- The next way to be ready for open water.
(jazz music)
Morning trainiacs.
Today we're talking about and getting over
our open water swimming fears.
You know why?
It's because Jacque and Pat and I are about to go swimming
in the Red River for a test swim.
All these years later I'm still a little bit afraid, not
necessarily of open water, I'm afraid of that open water.
But you know what, it ain't just me.
The entire city is afraid of that open water.
The closer we get to the swim and the more people that find
out about it, the more people become afraid for me.
I think they're afraid for themselves.
I don't blame them.
Let's do that swim, we'll talk about how I approached
this swim and how I approached open water back in the day.
Help you, help me, help you.
- We're here, we're gonna go swim around this bend.
This peninsula's a U-bend.
We're gonna hop out here.
Someone just run back at the (mumbles).
(jazz music)
- All that rebar sticking out is pretty comforting.
(jazz music)
Oh there's some hard spots here.
- Well we don't have a choice, we're doing this now.
(jazz music)
- We're averaging 5K an hour there.
- Let's get some heat. - Get some hot, hot heat.
- Are we goin' for breakfast?
Well that calmed the nerves very nicely.
Right up until about the fourth stroke in the water
I was scared, ooh-hoo-hoo.
Now I feel a lot better about
what's about to happen next week.
Open water swimming fears.
- Sunday food dump (mumbles).
- I think I've got six, seven tips for overcoming
your fear of open water, and you're dealing with
a certified professional of fear in open water.
The kid that thought that Jaws was in the pool chasing him,
that was me, yeah.
And like right up until I was an adult and started getting
into triathlon, even being in the pool scared me.
This morning while I was getting ready to go into the river
I was scared, so I think that it's just completely natural
to be afraid of open water.
It's a foreign world.
We don't live in the water.
We're horizontal, we're not vertical,
There are all kinds of reasons to be afraid of the water.
But there's also a lot of good methods
to overcome those fears.
Number one, relax, literally.
You need to relax your body because you're not gonna
be able to overcome the physical force of the water.
Even just a little bit of water is more powerful
than anyone's body.
So when we go out into open water and rivers and lakes
and oceans, the waves are gonna knock us around, and if you
try to fight those waves you're gonna be skyrocketing your
heart rate, your adrenaline is gonna start pumping, your
heart's gonna start like this, oh my god, oh my god,
oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.
All the people around you are gonna start splashing around
and you are going to maybe go as far as having a panic
attack in the water.
So when you enter the water, go in with the mindset
of letting the motion of the ocean do the work for you.
Just go with it by relaxing your body and even though
it's gonna throw off your swim stroke a little bit, your
better off to be loose and relaxed.
Kinda work with the motion of the water
instead of fighting it, much better off for it.
That's tip number one.
Tip number two, this gets a little bit further
into the woo-woo side of things, not eating those.
You don't have to learn how to meditate
and do it every single day.
I certainly find it helpful in life in general,
but if you just kinda study a little bit of the philosophy
of meditation, that it's all about getting out of your own
head and breaking out of those cycles of self-talk
and self-chatter, and learning how to snap your mind out
of that cycle of anxiety, fear, stress, self-doubt, anger,
anything like that that gets you going in your head when
you get in the water and you worry, oh my god,
there's people around.
What's in the water, how fast is this gonna be?
My heart's breathing really hard!
You're gonna be a lot better off because that again,
is gonna keep your heart rate low, it's gonna keep your body
relaxed, and you're gonna enjoy swimming a lot more if you
can break that habit of being caught up in your brain.
It's a scary place up there when you're Taren.
Beet hummus ladies and gentlemen.
(mumbles) Triathlon Kim outdid herself.
The next way to be ready for open water
is to actually practice it when you get in the pool.
There's a number of drills that our swim group starts doing
in the spring, draft set where there's people
in front of you, behind you.
We're doing math starts in a lane.
Instead of talking about it there's just a video that I did.
I always get this backwards.
Video that I'll link to up here that has all of the open
water swim preparation drills that our team does.
Just check it out.
So now let's say that you've learned how to mellow yourself
out, you're not anxious, you've done some swim prep drills,
and you actually get to the race.
If you're still nervous, which a lot of people
are in their first several races.
Probably took me about five or six
to get used to having people around.
If this is where all the action is going in the washing
machine during the race and everyone's lining up getting
ready to smash each other and be the little weekend heroes,
go over here or go back here.
Let everyone go out and just race your own race.
If you get in that churn and you freak out and you've gotta
stop swimming, you've gotta float on your back, that's gonna
take a heck of a lot more time in the middle of your race
than just going off to the side or waiting until everyone
goes and racing your own race.
So you might actually go faster by letting
everyone else go and staying out of that churn.
Fighting the knowledge today.
Now let's say that you get to a race and you actually
find that there's a huge amount of waves that you haven't
prepared for before.
Like I said, number one, relax.
Number two, one of the tricks that you can use is to keep
your face out of the pssh, and the slap that comes
from being in very rough water.
That is what I find actually makes me more nervous,
and if I can stay away from that pssh in the face
everything's gonna be good.
How you can do that is by actually pushing your face just
a little bit deeper in the water and then turning your
body more than you would typically to catch the breath.
So because your face is deeper in the water you've gotta
have a bigger turn, but because your face is deeper
in the water, all those waves are just kinda getting spit
out over the top of your head and they're not pssh,
crashing you in the face.
That actually happened today in the river swim,
and it took me a few minutes to remember, oh yeah, I gotta
get a little bit deeper in the water and not worry about it.
Also, try to time your breaths when you're at the top
of a wave instead of when you're going down
and a wave is crashing over your face.
And then finally the last thing that'll help you get
comfortable in open water is to just get in open water.
The more that you're in open water
the more comfortable you're gonna be.
It's gonna become less of a foreign place to be in.
You're gonna realize that hey, sharks didn't get
me last time, Loch Ness Monster didn't get me last time,
it's probably not gonna get me this time.
However I can't see the bottom of the Red River
and I hear the Kraken might be down there.
Gradually, gradually build up to more and more time,
more and more bodies of water that you're not familiar with.
If you can, do most of your training in a very familiar
setting where you can see the bottom, you can see the shore.
You're not way out by yourself in dark water
that you can't see what's going on around you.
The more familiar, the better you're going to be,
and the more it's going to feel comfortable for ya.
I think that's somewhere around seven.
It was a jumbled seven, but it was seven-ish.
Have I ever shown you, I made this a while ago.
A battery dispenser, camera batteries, microphone batteries,
double A's, triple A's, SD cards that we know are nice
and clean, have lots of room on them.
I was really proud of that when I made it.
Alright trainiacs, go out, swim a lot, get comfortable.
You'll enjoy it a lot.
Once you get comfortable in open water it is one of the most
enjoyable experiences that you can have in triathlon.
Just chillin' out in water, in nature, open water,
and zoning out and getting that meditative groove going,
it's a good time, it's a really good time.
Alright, later trainiacs.