Triathlon swimming made easy by Terry Laughlin Read Free Book Online Page B

end they invariably swam significantly faster, and with significantly improved SL. As a long-distance open-water swimmer myself, I have used exactly the same approach in my own training
    I can tell you from personal experience that it doesn't just work for the youngest and fastest among us, either. Over several years, I have been able to steadily reduce the number of strokes it takes me to swim 100 yards at super-slow speeds (from 52 to 39), to gradually improve my speed at every stroke count (13 spl, 14 spl, etc.), and have dropped my SPL in mile races in the pool from 19/20 to 15/16. This progressive increase in Stroke Length and economy has made me feel much more smooth and controlled at my top speeds. Best of all, it has helped minimize speed loss over my 12 years of Masters racing, from age 38 to 50.
    You're almost fishlike. You've improved balance to save energy, letting the water do work that you once struggled to do. And you've reduced drag with a longer vessel so more of your energy goes into speed instead of making waves. All that's left is the final stage of the metamorphosis: learning how to slip through the smallest possible hole in the water.

Chapter 7
    Slippery Swimming: The Smarter Way to Speed
    I began swimming with aspiration upon entering my first race at age 15 in 1966. As soon as speed replaced fun as the goal of my pool time, I became aware of the gospel: "Swimming is hard." Virtually everything I've heard or read on swimming since has described the price of speed as "more" and "harder." No surprise then that the whole world understands the swimming speed problem in the same way.
    Fortunately the whole world has it wrong. The one non-negotiable, unavoidable, unyielding limit to speed is resistance, not your capacity for long or hard work. There is no workout, wet or dry, that can overcome the amount of drag produced by your body as it travels through the water.
    Consider this: Even Ian Thorpe or Alexander Popov, who swim as efficiently as a human can (gliding 25 yards in as few as six or seven freestyle strokes), use — at best — 10 percent of their energy for propulsion. More than 90 percent is consumed by wavemaking and other inefficiencies. What about athletes who take 22 or more strokes per 25-yard length? They may be spending as much as 97 percent of their energy making waves.
    If you're one of the countless triathletes who find swimming exhausting or frustrating, it's a virtual certainty that drag, not your fitness, is to blame. It's drag that limits human-swimming speed to 5 mph or less, while some fish hit 50 mph with seeming ease. Fish are so much faster because evolution has shaped them to minimize drag. Arm-thrashing, leg-churning humans are almost as ideally designed to maximize drag. And no matter how conscientiously you streamline, just the fact that you swim "like a human" still creates a huge amount of water resistance. But a strategy like one that already works well for you in cycling can make a big difference.

    I've enjoyed cycling for about 40 years, and have always had a general understanding that I could ride more easily when I was tucked over the handlebars than when I was "tall in the saddle." But I didn't fully appreciate how powerfully drag could influence cycling speed until I read that relatively little of a cyclist's energy output actually makes the wheels turn; most of it is spent pushing air out of the way. Thus, as every triathlete knows, a great deal of cycling speed can be created simply by lessening air resistance, instead of laboring to build leg power or aerobic conditioning.
    I recall precisely when I realized drag must be an even bigger factor in swimming. In 1978 in Midlothian, Virginia, I began coaching at a pool with an underwater window. The first time I climbed down to watch my team during a set, I was spellbound by a graphic picture that had eluded me all the years I'd watched swimming from above. Watching my swimmers push off the wall, I could see that the