Yeah, Coach Ziggy, Good for You, But What About Real Triathletes?

I've been getting quite a few comments already, both online and offline. This is to be expected with a topic like swimming.

A blog like this can rub a lot of triathletes the wrong way, because the swim gets tangled up with your ego, your race-day fear, and your sense of whether you're a "real" athlete. So to have somebody telling you how to fix your swimming, when they don't even know you and they started at age four!? Forget it!

But wait. First of all, Coach Ziggy is not judging you. He likes you and he is here to help.

And then there's the issue of our different backgrounds. Perhaps you feel alienated because you read Coach Ziggy's Own Story and saw that he started competitive swimming at age four and had a thirty-year head start in the water.

It's Not About When You Started

Don't worry! It's not a contest of who started earliest or who has the prettiest stroke. It's a contest of who can start training correctly right now and get faster in the surprisingly near future.

On top of that, not every person is a good candidate for the TRI Swim Club way. If you swim big yardage 6 days a week purely because you love it, wonderful, keep going. But what I keep finding every time I meet new triathletes, is that a surprisingly large number of them do have a perfectly good engine, a bigger aerobic base than I had at their stage, built on the bike and the run, yet they all seem to be just barely surviving the swim.

Others are genuinely strong athletes, the kind who crush the bike and run, yet STILL come out of the water gassed, minutes down, and dreading the next race. These people are really a key part of my target audience.

These are the people who have the power to start feeling like the front-pack swimmers they never thought they could be, instead of being a slave to the same slow, exhausting swim year after year.

Train With Precision Now

It is commendable to build yourself into a strong triathlete as an adult. But most people manage to build a swim habit that burns energy as fast as it comes, and never gets any faster.

If you are one of these people, you're in the right place. Because although I did start at four, the big difference between you and me isn't the head start. It's that I was taught to train the swim like a swimmer, and you never were.

That is, having grown up in the sport, I can't help but see every set as a precise tool aimed at one specific job, recovery, or skill, or speed, or endurance, never a random pile of meters. So I make certain decisions differently and get the same result, a genuinely fast swim, at drastically lower cost in time and energy than you're spending now.

You Can Make A Change

I started this blog figuring that surely these methods could be boiled down into a nice periodic column. And here we are.

So to the people who are asking "okay, but can someone like me actually do this?", I can only say "Read on."

I've got a big list of future articles already written and more on the go, and I'm taking every comment and question and writing them up with all my might. No drill or set or strategy will be spared. You'll reject some of my ideas and maybe outdo me on others (and then I'll copy you!).

But the bottom line is if YOU, adult-onset triathlete, make some of Coach Ziggy's recommended changes to how you train the swim, you will get fast surprisingly quickly, and you'll enjoy the process immensely.

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