For most of us Everyman Triathletes swimming is usually our limiter. By limiter I mean the part of the triathlon that limits our performance. In other words the part that we hate. And yes I know there are always a few triathletes who seem to have been born with gills and webbed feet.
BTW: Gills and webbed feet absolutely slow you down on the run.
When I started swimming two years ago the best nautical terms to describe my swim would be barge-like or supertankerish. Today I’m still more tugboat than speedboat but I’m working on it. Here’s how.
My goal here is to improve your swim. I won’t bore you with the best drills to improve your speed, or the newest swim techniques, or my advise on if you should get a sleeve, or sleeveless wetsuit, or if it should be black or blue and make you look like an orca, or a quintana roo (whatever that is) or an Ironman? I’ll leave that up to the experts.
OK... I will bore you with one drill guaranteed to make you drink the entire contents of the lap pool . We did this one the other day in my master class. The coach called it the Egyptian drill. You swim normal freestyle with the exception that you bend one leg (choose your favorite) at the knee skyward (kind of like the dorsal fin of a shark) while swimming and kicking as hard as you can with the other leg. Now this drill is guaranteed to make you sink like a rock while you flail around for your life like a very drunk sailor who never learned to swim.
Why is it called the Egyptian drill? Could the ancient Egyptian not swim? Is this what they looked like after when they fell into the Nile into the waiting teeth of the nearest crocodile? I’ll leave that up to the real swim experts to answer.
Anyway back to my main point; how to best improve your swim? The answer, unfortunately, is the same as how to lose weight: East less and exercise more. With swimming the answer is even simpler and thus more diabolic: Swim more. Period.
With this I mind I have come up with a few simple motivational techniques to get me in the swimming pool that I will be happy to share with you on the next page.