Subject: RE: Open Water Swimming Group in Galveston Area? My first year I tried to OW once a week, but it has fallen off to about once every couple of months. The way I understand it is: Swimming is not particularly injury prone compared to running so a lot of the gains can be made in short, hard intervals. Doing long sets is good for confidence and practice, but not as good for building strength and form. Pools have easily measured distances to rate yourself on. 25, 50, 100, 200s are all easy to track your progress against. Open water is much more difficult to measure, even races tend to be short or long. Open water practice is required for a few reasons: - Familiarity and comfort in the open water. There are 1000 threads here on the recent swim deaths, swim panics, swim fears... get over the fear by getting in the water and being comfortable. For me that was a lot of swims at first. Fewer later.
- Wetsuit practice. In houston there are not that many wetsuit legal races, but if you have one coming up getting out in your wetsuit is a good idea, and the chlorine is not good for them. Plus the pools are too warm to do any serious wetsuit practice.
- Sighting. There are no black lines in the open water, no lanes, and we don't always swim straight. Get in the water pick a target and look up once in a while to see it.
- Boredom. The openwater is a lot more fun than the pool.
That said, once you are comfortable with the open water, and get some practice in a week or so before the race you are usually good to go. |