Meet Coach Ziggy

"What do you mean you only swim three hours a week?"

This is a blog about swimming. We'll cover a lot of ground and take plenty of fun detours into training, racing, and the strange things triathletes talk themselves into, but when it boils down to it, we're talking about the swim, and the freedom that a good one gives you.

Freedom from dreading the water. Freedom from that pit in your stomach on race morning. Freedom from watching the pack disappear without you and grinding out the next 3,000 meters alone. And the best way to get you there is to have an opinionated but experienced coach guide you through it. That coach is me, Coach Ziggy.

A Radical New Way

I'm going to teach you a radical new way to think about swimming that pulls you off the treadmill you're on right now, the one where you swim more and more and somehow never get faster. I did it as a professional swimmer, and I do it now with triathletes who have full-time jobs and families and exactly three mornings a week to give the pool. It works. And it looks nothing like what the sport told you.

Here's the feeling I want for you. The gun goes off, and instead of that familiar spike of panic, you go out hard, settle onto the fast feet, and tuck into the draft. And somewhere around 400 meters in, cruising along easy while the water does half your work, it hits you. This is easy. I used to fight this. I used to dread this. And now I'm sitting in the front pack, saving my legs for the bike, wondering why nobody told me it could feel like this.

Where Are You On The Tri Swim Ladder

But let's talk about YOU first. If you're like most triathletes I meet, your swim lives somewhere on a ladder. Find your rung.

I am...

1. Front of the pack. I set the pace, I never get dropped, and my swim sets up my whole race.
2. Solidly in the front pack. I make the fast feet off the start and ride them to the exit.
3. I can make a pack, but only if it isn't too fast, and I have to fight to hold on.
4. I get dropped in the first 400 every time, then swim the rest of the race alone.
5. I just try to survive the swim and make up time on the bike.
6. The swim is the leg I dread. I count down the days before a race worrying about it.
7. I avoid open water entirely and I'm not sure I could finish the swim at all.
   

You Can Fix Your Swimming Too

Your goal is to move up this ladder. And here's the good news, anyone can do it, from any rung. Most triathletes think they're stuck where they are, that they're "just not swimmers," that the swim is a genetic sentence they have to endure. That's the treadmill talking. It isn't true. The swim is the most learnable, most fixable, highest-return leg of your entire race, and almost nobody trains it right, which means the gains are just sitting there waiting for you.

So stick around. Read this blog, do the work, and you'll move up faster than you think.

See you at the front.

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