Segment 2 showed me sharing the pool with a single ‘human swimmer.’ The underwater view revealed the critical differences that allowed me to travel twice as far on each stroke. The most significant is that Perpetual Motion Freestyle (PMF) prioritizes active streamlining, while human-swimming prioritizes pulling and kicking.

We showed that contrast to illustrate that swimming ‘like a human’ is normal . . . a relaxed and streamlined stroke is a learned skill. From 1966 to 1991, I swam ‘like a human’ too. I only began learning PMF at age 40 — and have continued improving my form for 20 years. Such enduring improvement is possible because human-swimming instincts are encoded in our DNA. However, as the TI coaches and swimmers in Segment 2 illustrate once you learn PMF you replace wired-in struggle with flow.  Segment 3 reveals the starting point for learning it. (Note: One of those swimmers, Dave Barra, completed an English Channel crossing yesterday, Sept 1.)

Humans naturally swim like other terrestrial mammals, head high and limbs churning. PMF consciously mimics the swimming of aquatic mammals (whales, dolphins, walrus, manatee, sea otters) to whom evolution has given a naturally streamlined shape. Another natural advantage of aquatic mammals is aquatic balance – a low-drag horizontal position. The designed-in balance we humans have is vertical – great for walking and running, but a source of drag when swimming.

Thus the first step in learning PMF is to rewire your brain.  This creates new circuits of motor neurons,  which allow us to move differently. Even more critically, it creates new cognitive circuits, so we can think differently.

Superman Glide, illustrated here, begins the creation of motor circuits that guide my head (hanging) arms (wide tracks) and legs (passive and streamlined) into new positions. Cognitively, it replaces the almost-universal sinking sensation with a ray of hope that ‘weightlessness’ is possible. Once I felt the possibility of weightlessness, I gained the freedom to make a conscious choice to use my arms to (i) extend my bodyline and (ii) ‘pierce’ the water instead of churning — an inevitable legacy of the sinking sensation.

Superman Glide and Laser-Lead Flutter, shown in this segment, are examples of a new form of TI drill – called Tuneups – introduced in the Self-Coached Workshop. Tuneups are intended for practice  in short intervals–usually 6 to 10 yards, rather than  full lengths.  They’re designed to narrownly target your attention on an essential aspect of the stroke, making it easier to maintain as you progress to more complex movement and longer reps. They also help you relax when you feel yourself becoming tense or — as human swimmers usually do — working too hard.

For most of this summer I’ve done little fast swimming, largely because an autoimmune condition called polymyalgia rheumatica caused muscle inflammation and sapped my energy.  I made peace with that by figuring this was a good time for restorative swimming.  I turn 60 next March and will likely train with intensity and focus in coming months to ‘make a splash’ in my new age group. Using this summer to recharge my batteries felt like a good thing. But once my condition was diagnosed and properly treated, I felt such relief that I decided to swim my first races of the summer, on August 14 at the Betsy Owens Cable Swims in Lake Placid.

Predictably my results reflected lack of training, a fair 25:09 for the 1-mile, followed an hour later by 56:21 for 2 Miles. Ouch — 8 minutes slower than last year, and over 10 minutes back of my best since age 55.  But I felt better the next morning, when I swam up and down Mirror Lake with Neil Brophy, Bruce Gianniny and Kim Skomra. Our 45-minute swim was a relaxed cruise for Neil, who had  set a new USMS 45-49 mile record of 20:03 and Bruce who broke the 55-59 record (which I had set four years ago) with 22:51. For me it was instructive to see their stroke length.  I couldn’t come close to matching Neil’s (consoling myself that he’s 3 inches taller) and needed to focus intently to match Bruce’s.  Doing so felt strikingly salutary. That was fresh in mind when I resumed swimming in Lake Minnewaska later that week.

New 45-49 record holder Neil Brophy

55-59 record-holder Bruce Gianniny

At Minnewaska, I can monitor efficiency by counting strokes along a 200-yd line. Prior to Betsy Owens I’d been taking an average of about 180 strokes per length, as I tried to pack the two weeks during which I felt healthy again with rehearsals of race-like tempo and effort.

But with the race behind me, and encouraged by how good extending myself to match Bruce’s strokes felt, I’m now striving to keep my average at 160,  a habit I’d had several years ago but had since lost. I soon decided that the best way to prepare myself for the fast swimming I hope to do next spring and summer is to strengthen my neural efficiency foundation by continuing this way through the fall.

Smooth  Stroke, Clear Mind

This didn’t just feel good physically. Striving to reach the end of the line in 160 strokes brought a simpler, clearer focus than I’d had in some time.  After enough practice, a lap of 160 strokes or less acquires a recognizable feel—bodyline sleek and stable, catch patient and firm; even the water around me feels calmer. When any of those sensations feels slightly off, even for only a short patch. my count increases by up to 10 strokes.

Thus I start each length of the line, with a clear set of sensations-to-maintain then spend 3-plus minutes trying to hold onto the feeling . . . and striving just as intently to stay locked in mentally. Such powerful focus has made my swimming more meditative than it had been in a while.

While some may picture meditation as sitting on a pillow in a quiet room, anything you do with great awareness is meditation. “Watching your breath” is meditation; listening to chants is meditation. And so is swimming that’s focused on banishing distraction. Meditation describes any state of consciousness that’s free of scattered thoughts. The key is to choose a targeted focus.

Start narrow. Expand gradually.

Those who have only recently begun TI Practice will find more success by keeping that focus very narrow. Visualizing a laser beam projecting from your head-spine line is one example.  Slicing your hand into a “Mail Slot” is another. As your practice hours mount, your focal points can become gradually more  encompassing or consolidated as mine are.

Shinji - Mail Slot (from OTB ebook)

As your powers of focus — and your neural circuits — strengthen, you can test both by swimming faster. After 90 minutes, over two days, of striving only to hold the 160-stroke-sensation, I attempted some Speedplay practice. (Learn more about Speedplay by reading Chapter 11: Develop Speed Gears with Speedplay of the Outside the Box ebook. See it illustrated in the Outside the Box DVD. )

I began by alternating sets of 10 strokes easy, 10 strokes ‘brisk’ (which means “How fast can I swim without losing the sensation?”) I also monitored how many strokes that added to my count.  When I could consistently complete a length of Speedplay in 165 or less, I began taking 20 strokes brisk at a time. Soon I was sustaining stretches of 40 strokes brisk, with only a slight degradation in the sense-of-control I was aiming for.

This deep internal focus kept me in a meditative state, something virtually impossible while training to swim a particular time., the traditional way to train for speed.

Finally, if you race triathlons, strength of focus gains its greatest power by insulating you from the potentially-paralyzing distraction of hundreds of churning bodies.

Segment 1 of the “Work Less, Swim Better” series showed me moving smoothly through a pack of other swimmers in rough water in the 2006 World Masters Championship. Segment 2 uses underwater video to reveal what was happening underwater as I did. The key points include:

Pierce the Water

Human swimming, exemplified by the swimmer in the next lane, is all about pulling and kicking. His hand goes in, down and back in one motion. As the video shows, I travel twice as far on each stroke, taking 4 to 5 strokes, to his 9 to 10 over about 10 yards. His stroke moves water back, My stroke moves my body forward. One reason is that I use my extending hand to “separate water molecules” (as does the tapered snout of a barracuda) then line up my body to slide torso and legs through the human-sized sleeve I create. That habit – taught in Lessons 2 and 4 of the Self-Coached Workshop – significantly reduces drag so I travel farther on each stroke.

Hold your place

Human swimmers press the hand straight down by instinct – and because they need constant propulsion. When drag is high, you lose momentum quickly, so you have to stroke ceaselessly. Streamlining helps me conserve momentum, which gives me the luxury of more time to firmly trap water behind my hand. My solid “grip” is another reason my stroke propels me twice as far. It also means lets me use the “free energy” of a weight shift, rather than weaker and easily-fatigued arm muscles, as my human-swimming lane mate does. The patient catch and synchronized weight shift are taught in Lessons 5 and 6.

Cocoon of Calm

We all start out as Human Swimmers.  It takes targeted and patient focus to replace deep-seated habits with Separating Molecules and Holding your Place. This not only helps you hold form in  rough water; it also builds powerful focus that converts into a “cocoon of calm” when you encounter a churning crowd in a triathlon swim leg or open water race. Practice like that demonstrated by TI coaches from 2:14 to 2:38 helps swimmers not only accept, but enjoy, close quarters. Even while crowding each other, and intentionally creating contact, none change their form. (Click here for an expanded version of this video .) This builds resistance to the loss of form and focus experienced by many triathletes in the first minutes of a race.

Anyone can learn PMF.

There’s nothing accidental about the form those TI coaches display. Besides the seven coaches in a pack, the three swimming under the bridge, and the four swimmers following the rope all look virtually the same. PMF is the first example in swimming history of a precisely-replicable technique . . .  and one that’s highly effective: All three TI coaches swimming under the bridge — Greg Sautner, Dave Barra and me – have won USMS national open water championships. PMF is a form anyone can learn by following the  step-by-step stroke-building procedures in the 10-Lesson Series.

From Chapter 5 “Different Strokes: Open Water vs. Pool Technique”

While others at Masters workout focused on pool speed, I used every repeat, no matter how short, as a rehearsal for open water races.  On short repeats, most would swim with aggressive, high-turnover strokes – some taking 21 or more strokes for 25 yards, while I limited myself to 15 SPL, regardless of how brief the swim or how hard the coach urged us to swim.

I probably could have swum those sprints faster by taking more strokes. But since my favored races were long open water swims, rather than pool sprints, I preferred to imprint the optimal way to swim during them. On “sprints,” rather than take more strokes, I focused on getting more out of those I took. I felt this would help program my muscles for the faster parts of open water races-–the start and finish. I was unconcerned that my sprints were slow by pool standards, so long as they developed open water speed.

Beyond the question of stroke count, I’d also begun to refine my sense of technique adjustments that minimized fatigue without sacrificing pace, a years-long process that included an unhurried catch, a higher-elbow-but-lighter-pressure stroke, and a patiently-tuned 2-Beat kick.

My goal was to avoid reliance on fatigue-prone arm and shoulder muscles by drawing ‘free power’ from weight shifts and untiring core muscle. This required the patience to work in a longer time horizon: While my pool-mates were thinking about racing to the next wall, I thought constantly about how I hoped to feel during open-water races months-–or years–in the future.

To swim your best in open water you must make a strategic choice to swim in a way that could slow your pool times, at least on shorter repeats — and, during a period of adjustment, possibly on longer ones as well. However, any swim that lasts over a minute should benefit fairly quickly from the reduced energy cost of Perpetual Motion Freestyle.  But first, you must be willing to defer the immediate gratification of short-term speed for long-term gain.

*  *  *  *

Will myelin improve my  swimming?

At 1:23 of the accompanying video, I play a brief clip from the Outside the Box DVD, showing me swimming in the 2006 World Masters Open Water Championship in San Francisco Bay (clip shot by TI-Japan Head Coach Shinji Takeuchi.) It shows me swimming through a pack of swimmers from waves which started 5 to 10 minutes before mine. The difference between my technique and theirs is striking. I explain their struggles as resulting from “not enough myelin.” This excerpt from the Outside the Box ebook explains the significance of myelin.

From Chapter 10: “Increase Sustainability by Secreting Myelin!”

Muscle memory is a metaphor for a physiological change in your neuromuscular system. Swimming efficiently requires a specific set of muscles to be turned on (and off) in an exacting and non-instinctive pattern. With each stroke, an electrochemical signal travels from your brain to instruct motor units to contract or relax. Each time the signal crosses that circuit, a bit more myelin, a fatty substance that acts like insulation on electrical wires, is secreted, strengthening the signal received by your muscles. A relatively faint signal is good enough to keep the movement consistent while swimming slowly for short distances in a low-distraction environment. It takes a strong signal, i.e., a lot of myelin, to remain efficient as your fatique increases when you swim a mile or more at higher speeds with waves smacking you or avoiding collisions with other swimmers. . . . in the rough water of San Francisco Bay, the main difference between me and those I’m passing is myelin secretion. Thicker insulation, laid down during thousands of focused, purposeful rehearsal repeats allows me to swim with virtually the same stroke as in the pool or a serene lake. Lacking it, most others swim with a “barely coping” stroke.

Forrest, an experienced “channel conquerer,” set a Catalina record for a 2-way crossing with this swim. After swimming for just under 12 hours in the Tampa Bay Marathon on April 17, I have a real appreciation for the mental endurance Forrest displayed in swimming for just under 24 hours yesterday and today.

In a second post, Tang Siew Kwan,  TI Coach-Director for Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan, reported, “I swam 7×300 on Osim on Sunday and did 100-200-300-400-500-400-300-200-100 with eyes half closed and focused on relaxation and coordination.”

Tang is training for his first marathon distance, a 20-km (12.5 miles) charity swim at Tioman Island, Singapore on Oct 3o.  (I’ll swim 10km in the same event.)

Tang’s practice method is one that few marathon swimmers consider, but can be critical in helping prepare for what four marathon swims–ranging from 10 to 28 miles–have taught me is the most demanding aspect of marathon swimming. Mental endurance is tested far more than physical endurance.

Coach Tang

One reason marathon swimming demands so much mental endurance is its solitude. In contrast to running marathons, during which you have the company of hundreds to tens of thousands of other runners, and the support of as many or more spectators,

Start of the 2009 NYC Marathon

it’s usually just you and your escort boat. I learned how powerful any human connection is during my English Channel relay last September. During my second leg, teammate Willie Miller came out of the cabin to sit on the foredeck. The mental and physical lift I gained from seeing him there was palpable — and I was only swimming for two hours at a time. Knowing how much I appreciated his presence, I sat there during Dave Barra and Willie’s final legs.

Fortunately open water marathoning strongly lends itself to meditativeness. Not only are you alone, but your field of vision is very limited. Between breaths, you see a field of murky green–or in tropic waters possibly blue. But during a swim of nearly 5 hours across Maui Channel last March, in relatively clear waters, I saw the bottom for only the first and last minute or so, and unvarying blue depths between.

Thus Tang’s strategy of swimming with eyes half closed is highly appropriate. I often find myself involuntarily closing my eyes at times when I focus more intently on a fine point of technique. In yoga, we often adopt a “blurred focus” to increase our inward gaze. Combining that with a focus on relaxation and coordination turns  endurance-building training into a ‘practice.’

The more of this training Tang does, the greater his chances of turning his 7+ hour charity swim into a meditation.

Here I was able to observe the entire field from the leaders, who finished in just over 4 hours, to the final finishers who came in 4+ hours later.  I was struck by the relative isolation of the leaders in this particular race. The top 10 to 20 finishers, were spread thinly, in some cases several minutes apart  for most of the run. Those in the middle and back of the pack were engaged in a much more communal activity – seeming to race with, not against, each other in large, close groups.

I’ve pondered this a great deal since in 30 years of open water racing I’ve mainly been a front-pack finisher and a keen competitor.  This has meant mastering tactics like sighting quickly — and coaching others who swim in open water to do the same.

Thus a message I received this week from Bob McAdams a TI Coach in New Jersey was mind-expanding: “My first real open water swimming experience was last summer, while working with a student who was preparing for his first triathlon.  After some lessons in a pool, we went to a nearby lake with marker buoys.  It was also my first experience in a wetsuit. The temperature was something like 58 degrees F and I was amazed at how well a sleeveless wetsuit protected me from the cold.  I was also surprised to discover it let me float without kicking.

Although I can do sighting strokes, we both found it easier just to pause now and then and look at the shore.  What impressed me the most was the changing scenery.  I remember being struck by the fact that I could actually use swimming to travel somewhere!”

I relate strongly to the possibility of using swimming to travel somewhere you wish to go, rather than ping-pong between the walls of a man-made box. My first swimming urge, at age 7 or 8, was to be able to swim to a floating raft, 20 yards offshore at Bar Beach in Hempstead Harbor on LI Sound. For all my swimming ability at the time, it might as well have been across the Sound in Connecticut. The desire to reach that raft was as strong as any I recall from childhood.

But what Bob wrote about choosing to pause to look at the shore struck me, as never before, as possibly a very smart strategy even for racing, for open water swimmers and triathletes who are new to open water racing. Previously I’d just assumed that we should encourage everyone to strive for early mastery of the quick-peek sighting stroke that top open water racers use.

But anxiety, not inefficiency or lack of speed, is the most common and daunting challenge faced by novice open water racers. One of the best ways to not just maintain calm, but to actually enjoy the experience, would be to do all you can to avoid feeling rushed.

So why not include in your race plan to intentionally pause along the way to look at the shore, the changing scenery and take in — and feel good about — how far you’ve traveled.  The time you’ll add will be negligible (in fact by staying relaxed and avoiding the common tight-chest sensation you could even save time) while the enjoyment you gain will be considerable. And when you do pause, note and appreciate the company of all those you’re swimming with.

Learn more about how to gain greater enjoyment from open water swimming in my ebook Outside the Box.  Read a free excerpt here.

Still, it’s definitely a marathon. What’s a marathon? Well it could be 26.2 miles as in running, but not likely. FINA, the world governing body of swimming, defines any swim of 10km or longer as a marathon – applying the accepted 4-to-1 conversion of run-to-swim mileage. 400 meters of swimming is considered equivalent to a mile of running. Thus 10km of swimming equals 40km of running, which, conveniently, is about a mile short of the running marathon.

In 2002, I swam MIMS as healthful observation of having passed the half-century mark the year before. I set two explicit goals for the swim: (1) To complete an ‘ultra-endurance’ swim with distinctly ordinary training and feel no distress during or after the swim; and (2) To finish the swim in fewer than the estimated 27,000 strokes taken by TI Coach Don Walsh in swimming MIMS the previous year.

I trained for MIMS with no increase in the modest training volume I was doing at the time – averaging about 15km per week. Most other entrants were swimming two to three times as much. My focus was entirely on maximizing my ’swimming economy’ – not just stroke efficiency but profound relaxation. I seldom exceeded a HR of 110 in the 3+ months I trained – trying to ‘program’ my body to rely almost entirely on what was then an ample supply of body fat (I weighed about 20lbs more then, than now) for endurance fuel.

Though MIMS is a race, I swam it in 2002 as a ‘tourist’ – enjoying the sights and experience – pausing frequently to pose for photos with noteworthy landmarks in the background. I completed the swim in 8h53m, 18th of 21 individuals and relays, and – though I was severely dehydrated at the end – never felt significant fatigue and felt completely recovered the next day. Indeed, after drinking 64 oz of water on the 2 hour drive to New Paltz from Manhattan, I felt surprisingly fresh that night.

I swam MIMS again in 2006, with a slightly more competitive orientation. I had trained more intensively leading up to that swim — but had not trained in any particular way for a marathon distance, as my goals that summer were to win USMS national championships and break 55-59 age group records in 1 to 2 mile open water swims.  Again I felt good throughout and experienced little residual fatigue or soreness in the days that followed.

Last year I swam an English Channel relay with training buddies Dave Barra and Willie Miller, mainly to enjoy a ’shared Channel experience’  and to know the Channel first-hand for an intended solo attempt this year.  (Read a series of blogs describing the Dover experience and my motivation for being there, starting with this entry.)

In February I relocated to San Diego for three months of training, in preparation for a planned series of four marathon-distance swims – Maui Channel, Tampa Bay, Catalina Channel and culminating in English Channel. I chronicled the training in a series of posts that started with this entry.

I swim Maui Channel on March 17. It was an absolutely joyful experience (complete with whale and dolphin sightings) shared with my English Channel relay mates Dave Barra and Willie Miller. We completed a 10-mile swim from Lana’i to Maui in rough seas (small craft warnings and alerts of ‘extreme’ surf conditions) in 4h55m. We swam virtually the entire distance 3-abreast, often synchronizing our strokes–something we’d practiced for countless hours in Minnewaska and Awosting lakes at home in New Paltz.  The focus required to synchronize that way makes the distance and time fly. We all felt great in the final mile.

On April 17, Dave and I swam the 24-mile Tampa Bay Marathon, which turned into the most difficult swim I’d ever attempted. I started with a queasy stomach, and had difficulty digesting my planned feeds (Hammer Nutrition’s Perpetuem) beginning in the fifth hour.  During the eighth hour I felt as if my tank was completely empty, an experience radically different from the way my MIMS had gone. This was extremely puzzling, inasmuch as this was the first marathon for which I’d done marathon training.  I finished the swim in 11h46m but was utterly drained in the final miles and felt on the verge of physical collapse afterward.

In the days that followed I understood why. When my queasy stomach, extreme diarrhea and fatigue continued unabated five days after the swim, I sought a diagnosis from Suzanne Atkinson, a TI coach and emergency room physician who was helping conduct a TI coach training session in Coral Springs FL that week. Suzanne told me I most likely had a stomach virus since the day of the swim.
Suzanne explained that during such a virus, the intestines don’t absorb fluids or nutrients as well as usual, meaning that I had most likely become dehydrated and depleted by the 8th hour. I felt better about my swim, particularly that I’d had the will and efficiency to complete the final five miles (in rough conditions) and nearly four hours in that state.

Even so, in the weeks that followed I felt a distinct lack of enthusiasm for continuing my marathon quest. Even before my energy gave out I had not been enjoying the Tampa Bay swim. In part because my stomach was unsettled, and occasionally nauseous, but also because of the lack of  sensory stimulus. The only two noteworthy features in that swim are two bridges, at 18 and 21 miles. Apart from that the only thing to look at all day is the boat accompanying you.

That day I discovered I lacked the particular kind of mental stamina that allows one to swim solo, next to a boat, for a very long day.  I hadn’t experienced that kind of – not boredom exactly, but absence of diversion – during MIMS because the scenery was highly visible, differentiated, engaging and constantly changing.  Besides the famed NY skyline, and countless other features, you pass under 13 bridges, 9 of them close together in the Harlem River, which is otherwise a pretty uneventful stretch, with mostly industrial  backdrops.

As well, for the final 18 or so miles of MIMS, I had an on-and-off experience of being in a race, with other individuals or relays close enough to pace with or try to pass. In Tampa Bay I had that experience for the first 3 hours or so, but the final 9 hours were lonely.

In early May, about three weeks after that swim, I decided that the Maui and Tampa Bay swims were going to be my full complement of marathons for 2010, and I’m undecided whether I might revisit my earlier ambition to swim the Catalina and English Channels in a future year. The initial and most compelling reason was that the TI business had taken a serious hit to revenues during my 3-month marathon sabbatical and it was clear we could not sustain further diversion of my energy, attention or physical presence to train for and swim two more marathons over the ensuing four months.

But the second reason, which became increasingly clear  as May gave way to June, was that I also lacked the appetite to continue marathon training for the additional 16 weeks needed to stay marathon ready for an English Channel attempt in late August.  And that self-discovery, I now recognize, has everything to do with the keen interest I’ve developed this year in how every aspect of swim training — indeed every aspect of life — has the potential to be impacted by conscious choices about cultivating  brain circuits.

In my next several posts I’ll expand on this idea and how it has come to influence so many aspects of where I devote my energy and attention.

Stay tuned.

To recap: Journal reporter Kevin Helliker has swum freestyle for years but a lap or two of Butterfly leaves him exhausted. Noting that long-distance Fly has become a passion for some, he was curious if – after years of no improvement – someone like himself could learn to swim Fly for distance. His sources mainly advised to train much harder – and not just in the pool either.

Steven Munatones, a former world marathon swim champion, and founder of web sites 10kswim and 10kswimmer commented: “There’s a huge surge of propulsion as the arms pull you forward, then a deceleration during the recovery.”

That’s a completely accurate description of Fly as most everyone swims it. It’s also the reason, I’d been unable to swim more than a lap or two for 40 years. At least until I began to think about solving the deceleration problem with streamlining, rather than a “huge surge of propulsion. Watching a Michael Phelps DVD I noticed that there was a moment between strokes when he just held his streamline while allowing gravity to draw him down, then buoyancy to bear him up again. I thought that was something I could imitate.

Challenge Assumptions: Grow Neurons

After an hour of experimenting in an Endless Pool, I found I could keep swimming Fly as long as I wanted. (In the EP, with no turns, so it’s like swimming Fly in open water). How do you overturn 40 years of frustration in an hour? Well, obviously not by doing what you’ve always done.

This is a perfect example of why improvement-minded swimming is ideal for Adult Brain Building. Researchers say that attacking Mental Autopilot – habitual ways of thinking – is a known stimulus for improving brain function.   If you ride a bicycle down, then immediately up, a hill it would make no sense to brake near the bottom. Instead, you conserve momentum from the downhill to help carry you up. So why do swimmers aim for — indeed celebrate – an incredibly costly “huge surge of propulsion?” Isn’t this just like flooring the gas pedal in your car after every intersection?

What made Butterfly-for-Boomers so “tireless” is that it solved the “deceleration problem” with streamlining rather than power. Conserving momentum is obvious in cycling, but not in swimming. Finding flaws in accepted ways of thinking, then developing strategies to act more effectively – followed by Deliberate Practice to convert new thinking into new skills – are proven brain builders.

Engage. Enjoy. Improve.

Another quote from the article seems to position Fly swimming as a poor-man’s alternative to the $15,000 ROM machine that promises you can be fit in just 4 minutes a day. “’Fifteen minutes of butterfly can provide similar benefits to 30 to 45 minutes of freestyle,’ says [Tom] Boettcher.”  For me this hints a bit at the Fast Fitness philosophy (“Washboard Abs in just 5 minutes a week”) which treats physical activity as an inconvenient necessity that we should seek to squeeze in to our busy schedules..

For contrast, there’s the yoga class I took this morning, which brings essential balance to the headlong multitasking outside those walls. Giving myself fully to each down-dog, triangle or tree does to energize me mentally as align me physically. And so it is with Deep Swimming Practice. No longer do I watch the clock. Instead I relish every moment.

As Harvard psychiatry professor Dr. John Ratey wrote in Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain: “The real reason we feel so good when we exercise is that it makes the brain function at its best . . . this benefit is far more important than what it does for the body; conditioning the heart and lungs are essentially side effects.”

In the holistic view, a healthier heart and stronger, more supple muscles become the icing on the cake while flow experiences, habits of mastery and excellence, and a healthier brain become the more conscious goal. Improve-oriented swimming is the perfect vehicle.

Watch Butterfly for Boomers (ButterFrog variety)

Sue wrote back: “My brisk 50 yarders are now like about 46-47ish when they used to be like 43ish. The effort exerted doing the 2BK ones is about ten thousand times (okay I exaggerate) but we’ll say a *lot* less. My two mile swims are now 1:02 vs. 1:01 which seems like a small price to pay. But those 50 yarders are somehow always so disappointing to me.”

Sue’s post makes a revealing statement about what is very likely an almost universal psychology of swimmers. While her 2-mile time – which I think highly respectable – has fallen off by less than 2 percent, her 50 time may have fallen off by 7 to 10%.

Yet the loss of speed in her50 looms so large that she’s thinking about doing something – kicking harder — that would undoubtedly hurt her potential to swim the mile or 2-mile well.  This way of thinking is probably widespread beecause  (1) We  measure our performance by 50 or 100 times far more often than by1-or 2-mile times; and (2) We think of 50 times as reflective of Speed, and times for longer swims as reflective of Endurance.

But Endurance is really Speed — Sustained. And who among us is more interested in swimming fast for a minute or less as opposed to being able to improve our pace for a healthful 30 minutes to an hour or more.

I suggested to Sue that adopting a more expansive way of evaluating her swimming  would be helpful in many ways.

Measuring your swim performance is always good. “What gets measured gets improved“,as the saying goes. But a key question is what to measure. Most people focus exclusively, and disproportionately, on Time. But there are really four key metrics:

Stroke Length or SPL – a measurement of how well you combine streamlining and propulsion

Tempo - as measured by the Tempo Trainer

Effort - Land exercisers use a HR monitor but I’ve found them unreliable in the water and have been well-served with my subjective, but well-honed, internal effort gauge. I like a 5-point scale in which 1 = almost literally effortless and 5 = maximum. I train 85% of the time at 3 or below.

Time - what the pace clock or sports watch tell you.

It has been some 20 years since I only used Time as a measure of my swim performance. I now use at least two at all times. Every week, I’m likely to do sets that include all of the combinations below:

• Time and SPL
• Time and Tempo
• SPL and Tempo

And in fact I always use 3 measures  since I never fail to consider how easy or effortful the swim was.  Indeed if I can do a particular combination of Time and SPL or Tempo and SPL at a 3 effort, on my next repeat, I’m more likely to try to repeat the same combo at a 2.5 effort, rather than try immediately to improve the combo.

Measuring more aspects of swimming, and relating one metric to one or more others will:

Give you more information about your swimming,

Give you more things to focus on improving – and the psychic rewards of doing so; and

Give you a more balanced perspective.

Finally, I emphasized to Sue that I’m not suggesting for a moment that she cannot reclaim those lost 3 or 4 seconds in her brisk 50s. I’m fairly certain that when she begins measuring the things that matter, she could aim to break an hour for her 2-mile. I even suggested she set a goal doing so, possibly at this race I’ll be swimming in August.

For detailed guidance on effective TI Training, see these related resources:

Triathlon Swimming Made Easy Part 4, Chapters 11 to 17

Extraordinary Swimming for Every Body Part 3

The ebook Outside the Box: A Program for Success in Open Water Part 3 Chapters 8 to 12  

• Physiological improvements – the body’s “superadaptation” to the stresses imposed by training – occur during periods of recovery or restoration. In training cycles, you stress the body, then de-stress, in measured ways, to allow stepwise improvements in strength and work capacity. Those who never de-stress limit the body’s capacity to do that.
• Swimming is unique. In running and cycling 70% to 80% of improvements come from increases in physiological capacity. In swimming, 70% to 90% of gains in speed or endurance come from improving the “neural programs” for efficiency. Those improvements virtually always come during easier practice.
• The vast majority of adult swimmers are more interested in swimming well for a mile or more, rather than for 100 meters. To swim well for such distances, you need to feel very controlled, very much at ease, for most of the distance. If you go “hard” it will likely be for just the last few minutes of a swim that lasts 30 to 60 minutes. If you feel as if you’re swimming hard earlier than that, it’s far less likely you’ll be able to sustain to the end.  Thus it makes sense to spend much of your training time rehearsing and imprinting the thoughts and feelings you hope to have while swimming a longer distance, possibly in open water without pushoffs to give your arms a rest.  This is even more the case if you have to cycle and/or run after finishing your swim. Yet on the occasions when I swim with a Masters group, I observe that the great majority of others there, many of them triathletes, do almost everything hard.

Easy doesn’t mean Lazy. Easy swimming is valuable even if you aren’t doing it to recover from the physical stress of harder efforts on land or in the water. It’s the best pace for examining your stroke, improving your efficiency and imprinting new skills. When I swim easily – something I do as much as 80% or more of the time – my practice repeats include one or more (often all) of the following elements:

1. I think about how I would like to feel on a brilliant long swim. In the middle of a 2-mile, 5km or possibly 20+ mile, swim how would I feel if I swam better than I ever have in my life. Not just ease but complete harmony with the water. I strive to make every stroke feel that way, to imprint the movements and sensations of brilliance into my brain, nervous system, muscles and even my psyche.
2. I strive to maintain lower stroke counts, with a feeling of rhythmic continuity, than I could maintain if swimming harder. Once that higher efficiency begins to feel “settled” I’ll increase effort , tempo, or pace very slightly (often with a Tempo Trainer) to test if I can keep the SPL and the feeling of relaxation I established previously.
3. I strive to maintain – and sometimes even improve – pace as I continue for as much as two to three hours, and often as I increase repeat distance.
4. I strive to avoid sensations of fatigue.
5. In sum I try to swim as fast as I possibly can – and yet do so effortlessly and in a way that feels almost limitlessly sustainable.

Kaizen Ease Swimming easily is most beneficial when it’s technically exacting and when you add as much or more mental energy to make up for the physical energy you subtract — when you still strive to swim better than you ever have before, and to leave the pool a better swimmer than when you entered it.