Way harder than I expected

In April I was on a beach in Mexico. The marathon was 30 days out. The Ironman swim was 527 days out. Up to that point I had done zero open-water swims in my life.

I planned the vacation. I did not plan to swim.

Three days, three swims, 1,561 metres total. I came back to Alberta with one sentence in my notes app: way harder than I expected. Lots of work to do.

This wasn’t a training-camp post. It was a planned taper-week vacation with the marathon coming up, and the ocean happened to be right there.

The Ironman is October 3, 2027 — Barcelona. I’ve been training for the run since January. The bike I’m just starting. The swim, until last week, was a thing I told myself I’d handle later.

I didn’t bring goggles. Once the idea hit me, I walked into the resort gift shop and bought a pair. 550 MXN, which hit my credit card as $44.55 CAD. I have no idea if that’s expensive. I’ve never owned goggles. I’ll find out what a real pair costs when I buy one.

Water was 28 °C. The trip wasn’t going to swim itself.

Three days, three swims:

• Apr 24, Benito Juárez: 638 m, avg HR 128, SWOLF 72.

• Apr 25, Isla Mujeres: 204 m, avg HR 128, SWOLF 76.

• Apr 26, Isla Mujeres: 720 m, avg HR 147, SWOLF 104.

SWOLF is a swim-efficiency number: strokes plus seconds per length. Lower is better. Fewer strokes, less time. Pool swimmers chase a SWOLF in the 30s and 40s. 104 is what happens when a guy who learned to swim at 33 tries to swim long for the first time.

Quick read of the list: the further I went, the worse the numbers got. Heart rate up. SWOLF up. Both pointing the same direction.

Two things the list doesn’t show. On the morning of swim three I’d already run 6 km through Benito Juárez before breakfast. So I went into the longest swim with a moderate-effort run already in the legs. And swim three was off a boat we’d rented for the day with family. The kids were snorkeling. I’d swim a lap out, swim back to the boat, hang around for a few minutes, then do it again. I forgot to pause the activity. 720 m is real swim distance — but it’s stop-and-start, not one clean structured effort.

The ocean doesn’t have lane lines. You can’t push off a wall. There’s no black line on the bottom. You sight by lifting your head every few strokes to find a buoy or a shore, and every time you do, your form falls apart.

Sighting is the part nobody tells you about. In a pool, you breathe to the side and you’re done thinking. In open water, you lift the front of your head every six to ten strokes, find your line, drop your face back down, and somehow don’t lose your stroke rhythm in the half-second it takes. I did it badly. I still went off line on every length.

Salt gets behind your goggles. The taste is in your mouth for the next hour. Waves don’t care about your stroke timing. The bottom isn’t always there.

On the longest swim, my HR climbed to 147 and stayed. 147 is tempo for me on a run. I had no business hitting that in the water. Stroke distance tells the same story another way. Session one: 1.47 m per stroke. Session three: 1.12 m per stroke. Same body. Same goggles. Longer effort, with stops in the middle, made me worse.

The Ironman swim is 3.8 km in one go. My best last week was 720 m, broken into pieces, in calm water, with a beach 50 metres to my left.

That’s 5.3x the distance, on a worse day, in colder water, with a thousand other people kicking around me.

I have 16 months.

The pool is going to be a regular thing in a way it wasn’t before. End of May I’m buying a wetsuit. June 4 is when I start lake swimming. Sylvan Lake gets the first Alberta open-water session of my life. About an hour from home.

After that, it’s just reps.

Here’s what I actually learned. The aerobic base from a marathon block doesn’t transfer to swimming the way I thought it would. Cardio is part of it. Stroke is the other part. I have one of those things and almost none of the other.

Triathlon is three different sports. Being good at two of them is irrelevant on race day in the third one. That’s the part that’s deadly about it. It’s the same person training for three things, and the discipline that built the run has to do the same job in the water.

Same daily showing-up. Different stimulus.

Next week: why I read a TFSA briefing every day, even on race week.

Reply and tell me the part of your race calendar that scares you most. I read every one.

— Kiegan