Swimming straight doesn't matter very much

btorr12 - 2009-06-29 12:01 PM

Maybe I am wrong, but sighting every 75 meters doesn't seem like enough. How often should you sight?

kcb203 - 2009-06-29 12:09 PM

That's my point.  Put your head down and swim.  The little zig-zags of infrequent siting don't amount to very much. If there's no current and you can swim down the lane at the pool with your eyes closed and not hit the lane marker in the fist few yards, you're probably swimming straight enough.

Likewise, if you want to avoid traffic in a mass start and can start 20m to the outside to the first turn buoy that is 500m away, you'll only swim an extra 40 centimeters or 16 inches to avoid traffic

kcb203 - 2009-06-29 12:29 PM There's a lot of emphasis on sighting and swimming straight.  But a little math seems to show me that it doesn't matter very much.  Imagine a 1500m swim course that's a straight line.  The swimmer sights every 75m, and every time, he's off by 15m horizontally and returns to the direct course over the next 75 meters.  That's 10 cycles of sighting and correction of a substantial error in a 1500m race.  The total distance swam would be 1529.7 meters.  If the swimmer swims at a 1:45/100m pace, that's a total swim time of 26:46 as opposed to 26:15 if he swam straight.  It's still 31 seconds, but not the disaster that many make it out to be.  And being off by 15m every 75m is a huge error.  It's as though in a 25m pool swimming with your eyes closed, you end up two lanes over. 

DerekL - 2009-06-29 10:16 AM

You should try that sometime.  You're not going to be 20m off.  You're going to end up all over the place.  There may be a few people who have such even strokes that they can get away with it, but that's not most of us.  If you did that in a pool, you'd probably hit the lane marker before you ever got to the end.

And I don't know about you, but I don't zig and zag.  I zig and zig and then zig again.  Watching others do OWS, that's seems to be the case for most.

kcb203 - 2009-06-29 1:09 PM



That's my point. Put your head down and swim. The little zig-zags of infrequent siting don't amount to very much. If there's no current and you can swim down the lane at the pool with your eyes closed and not hit the lane marker in the fist few yards, you're probably swimming straight enough.

Likewise, if you want to avoid traffic in a mass start and can start 20m to the outside to the first turn buoy that is 500m away, you'll only swim an extra 40 centimeters or 16 inches to avoid traffic

TriMyBest - 2009-06-29 1:17 PM

If I swam at Philly yesterday the way you describe and lost 31 seconds, I would have dropped 3 spots in my age group. 
For someone faster than I am, that could mean the difference between 1st place and 4th.

kcb203 - 2009-06-29 1:17 PM My point in the original post was not that it's not worthwhile to sight often or to swim straight, but that the outcome of not doing so is not so bad for an average swimmer. 

As to the diagram above, it shows a track at 45 degrees to the course, then making a 90 degree turn and cutting back across the course. I think that if you tracked a really crooked swimmer, it still wouldn't look nearly as bad as that example. 

I'm still new to this, but perhaps I'm a preternaturally straight (albeit slow) swimmer.  I did my first OWS on Sunday, and everytime I looked up, I was on course within a few degrees.  I started sighting less and less frequently but never really went off course.  Perhaps I'm just lucky that way.  I did notice that the intermediate buoys were not in a straight line with the turn buoys, and I seemed to be the only one swimming staight to the turn buoy instead of hugging the intermediate buoys.  (It was a clear, calm day, so I had no trouble seeing 500m ahead to the turn buoy.)  But by my same logic, those who swam 20m out of their way horizontally to follow the buoy line only swam an extra meter or so as opposed to trying to follow a perfectly straight line.