Don't Panic in the Pool

It was about six years ago that I did my first triathlon, and six years feels like a really long time ago. For me I thought that the swim would be the easy part of training, but I learned all too quickly that having grown up swimming in lakes and open water was a heck of a lot different than swimming in a pool. My first swim in an indoor pool was a total disaster. I had a panic attack. Swim cap, goggles, walls in the pool, chlorine, no way out! I thought I was going to die. It took a lot of practice for me to get comfortable in a pool and couldn't wait to get outside and into open water. I do realize that I'm in the minority of triathletes that feel this way.

Pete working on stroke entry with Randi

For Randi and I, the challenge would be different. The little vision she has is limited shadows and color, limited vision means in what and in what terms? Would she be able to see the lines at the bottom of the pool? I had no idea. Would she be able to distinguish the end of the swim lane? Who knows?! Just navigating the maze that is the downtown YWCA locker room was going to be hilarious. Then we were to get in the pool and figure out how to swim knowing that we'd eventually be tethered in some way? Screw that?! I mean, hell yeah! But for someone like me, her tether - what does that mean? It means nothing! I'm not blind. I have absolutely no concept of what she's experiencing.

While Randi said she could be tossed in a pool and not drown, she gave little credit to herself as to  how much she could actually swim. The first attempt was going to tell me everything. We started simple, down and back with the kick-board. It went great. No one died. Keep in mind that I'm not a swim instructor. What I learned about swimming was from an expert, but how teach swimming is not my forte. But as a personal trainer I can break down the motions into basics, and since Randi and I have run together, why couldn't we swim together?

Before we got into the logistics of how we'd tether ourselves together, she just needed to get from one end of the pool to the other, and be able to repeat that a million times. So twice a week for the next few weeks and her stroke-form and efficiency skyrocketed.  And no one drowned. What she was able to command her body to do in the pool had taken me months all those years ago. Her body awareness is that of any athlete, excellent, once she knew what queues to take. However, the very unexpected struggle she's had has been endurance. Swimming takes charge of the whole body as a system, unlike any other sport. Our swims have been shorter and her endurance is catching up. The strength is there. Her form improves every time we get in the pool. And thank goodness she's patient.

The issue of how we'd connect to each other during the race has been the big question. Think about this: we swimming about a mile in open water with a hundred other people, they don't know that we're tied together. We've
done some laps where I would swim in front and she'd tap my feet with each stroke. That seemed reasonable, but we still needed a string or some mechanism to connect us. The open water chaos of a triathlon swim means we MUST be connected or we WILL lose each other. The toe-tap technique was fine, but it limited our ability to actually get our workout completed. For the time being we're swimming back and forth independently, warmup, kick board, pull buoy, sprints, the whole 9 (or rather 50) yards. The great part is, Randi has never panicked, not once. Panicking in the water really sucks. She's trusted that I woke let her drown or at least trusts that the lifeguard at the YW won't her drown.

I think that our first attempt at a tether might be around the ankle. That's right. The ankle. But this seems to make the most sense. This week, our work will be to swim side by side and get our rhythm down, before we tether. We've got about 14-weeks, we'll figure it out.... right?