being very comfortable in what you’re doing and you can’t expect to maintain the same speeds or the same skills if you don’t practice in that environment.

Andrew: Big swim problem #6 is not swimming the course straight on race day and this very much goes hand in hand with kind of what Jo was just talking about, open water problems. A lot of factors can push us off course on race day, following the wrong person, currents, waves, poor sighting, poor form. Coaches, help us swim the course better please and thank you.

Joanna: Sighting drills are super important. Practicing sighting if it’s your local lake or wherever you’re swimming. If it’s an ocean swim, picking a landmark on land that you can see and practicing seeing that. Becoming more effective at sighting. You know, I tell my athletes even in your practicing in open water or in the pool you may fail a couple times at getting a good sight, but that’s okay. The more and more you practice it, the better you’ll get. So as far as swimming straight, a lot of that has to do with form. A lot of that has to do with body position and hand entry. I always demonstrate for my athletes that if you’re moving your hand side to side, you’re pushing your body side to side. You’re not pushing your body forward. So it’s very important and we talk a lot about it in pool school that the direction of how the hand enters; fingertips first, full reach, and pulling directly back from overhead toward the hip in a straight motion. I talk about your railroad tracks that run alongside your body. Pulling that catch back fully, full acceleration toward the hip. It’s got to propel you forward. It’s not going to propel you left 200 meters– that’s a lot– 200 meters to the side of a buoy. That might be off course. That might be on land.

Andrew: Some people go that far off.

Joanna: It’s amazing.

Andrew: Have you ever been out there in open water and you look to the left and there’s somebody just way out there? It’s like how did that person get out there?

Joanna: But that’s just somebody swimming horizontal. Like they’re going…

Andrew: Yeah.

Joanna: …like they’re going right in front of you, the complete wrong direction. I can tell you their hand entry must be off.

Andrew: Yeah, I found for me, Jo, in the open water when I am bilateral breathing I tend to stay pretty straight. Will, what do you have to add here about just helping people stay straighter and not having their Strava file after a race look like a zig-zagged mess?

Will: Oh yeah, I mean it’s a real problem. We do this drill to really highlight to swimmers how important it is to swim down the railroad tracks. Actually the example we use is something that adds on to Popov who has the most freestyle world record holder. He says like swim down a pipe. Right. So you can’t swing out to the outside. All the physics go front and back and that really helps, but we do this drill where we black out or give people some blacked out goggles…

Andrew: Wow.

Will: …and we’ll send them off into the lake and see what happens. They have to do like 30 strokes, 40 strokes whatever. Anyway, twice I’ve had people swim all the way back to the deck. They’ve done a full circle.

Andrew: Wow.

Will: Which is incredible and the look of shock and awe on their face when they take the goggles off and go “Uhhh, what?” So anyway, that’s a little drill to see quite how badly you’re going to one side or not. Anyway, recce a lot of the issues that can be found in open water, if you do a good recce of the race site. If you can get in before race day, great. Not always possible, because you’re working right up to the end of it or whatever, but you can get in and feel the temperature or the salt,  if it’s the first time you’ve swam in the sea, all that good stuff. Hopefully you’ve done it before, but that’s not always the case, you know. But then also don’t worry if you don’t have time for this. Sometimes, race sites, the water’s pretty cold. It’s not necessary for you to endure that more than you have to and actually whilst checking out the waypoints for the waters ideally you can get a lot done from the land. You know, you can designate landmarks or permanent features. If you’re in a lake swim you can walk to where the buoy is going to be and see what you’re going to see on race day, look through the sight of the buoy. You know, make sure you’re using permanent features. Don’t use the third pigeon from the right. It might not be there on race day. This is going to help you to navigate in the heat of battle, but think about different ways of sighting. So crocodile sighting is best where you’re just sort of peeping up. You’re not going to full sort of water polo stroke. You’re just peeping and then going back into your normal stroke, but remember you don’t have to sight forwards. You can sight sideways as well. Like a lot of races around us are done in rowing lakes which are nice and straight, but if you know that you are running equidistant to the bank being on that side, then you’re probably swimming straight and that could be the same even like in a sea swim, right. Walking is a good example of this where you know from Google maps, you can map recce this. You don’t even have to do it in real life. You know that there’s a road that runs along the front and you can tell that the road is there when you’re in the water because you see the street lights or there’s a bunch of palm trees or whatever that are lining that road. So you know that if they’re kept equidistant you are swimming straight with the course. So just think about it from a reconnaissance perspective and that will really help.

Andrew: Will, the number one thing I took away from what you said is I have a new idea for our YouTube channel where we absolutely need to get a handful of our TriDot coaches in a lake or in the ocean with blackout swim goggles and see how everybody swims on camera. So be on the lookout for that on our YouTube channel the next time I’m with some TriDot coaches. We’ve got to try that one for sure. That sounds like a blasty blast.

Big swim problem #7 is getting a good, comfortable fit from our wetsuit. Wetsuits have to fit just right so they can work with our body and not against our body. Many people said they struggle to find the right one and then they struggle to swim well in it. Coaches, would you please solve our wetsuit woes. Will, over to you first.

Will: I’ve been working with various wetsuits brands for years, decades, too long, but what we’ve actually found over the years is that again, going back to that metric of 85% of particularly middle and long distance swimmers– sorry triathletes do not coming from a swim background, a lot of triathletes don’t really know how to fit a wetsuit even. Now this is obviously changing over the years, but even the big, big gun open water 10,000 meter swimmers from the Olympics up until a few years ago didn’t know how to do it even though they’re specialists in open water because the wetsuit wasn’t allowed. They had to be skins basically, well and a costume of some description. But so it is a little bit of an art. Fitting a wetsuit well I think we’ve got a little video which we can pop into the link to this podcast.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, love it.

Will: Ideally it’s a two person job. It is hard to do well on your own, but if you fit it well, like I can fit into a suit that is like on the sizing scale, 9 kilos too small for me, alright, if I fit it well. Actually the closer the fit is the better the technology within the suit is going to work to a point obviously. Then one of the issues that we see quite often is it comes down to the quality of the neoprene. So the it’s called Yamamoto rubber which basically will stretch around five times its size outside of the seams, but they only start at a certain price point and I’m not trying to spend people’s money for them, right, because typically you’re getting into the sport and you need to do what you’ve got to do. But if you’re an adult which for the most part triathletes are really heavily sort of in that sort of demographic, you’re not wildly going to change in shape unless you were on some sort of fitness journey, but once where you get to the shape where you’re happy, you think you’re going to roughly be. Most wetsuits have quite a wide range in terms of kilos. You’re not going to get any shorter or taller so it’s only the weight that really fluctuates. So maybe invest in that suit because in wetsuits what you pay for is what you get and the lower quality rubber, the entry level suits, they do not flex as well, alright. So unless you fit those really, really well then it’s going to be a miserable time. Even with the high quality suits, right, Professor Greg Whyte who is quite well known here in the UK, does a lot of stuff for charity and anyway, he’s swam the channel multiple times. He’s a physiologist and he hates swimming in a wetsuit even though he’s faster in a wetsuit because fatigue in his deltoids is horrendous just from the element of the stroke. Now you put cheap rubber or cheaper rubber into the equation and that only exacerbates the problem. Of course, you do long course it makes it worse. So think about what your budget is because like I say, you’re not going to change shape. Treat it well and it will treat you well.

Andrew: Yeah. No that’s absolutely right and when Jan Sibbersen, our good friend from Sailfish Wetsuits was on the podcast, he made a really interesting point that I just don’t think as customers we think about. But he was like, “Ask us. If you have a question about what size wetsuit you should be in, we know our product.” So whatever brand you’re looking at, whatever model you’re eyeballing, reach out to the brand. Don’t be afraid to ask. They’re more than happy to help you get the right size and to Will’s point, Will and Raya have a video where they teach you how to put on a wetsuit the proper way with two people. We’re going to put that link in the description for you to check out how they do it. Coach Jo, anything to add there about wetsuits?

Joanna: I do think on the female front there is more change to body as we talk about, you know, leading up to Ironman. My physique changes and again it comes back to practicing in that wetsuit and asking. I love what you said, Andrew, about asking the company you know.

Andrew: Yeah.

Joanna: Reaching out to them and their customer service, most of them are so willing to help you find what is a good fit for you. I’m a weird fit; small, tall and it’s still short on me. People constantly ask “Did you cut that wetsuit at the bottom?” No I didn’t cut the wetsuit at the bottom it just comes right below the knee. But you know, wetsuits are– if you read in their description or ask their customer service, for those that are more natural swimmers, grew up swimming, collegiate swimmers, they’re going to want a different type of wetsuit. Different wetsuits are made differently.

Andrew: Yeah.

Joanna: Different brands are made differently. For those that want more buoyancy that have their legs, hips, feet drop, they are going to want a wetsuit that provides more buoyancy. A more natural swimmer, no. That’s going to fight against the stroke that they’ve always had. So I think it’s super important to ask the customer service. Ask training partners which they prefer. Try it out. You know, if it doesn’t work for you most of the companies will take it back. You know, but it’s very important to not wait up until morning of the race and then it takes you two and a half hours to get the wetsuit on and you’re fully sweated wet. That’s like– that’s not a good sign. So make sure you’ve practiced.

Andrew: That shouldn’t be your warmup.

Joanna: No. Make sure you’ve practiced putting it on. That’s another thing to do.

Will: Actually to that point, you always see this in transition. Like people will rush in to put their suits on. It’s the one part of the race you don’t need to rush, right?

Andrew: Yeah.

Will: So do it slowly. Do it properly. Take the time. You see it every time, people being meticulous about taking a blade of grass off their wheels, but then they’re rushing hopping down onto the swim course trying to get themselves into a suit. Of course they’re going to have a bad experience.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s one thing to keep in mind too is when you first put that wetsuit on, I mean see how that wetsuit feels in the water because they should fit you– they’re designed to fit you well in that horizontal plane in water. So mine when I first put it on, it didn’t feel as tight and then as soon as I laid horizontally in the water and started swimming, it no longer feels tight. So keep that in mind as well. Clock a few laps and see how you feel.

Big swim problem #9 is swim specific body pains. There’s a couple things that our athletes reported that they don’t experience from cycling and running that is unique to the swim. Some folks reported calf muscles that cramp just every swim 40 to 50 minutes in their pool session no matter what my calves start cramping. Some folks reported their eye sockets are hurting by the end of a one hour workout from their goggles and that seal and some folks reported shoulder pain from just the grind of lap after lap. I personally have experienced all three of those in different phases of my triathlon career. How can we thwart some of these common swim specific body pains? Coach Will.

Will: Well see, calf muscles is super common. We get that quite a lot whether we’re kicking or not, our upper bodies are dominant in the requirement for the blood whilst swimming. In a pool we’re effectively doing a weighted jump every time we push off. Right, with limited blood supply it cramps the muscles. It’s a CP or creatine phosphate energy system, alright. it’s explosive and takes a while to regenerate, like three to five minutes. So it’s certainly not in the time it’s taking to swim another 25 meters. So, but we’re doing an aerobic activity and so it takes an absolute beating with the limited blood supply. But honestly, the fitter you get, the more often you swim, you’ll notice this problem dissipating. So for example, if I’ve been out swimming for a little while and I start being a little bit cramped towards the back end of the set, maybe 3000 meters in, two and a half to 3000 meters in. Then as you get fitter, I’ve pushed out to 7000, 8000 meter swim set and I’ve had no cramp at all. But, all the buildup through the weeks up to that it’s been coming later and later and later until the point it no longer matters because you’re swimming your distance without any issues. So my advice is stick with it.

Andrew: And that Will– I just want to say that exactly mirrors my experience with that problem because that’s a problem I have. Almost every single session my calves will start cramping and as I was getting ready for Ironman, all of a sudden you’re in the pool more regularly and you– yeah. That starts happening later and later in the set to where it just stops happening all together. So definitely agree with you there.

Will: Yeah, so goggles. Honestly smaller goggles as a rule which are not necessarily popular, but are better. They’re a better fit. You know your vision maybe is not as good as the wider goggle, but the fit or your eye soreness is better. Because most people’s skulls are different to make it harder to create a seal, but most peoples eye sockets are quite similar. There’s a little bit of a difference that comes to the bridge of the nose. I have a big nose bridge and consequently it’s important for me to switch out from the generic nose piece that comes with the goggles, right? And most of the goggles that come outside of your face, you can’t adjust the nose piece. They tend to be molded and if you are having a problem with a good fitting goggle, step away from the single mold goggle and look so you can have an adjustable nose piece or something like that. But it is very, very personal. My particular brand, but the particular model that I’ve been using for years I can actually take the straps off, put them onto my eyes and do a sprint 50 with a tumble turn.

Andrew: Wow.

Will: And you know, now that’s not going to happen for everyone. But what I’m saying is trial and error. They aren’t cheap necessarily, but maybe you can swap some goggles with your mates to get a good idea of what’s a good option for you. If your wallet’s looking pretty fat this month then maybe look at some of the 3D printed ones that you can get now. But do be aware that they are no more durable than the cheap pair so, you know, you’re setting yourself up if they’re wonderful for extended expenses. That sounds a lot like triathlon, but yeah. Then finally shoulder pain. As long as it’s not from poor technique, which it might be. So a really common issue for shoulder pain particularly you’ll find it right on top of the shoulder joint where the sort of end of the shoulder girdle, which is your rotator cuff, right and it can be from a thumb entry. We see this from swim teaching 80’s and 90’s where people enter with the thumb and do this like, what’s called like a half keyhole shape to their stroke and that puts a lot of pressure on the shoulder and can be really detrimental. Actually some people end up with surgery. Don’t do it.

Andrew: Wow.

Will: So yeah, correct technique and if it’s not that then we talk about normal recovery methods, right. Good balance of protein in the diet, 2 grams per kilogram of body weight. Good cooldown, right. Just because the main set is over, don’t rush out of the pool. I know time is always tight, but use the cooldown. Even there’s a lot of science suggesting that a really hot shower, extended shower after a swim workout is good for helping dissipate the waste products and some light stretching. Infrared clothing and making sure that it’s not one of these brands that just coats it with infrared, but they actually have it in part of the molten resin stage like Kymira do that. Pool standing. Pool standing is really, really effective. It looks a bit weird, but it’s really good. Basically you just need to stand there with your head above the water as long as your neck is covered and it raises your heart rate about 10%, again a human reaction to water, but it’s great because what you’re trying to do with recovery is increase the blood flow to the various muscles. So that can be super useful and then just some little light active recovery work, but wear your sore shoulders, providing it’s not from injury or from bad technique, with pride. You know, you put the work in and you’re going to be massive in your tri suit.

Andrew: Joanna and I actually use the same model of goggle…

Joanna: Don’t tell people!

Andrew: …because actually–

Joanna: Don’t tell them.

Andrew: What was that?

Joanna: Don’t tell them. They’re going to buy them. Prices are going to go up.

Andrew: Jo, there’s plenty to go around and it’s funny because it’s not a brand that I see very often at triathlon events, but I was watching the last round of the Olympics and I noticed, like, oh man. A lot of the American swimmers have Arena goggles so they’ve got to be good goggles if the Olympians are using them and they obviously are using the more pool variation, but I was like let me see if this brand has tri goggles and sure enough they did. I ordered a pair and it’s the first one I’ve found that I do not really have leaking problems. And obviously to your point Will, everybody’s face is different. So those work for Joanna and I. They might leak or not get a good seal on Will. So you’ve got to find what works for you for sure. I love your idea of swapping with your mates and seeing just kind of what could work for you before you buy it and spend a lot of money, but anyway Jo, anything to add there on those three kind of pain problems that Will just walked us through?

Joanna: The one thing I find with a lot of my athletes is vision problems. So as much as we want a smaller– I do agree with Will. I think they’re a better fit as far as some of the smaller types of goggles. A lot of my athletes, a lot of them are older, struggle with sighting and vision and I have found that the Arena that we use, it’s impeccable. I mean, they are amazing sighting and they’re an anti fog which is awesome too. If you can find a one swipe goggle that you can– whatever product you tend use, once you clean them and start the race they’re not fogging up on you, that’s huge. It all comes back to if we can’t see that’s unnerving and then we’re off course and we’re nervous and our heart rate goes up if we’re not comfortable. So I think it’s very important as Will was saying is that you know, you have to find what works for you and you need to practice in those goggles in open water and make sure that you don’t have any issues with them.

Andrew: I just pulled it up to confirm the name. Joanna and I use the Arena Cobra…

Joanna: Cobra Tri Swipe.

Andrew: …triathlon goggles. Yeah. They are great. They’re actually on sale right now.

Joanna: Oh.

Andrew: So anyway. Go check those out.

Big swim problem #10 is not improving in the water and being unable to identify why. Swimming is so technique based, fitness improvements can only help so much. How can a triathlete get unstuck in their swim improvement? Coach Jo, what do you think?

Joanna: Um, I’m going to make you all repeat this statement. I have my athletes– This is the holy grail of swimming. There has to be proper form before fitness. There has to be form before fitness. I get a lot of athletes that come to me talking about that they’re just stuck. They’re plateaued. You know, three things we have to know. Three things are truth. We have to find proper body position in the water. We have to find balance. We have to reduce resistance. That is how you’re going to be a faster swimmer. You could swim 50,000 yards a week and could be perpetrating bad stroke, bad habits. You’re never going to get faster. So I have athletes that come out of Pool School and coach’s orders, I’ll say “I want you for 12 swim sessions to do the Pool School drill sequence. I want you to drill for the prescribed time the entire time. I want it to become your norm.” The tricky thing is about establishing great form, reducing resistance, getting very comfortable with a fast stroke, it’s hard to learn that in the water. It’s much easier to learn body position and balance if we’re in a very stable environment meaning, we’re on the dry land. You know, if we can take away breathing, if we could take away all of the other sensory deprivation that we find in the water and have you establish muscle memory; what your arms are supposed to be doing, how your body is supposed to be rotating, where your head is supposed to be positioned. If that can become ingrained in you on dry land before we put you in the water, you’re going to establish good form and that’s going to carry over into the water and you’ll be able to drill and work on it and that will become your normal stroke which will be a faster stroke.

Andrew: Yeah, sounds great and I know Jo for a lot of these questions today when I was asking, okay, how do you solve this problem? How do you solve that problem? You could have just said “Attend TriDot Pool School.” So I complement both of you, Will as a TriDot Pool School instructor yourself over in the UK, both of you could have– We could have had this be the fastest podcast ever just by saying, “Yep, go to TriDot Pool School and it will solve a lot of these problems for you.” So Jo, before we call it a day I would remiss if I didn’t give you the opportunity to properly plug TriDot Pool School as an answer to a lot of these problems. What from this list specifically do you feel like people could really get a handle on just by attending TriDot Pool School instead of just fighting for session after session after session on their own?

Joanna: Well, I think it’s you know, going back to the instructional method. I was a swim instructor for 20 years and I’m guilty of it. I would have whether it was a kid or an adult, the way I instructed on swim was always flaw focused. It was always “Hey, I see their arm crossing over. Hey, I see their head is too high.” and then I would put a bandaid on it. I would give them a drill or something to fix a symptom, but I was never addressing the root cause of what was going on. Their body was not in the right position. They weren’t balanced and when we established TriDot Pool School over a year ago, the whole concept was different. It was we were going to build stroke from the ground up or I say from the pool side off. We are going to establish the basics of the stroke first and so it is definitely we looked at how the body functions and then we applied form and that has been a huge difference in how we teach swimming. You have to look at what the root cause of the problem was with a swimmer and not just what a symptom was in their stroke. So it’s very innovative. It’s a totally different type of instruction. What I mentioned before was there hasn’t been an instructional method that said, “Hey, I need you to do a couple of weeks of dry land exercises.” You’re like “oh man I feel like an idiot. I’m on a yoga mat in my house.” You know, trying to practice a high elbow and all the terminology that we use at Pool School. We want them to do that work first. They’ve got to do the work so that they’ve already established some muscle memory and what their arm looks like when it enters the water. Then they come to our in person workshop and we still continue to have them do dryland work, but immediately put them in the water to practice what they’ve learned and it absorbs. It gets ingrained in you. It changes your stroke and that has been– It’s been revolutionary. And I will say one more thing. One more thing because I have gotten a lot of comments about the cost of Pool School. We invest astronomical amounts of money in the type of bicycles we ride and in the type of races we do. We are constantly paying race fees and entry fees. If people would invest, and it’s really just a percentage of that, in their stroke they would be super happy. The benefits they would see are really crazy across the board.

Andrew: Yeah, absolutely and it’s definitely an investment in your swim for sure. I think a lot of people see that it’s a weekend clinic and think it’s a lot for just a weekend of swimming, but to your point there’s weeks of homework leading up to it. There’s weeks of follow up on the back end. I think we can tease this. Our software team is working on bringing Pool School drills into the app for athletes once you go through Pool School. Your drills in the app will be refined just kind of knowing how far you advanced in Pool School while you were there. So it’s definitely buying into a system that is going to overhaul your swimming as opposed to just– It’s not just two days in the water with coaches, which to be fair would already be worth quite a bit.

Will: So yeah, the other thing that doesn’t really get spoken about as much, it’s all about performance which is great, but actually we’re seeing a huge reduction in anxiety.

Andrew: Wow.

Will: One of the reasons we don’t go to the pool is because we’re nervous to get into the pool. They’re anxious starting.

Andrew: Sure.

Will: And what Pool School does is it gives people this toolbox of very easily repeatable drills and a way to rebuild up their stroke and it takes that anxiety out. Before they know what they’re doing, they’re swimming and they’re swimming really well. So it’s a super friendly environment. I can’t recommend it enough.

Cool down theme: Great set everyone! Let’s cool down.

Vanessa Ronksley: Hello there everyone. I’m Vanessa, your average triathlete with elite level enthusiasm and I’m honored to be sitting here with Alex Hamlow who will be sharing a coach cooldown tip. Alex grew up on a cherry ranch in California and is over the top inspirational. He is the president and CEO of Hamlow Servant Leadership which provides healthcare companies with coaching, systems, and development plans. He is also president and CEO of the Candi Hamlow Memorial Foundation which launched in 2022 after his wife’s passing from cancer. On the triathlon side of things, Alex has been involved in the sport for 37 years and he’s competed in over 150 triathlons and more than 20 ultra marathons. He has sat on top of the 70.3 age-group podium, he is a seven times USAT National Championship age-group qualifier, a 70.3 age-group qualifier, 30+ 70.3 finisher, three time 140.6 finisher, and many ultra marathon top three age-group finishes. Alex has been a triathlon coach since 2011 and started coaching with TriDot in 2022. He likes working with slow or fast intermediate and experienced athletes, experienced single sport cyclists and runners looking to get into triathlon, and I can only imagine with all of his racing and coaching experience he knows a thing or two about nutrition and hydration for endurance sports. Welcome to the cooldown Alex.

Alex Hamlow: Hey Vanessa. I’m so glad to be here. I can’t wait to get into it.

Vanessa: Me too! Something that most people don’t know about you is that you previously weighed over 325 pounds, gaining 140 after suffering a brain injury when you were hit by a drunk driver. I’m imagining that this was a life altering event for you that came with quite the recovery journey.

Alex: Yeah Vanessa, it sure did. I was nine years plus into the sport. I was thinking, like most people, I was on a ramp. I was invincible. I had actually really got into 70.3 in the last few years and was on my way to Ironman full and then this event, this tragic thing occurred. I was essentially stuck with the brain injury and unable to raise my heart rate or do anything of any kind of activity without severe consequences to brain swelling. So I gained the weight because I was used to eating. I was an athlete. I was also depressed from not being able to do all those things. You can name all the reasons and all the things, but in the end it was almost five years before I was able to clearly do activity and not actually suffer the consequences of the brain swelling. So it took a year to drop the weight and within that year I literally had dropped about 130 pounds and started racing again and I’ve been racing ever since. What’s amazing is while it was like starting from scratch when I began to train again, I was able to meet and surpass all the goals that I had set many years before in the sport. You know, you heard from the preamble, I’m not done yet. So super excited to share that journey and give people any kind of inspiration. You know, you’ve got to have grit. You’ve got to have determination and nothing can stop you if you have those things. Yeah. So more power to all those out there that I know have even been through more difficult circumstances. But yeah, I’m excited for the journey ahead and so grateful to still be able to do it.

Vanessa: Yes. I fully, fully believe that you are an inspiration to so many people out there and thank you for being so vulnerable and sharing your story with us. And I’m also excited to hear what tip you have for us today.

Alex: Yeah. Well I want to talk a little bit about cycling, handling…

Vanessa: Yay!

Alex: …for the tri for the TT bike, but most importantly I’m going to actually talk about something that’s rarely discussed and that is low speed handling and avoidance of situations that you’re likely to occur when you’re in the sport of triathlon. Most people work on bike handling, comfort in the TT position. It’s obviously awkward. It’s different. I’ll just make an assumption and set that aside. That’s one thing that obviously needs to be worked on. One thing that gets overlooked is that there’s two– People need to talk by the way about mounting and doing all those things. I’m not going to talk about those. What I’m going to talk about is how do you actually deal with when you have to slow down quickly and you have to deal with some impediment or get around something or a change in the course or what have you? How to practice that is really simple. First of all, what you need to do is find a safe place, usually a parking lot works really well for this. Morning where it’s a parking lot where the businesses aren’t open yet, but they have those islands and nice little areas and wide berth and good pavement. The best thing to do is pick one of those corner islands and you take the straightaway and you literally take that turn as you would normally take it at whatever comfortable speedo have. Then you do it again at half that speed. Then you do it again at an even slower speed and once you’ve mastered the ability to actually make those 90 degree turns both directions at lower and slower speeds, the next thing you’re going to do is you’re going to actually practice clipping out on your inside foot and you’re going to do the same thing except you’re going to keep the one inside foot unclipped. Because the biggest thing you have to realize is that when you come up on a situation clipped in your pedals and all of a sudden you need to slow down, you’re going to make a decision whether you’re going to have to move to the left or move to the right. You’re going to be slowing down at a lower speed. Whichever way you’re going to have to go, that leg you’re going to need to be able to clip out of the pedals so you have ultimate control as you make a low speed turn. You might even need to put your foot down, but you’re out of the pedals. You’re not going to fall over. You’ve got to practice pedaling around a corner with one foot clipped in, the outside foot, and one unclipped so that you can balance your body at those low speeds around those tight turns. It will serve you well in just regular circumstances, but more importantly in a race or in a difficult training situation you’ll have much better control of your bike, your person and a few less abrasions on your knees, legs, arms, elbows, and all of those things.

Vanessa: Yeah. I have one question for you about when you take your foot out of the pedal. Do you rest your foot on the pedal like behind where the clip is on your shoe, or do you just keep your leg extended? How do you do that?

Alex: That’s a great question. So when you’re going straight you absolutely rest your foot on the pedal just unclipped. But as you make that slow speed turn or even medium speed turn, let’s say it’s to the right, that means your right foot is unclipped, then you actually let your foot naturally and loosely dangle next to the crank arm.

Vanessa: Got it.

Alex: And that way as you maneuver the bike, your leg will actually naturally be dangling, not dragging on the ground, but not actually interfering with your pedal and therefore if you need to put your foot down it’s ready to go, but you’re loose and relaxed on that side so you’re not going to just fall over if all of a sudden something happens even further in front of you. So it’s just a great tip to practice riding around tight corners like that at lower speeds both clipped and then unclipped.

Outro: Thanks for joining us. Make sure to subscribe and share the TriDot podcast with your triathlon crew. For more great tri content and community, connect with us on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Ready to optimize your training? Head to tridot.com and start your free trial today! TriDot – the obvious and automatic choice for triathlon training.

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