Head Above Water

WU: 4x50(5) 25drill/25swim 25BK/25swim 25drill/25swim 25kick/25swim MS: 100 (10”) steady 150 (20”) 200 (30”) 300 (40) 200 (30”) 150 (20”) 100 WD: 4x50 alternate drill and easy (10”) Total: 1550

Typical Swim Workout

“Pooh, did you see me swimming? That’s called swimming what I was doing!”

Roo, in Winnie The Pooh
A.A. Milne

I was slow to start my swim training for Ironman this year. Whether this was due to insecurity over my imperfectly recovered collar bone injury (possible) or just plain sloth (more likely) I can’t say. The fact is that I didn’t get into the open lake till the beginning of July and now I am trying to make up lost ground. Or lost water.

This season my shoulder joints feel like oars on an old wooden rowboat, creaking and clunking as they rattle around in the oarlocks. My body position is somewhere between pretzel and fetal.

My swimming technique, like my golf game, never seems to get any better or any worse no matter how I work on it. I am slow and passably steady and I will end my days that way. A revered triathlon coach once advised me to think of Ironman as one whole event rather than as three separate ones; meaning, I took it, that I should accept my swim as the talentless mess that it is and concentrate on not exhausting myself needlessly in the water.

And so my strategy for the 3860 metres of the Ironman swim is to keep everything as simple as possible: to aim to move forward in a fairly straight line and to conserve my energy. Of course, this strategy does not get me to the swim finish very quickly. Even at my best I am slow. In fact in my last – and fastest – Ironman swim I was 1975th out of the water, of 2210 athletes. Yet my time was so fast compared to my usual performance that my family on shore, still peering seaward, missed seeing me exit the water and were convinced that I had drowned.

There is so much that I like about a triathlon swim. There are no tires to go flat or heel spurs to become inflamed. Dehydration is rarely an issue. My wetsuit acts as a full body personal floatation device, supporting every inch of me like a neoprene mattress on a water bed. There is no weather to speak of. This morning it was windy, cool and rainy; I swam an easy and enjoyable 2000 metres in the lake, insulated from all elements by the warm, cozy water.

I relish the relative calm during the swim portion of the race, silent save for the sound of my own breath bubbling out of me and the muffled eggbeater swishing from the limbs of the other athletes. The embryonic quality of the water produces a sense of isolation that strokes my solitary nature; no one can talk to me, and vice versa. An old opera singing colleague once told me that she hated swimming; for one thing she couldn’t stand putting her face in the water: “Makes me gag,” she said. I recall that I used to have the same reflex when required to socialize at opening night receptions.

Aside from a little pinch at the apex of my stroke I am not aware of my year-old clavicle injury, which is a relief. All winter I had visions of the whole affair snapping in two again leaving me in the middle of the lake with my left arm flapping uselessly in the waves like a piece of driftwood. So far though, whatever grew back together in the past year has held.

There is a saying that you can’t win an Ironman in the swim but you can lose it. To me, who will in my life never win or lose an Ironman, the swim is a chance to warm up my body and to calm my thoughts for the rest of the day ahead. Twelve hours later, as I try to coax my tired legs to carry me over the last ten kilometres of the run, the brief swim that began the race will be long forgotten; and yet without it, the day would seem incomplete. Whether you are first out of the water or 2210th, triathlon is what it is because of the swim.

So up and down the lake I practice my stroke, my old oars called back to duty for one more year: creak, clunk, splash, creak, clunk, splash.