Moving Your Swim Sessions into Open Water: Everything You Need to Know | Ep 594

And let's get right into these questions around moving your swimming into open water.

So first question, I've got access to open water at the weekends.

When should this go into my training program? Now, this is probably the number one question that gets asked by athletes and by listeners to the show who don't have that direct coaching question.

When should I start moving my swimming into open water? So there's a couple of answers to this.

Either six to eight weeks out from your race day or late spring, early summer, whenever the water's warmed up enough that you can comfortably and meaningfully do your endurance swim in the open water, whichever comes first.

So if you're not racing until October time, I'd still encourage you to get yourself into the open water when the water gets warm enough and gets pleasant enough.

So in the UK, we're just at about that point now where people can get in and do meaningful swims.

Up until this point, this year has been really, really cold.

We haven't had much sun at all.

I was in the ocean surfing back in mid-May and the water temperature was probably the same as it was back in February or March.

It hadn't warmed up at all.

It was still five mil wetsuit weather, which really surprised me.

And it all depends on how much sun we have and how much hot weather we have to warm the water up.

So it's one thing to be surfing where you're sitting on your board and your head's out of the water.

It's a whole other thing if you get in and try to go for an open water swim.

So always as a test of this, when I'm going surfing, I'll get in and I'll swim a few hundred meters and just see how it is.

And without a swim hat on, it was too cold to meaningfully swim.

It was definitely too swim hat weather in the UK in the ocean, down in Cornwall in the middle of May.

So that means most inland bodies of water as well, lakes, are going to be about the same temperature.

It's really, really hard.

As soon as that warms up enough, get yourself in there.

And I'd encourage you at that point... replace your endurance swim with your open water swim as often as you can.

If that's every week and you live close enough to do that, great.

If it's every two weeks, every three weeks, every four weeks, get into the open water for your endurance swim as often as you can.

Now with our athletes, we've got them on coach training plans.