The next time I took up swimming was when I was 21, at college. It was just for exercise, and I think it lasted about two times. The swimsuits the college made you wear were about 40 years old, I wore glasses at the time (pre-Lasik) and was totally blind, and then the second time I went swimming I had a head-on collision with a girl who had decided to share my lane–but without telling me so. I’d like to say that our collision led to me asking her out on a date and we ended up getting married and having kids and a minivan, but no, I was so shocked and annoyed that I just mumbled something to her about physics, got out of the pool, and never came back.

Because of that experience I detest sharing a swim lane. I don’t mind sharing a lake with 1,000 other triathlon swimmers, because we’re all headed in the same direction at a relatively similar speed, but swimming in the opposite direction as someone else in a constrained space gives me the willies and totally throws me off-form.  This morning I arrived at the gym to find the pool full, and some people already sharing lanes. Normally, I go in the hot tub and stretch while waiting for a lane to open up. But a guy waved at me to share a lane with him, and I was caught off-guard because that’s never happened before, so before I knew what I was doing I was jumping in the pool to voluntarily share a lane with this guy. He stayed on the left and I stayed on the right, and that worked out as well as could be, although I didn’t like it.

Then the lane next to us opened up, so I swam under the lane line and started swimming there. It wasn’t five minutes before I was down at the end turning around, and luckily looked down the lane to see a guy swimming in my lane coming towards me. If I hadn’t looked up, I would have collided with him for sure. I had no idea somebody had jumped into my lane and had started swimming. For the next 20 minutes I had to deal with this guy, who apparently wanted to swim a loop, who was much, much slower than I am (not that I’m very fast at all), and whose feet were flailing all over the place. To add insult to injury, the guy I had just been sharing a lane with left just after this guy got in my lane, but another guy came along and grabbed the lane before I noticed. In other words, if I had just stayed in the original lane I would have been better off.

With all that in mind, here are some suggestions for effective sharing of swim lanes:

1. Most important of all, make sure the person whose lane you are getting into knows you’re getting into the lane, and that you plan on sharing it with them. I’ve had one head-on collision and almost had another today. I don’t know if these people assumed I saw them or what, but in the first case I didn’t and in the second case I almost didn’t.

2. To emphasize point #1, don’t assume they know you’re getting into their lane. I wear a waterproof sound system while I’m swimming, so if someone says something to me I cannot hear a thing they say, even if I’m out of the water and looking at them. I certainly can’t hear them if they say something to me while I’m in the process of swimming. If you and I don’t have a conversation, then chances are I don’t know you’re there.

3. Don’t do loops, just pick the right or left side. This means swimming speed doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t make things any worse for either swimmer. There is no purpose I can see to swimming in a loop, but I can see plenty of reasons not to, like me having to stop and wait for this other guy every second or third lap because otherwise I would have to swim around him.

4. Be sensitive to space while passing. I ran my elbow into the wall at least once today because the second guy I was sharing a lane with today was encroaching on more than half the lane and I was afraid his flailing feet were going to kick me in the face.

5. Oh yeah, when you ask someone if you can share their lane, ask them how much longer they have to swim. If they’ve only got 5 minutes, then maybe it’s better to just give them the courtesy of waiting those few minutes, and then nobody has to share a lane at all, and it doesn’t cost you much. I’d rather have the stress of someone sitting in a chair at the end of my lane waiting for me to get out than the stress of a possible collision with someone in my lane.

Thank you for reading and happy swimming to you…unless you get in my lane.

Wetsuit rental generally runs about $30, but let’s say it’s $40 after tax, just to be conservative. If it costs you $40 to rent a wetsuit each time, then in order to break even on a $600 triathlon wetsuit you’d have to wear the wetsuit to 15 triathlons. In the past three years I’ve done exactly 5 triathlons. At that rate, it’s going to take me three years to break even, or if I step it up, maybe two years. And what if I lose a lot of weight (which I am in the process of doing), then my wetsuit won’t fit right in two years!

Now, this is assuming that I never use a wetsuit in my training but only for events. If you are going to use a wetsuit for training then that changes everything, because if you did an open water swim once each week, then you’d break even on the cost in one season, plus you wouldn’t have to keep driving back and forth to wherever you rented the thing from.

For me, given my evolving body shape, my lack of open water training, and the number of triathlons I do per year, buying a triathlon wetsuit doesn’t seem to make sense. If you have a different perspective, let me know. On the other hand, once I get down to my target weight, and if I start doing more open water swims, then buying a triathlon wetsuit is going to start making a lot more sense.

But I certainly wasn’t grabbing the back of my trunks, so I figured it must just be my cheeks or something rubbing together (sorry for the imagery) and rubbing part of the material off. The problem was, I couldn’t figure out whether it was see through or not while wearing them. I would look at the two spots and I could sort of see my legs through them, but I wasn’t sure anyone else could. And I would stand in front of a mirror and look at my behind with the trunks on, but I still couldn’t tell what other people could see. So I went on wearing them.

I kept forgetting to try the jammers on at home so my wife could tell me if they were see-through in the back, and whenever I thought about it I was at the gym, and I couldn’t exactly ask a stranger for help. “Hey, would you check out my behind and tell me if my swimsuit is see-through in the back?” would probably result in me getting my membership revoked, and maybe a new membership on a public database somewhere.

So finally last night I remember and had my wife take a look. “Yep, totally see-through” was the diagnosis. Now the only question is how many people have seen me getting in and out of the pool at the gym and have said “Oh my goodness…does that guy really have a 4-inch wide clear stripe going down the back of his swimsuit?” I guess it’s a good thing I’ve got those waterproof headphones so I wasn’t able to hear anything.

Now that I’ve tried H2O Audio’s waterproof case for the iPod Shuffle (2nd generation) (update: they don’t make this case anymore, but if here’s a different waterproof case for the 2G iPod Shuffle, there’s no doubt about it–this is a far superior product to the Finis waterproof mp3 player. There’s just no contest. First, let’s go over the anecdotal evidence:

1. I can hear. My #1 priority for a waterproof mp3 player is that I can hear and understand audiobooks while swimming, despite the bubbles, my own breathing, etc. With the H2O Audio mp3 player there was absolutely no problem hearing and understanding. I could hear every word clearly, and that was without the volume turned up all the way. With the Finis mp3 player I had the volume turned up all the way and I still couldn’t understand what I was listening to. The only room for improvement I saw was that as I adjusted the earbuds I would sometimes get a crackle, and sometimes one earbud would be quieter than the other until I wiggled it around. Grade: A (only slight improvement possible)

2. Comfort. Nothing is as comfortable as nothing, right? I mean, if you’re going to listen to music or audiobooks while you’re swimming then it’s not going to be as convenient or as comfortable as swimming without a waterproof mp3 player. But this comes pretty close. Once you’re wearing it you’ll notice the player stuck to the back of your head, but it’s the type of thing you don’t notice much once you start swimming, if at all. I’m sure if they put a tiny bit of padding so that it’s not just hard plastic pressing against your head it would be slightly more comfortable, but only slightly. By contrast, I found the Finis player quite uncomfortable, although bearable if it weren’t for the other issues. Grade: A

3. Convenience. I found the Finis player a bit challenging to put on my goggles and then deal with, but the H2O Audio player has been 10 times easier. The box (see small picture in the Amazon ad on the right) clips onto the back of your goggles (it was a little hard for me to get on, but no biggie). When you strap on your goggles you have to pay a little more attention to make sure the earbuds don’t end up tickling your eyes or wrapped around a goggle strap, but nothing too bad.

And getting your iPod in and out of the waterproof case is a piece of cake. There’s a small latch that you open, there’s an earphone plug inside, you plug in your iPod, make sure it’s turned on (so you don’t have to open it when you’re already in the pool and all wet in order to turn it on and risk ruining it), close the box and the latch, and you’re ready to go. The case seems deceptively simple and I was a little worried about it really being waterproof, and about the latch staying shut, but I’ve used it twice now without any signs of leakage, so my fears are being assuaged. It’s all as safe and easy as can be. The only small, small issue I’ve had is that sometimes when I go to shut the case the iPod isn’t settled quite right, and so it won’t shut and I have to open it and make sure the iPod is sitting right. However, thank goodness it doesn’t latch when the case isn’t fully shut or then we’d really have a problem. Grade: A

4. Added benefits. For one, the earbuds also act as earplugs, and I very much prefer to swim with earplugs so that I don’t have to deal with water in my ears. And the player comes with multiple sizes of earbuds, which is good because I found out that I need to use a smaller one in my left ear in order to get the right fit so that the earbud doesn’t fall out. And the fact that it’s not a proprietary mp3 player like the Finis, but rather uses your existing iPod is great because that means I can listen to my iPod on the way to the gym, switch it to the waterproof case for swimming, switch it back for running, and then switch it back for my hot tub time (yes, I wore my goggles on my head in the hot tub, just so I could listen to my iPod while I did my stretching–you got a problem with that?). And…drum roll please…you can buy the H2o Audio waterproof iPod case and a 2nd generation iPod Shuffle for about the same price as the Finish player (which only holds 256 MB of audio, vs. 1-2 GB for the iPod Shuffle).

So when you add it all up, there’s just no doubt in my mind which player is superior.

Room for improvement. To sum up, here are the things that could be marginally improved on the H20 Audio waterproof iPod case:

1. The clip. If it were a little easier to clip on to the goggle straps that would be nice. I found it difficult to get the strap in there, perhaps because I don’t have longer fingernails. I’m not sure how the clip could be changed, and obviously I don’t want the clip to be changed so that the player falls off the goggle straps, but I think there’s probably a way to make it easier to clip on without making it easy to come off.

2. Buttons. The pad on the case pushes the buttons on your iPod inside the case, but the pad on the case is hard to push. You have to push until it clicks, and I was surprised how hard I had to press in order for this to happen. It’s not a huge problem, but I don’t see why it needs to be that hard to push the buttons.

3. Comfort. Perhaps some small padding on the part of the case that touches your head would make the case even less noticeable.

4. Profile. The case feels thick, which affects comfort and makes the player more noticeable. I would like to think they could develop a lower profile case, and perhaps a more hydrodynamic case, so that the push of the water against it would be less noticeable.

However, again, in saying there’s room for improvement, there isn’t much room. On a scale of 1-10, 10 being “very important to improve” and 1 being “not at all important to improve” I’d put all four of these items at a 1.1. I love the product and it works perfectly for what I need it for.

My friend sent me to SwimSmooth.com the other day which, as a triathlete, I found interesting since I’m always trying to figure out how to swim faster while expending less energy. But could I trust Mr. Smooth, if that is his real name? I asked my triathlon coach David Warden, and got the following answer:

All,

Due to the many inquiries I have had on my opinion of Swim Smooth (http://www.swimsmooth.com) from athletes, Tri Talk subscribers, and associates, I hope you don’t mind if I respond to all of you at once!

First, of all the concepts in I coach triathlon, swim coaching is my weakness. I’m very good at scheduling swim frequency, swim volume, swim intensity, and swim tapering, but I am not very good at swim technique. You’re getting the opinion from someone who does not know what they are talking about.

However, here is what I really like about the program:

- Once Mr. Smooth starts his “catch”, his fingers stay pointing down for the remainder of the stroke, even as he starts the recovery. This is something I have not considered or heard of before in swim training, but it really resonates with me. Can’t wait to try it in my swim tomorrow.
- As the hands enter the water, the fingers are lower than the wrist, wrist lower than elbow, and elbow lower than shoulder. In fact, if you look at the top view, this shows up very well as the elbow and shoulder are the last to submerge below the water on the arm.
- Front view shows the hands not crossing the center line of the body.
- Great kick, very little knee movement.
- I like his momentum, very little pause and very little gliding.

What I don’t like:

- His head seems very high in the water. If you draw a line from the top of his head to the top of his butt, that is a significant angle. I question whether any swimmer can maintain that high of a hip placement with the head that high in the water.
- I perceive over-rotation in Mr. Smooth and the hips and shoulders rotating at the same degree. Too much empirical data on improved velocity from moderate rotation and shoulder and hip rotation being separate.
- He does not perform what I would consider front-quadrant swimming. As the recovery hand hits the water, the stroking hand is almost behind the head.
- He appears to breath out the entire time his head is under the water. I’m not a fan of this. Plus, set the stroke rate to 45 (a reasonably paced cadence) and tell me if you honestly think you could breath out the entire time during that bi-lateral breathing rotation at that pace.
- “Mr.” Smooth appears androgynous from the waist down. This makes me nervous. I need clarity in my life.

Overall, a great tool. As mentioned above, I’m going to incorporate the “fingers down” approach first thing tomorrow. I think that people will see in it what they want to see. Like me, it will help them reinforce what they believe to be swim gospel.

David

I have, or had, a problem. I swim at the Lifetime Fitness gym in Sandy, Utah, and I like swimming in the outdoor pool as much as I can because there is part of the pool where you can swim lengths that go beyond the 25 meters of the lap pool area.

But today I received the following assignment from my triathlon coach:

This set will establish your “T-time.” After a short warm-up, swim 1000 yards/meters at a constant pace and good effort—as if racing. Record the time in your log. The average pace per 100 will be called your “T-pace.”
Remainder of workout as you feel.

The problem I have…er, had, I hope, is that I didn’t know how far I was swimming when I swam a length. I walked it out one day, and estimated it might be 35 meters across the whole way, but I was only confident to within a meter or two. Luckily, I’m not as dumb as I look.

Enter Google Maps. I looked up the address of the gym, and sure enough, Google Maps allowed me to zoom all the way in on the pool and get the above image. Now, I know the lanes are 25 meters. All that was left to do was a little work in Photoshop as follows:

1. Measure the pixels for the 25 meter area. Pixels = 220

2. Measure the pixels for the entire distance, including the 25 meter area. Pixels = 340

3. Simple math – (25/220) x 340 = 38.6ish

In other words, the pool would appear to be 38.6ish meters per length, or roughly 77 meters per lap. However, the major problem with my method is that even though I could zoom as far in on the pool as I did, it’s still a fairly blurry image, so I estimate I could be off by as much as 1 to 1.5 feet on the length, and I would like to be exact. So, tomorrow morning what will I be taking to the gym? That’s right, a tape measure. I just know I won’t be able to sleep soundly at night until I know for sure.

Now, there are some problems that actually make this device totally useless for me, although it might be great for other people. You see, I find music boring when I’m training, so I listen to audiobooks instead of music, which I find keeps me quite engaged. Unfortunately, the SwiMP3 is not a very good solution for me because it’s not loud enough. If it were music, then I’d be totally find and would love this thing. With music you don’t need to hear all the words, and most of the time you know the song so if you don’t hear a word clearly you wouldn’t even notice. But with audiobooks, if you don’t hear a word clearly then you’re missing something, and if you’re not hearing one out of four words, then you might as well not be listening at all. That’s the situation I find myself in. If I’m sitting underwater doing nothing, I can hear and understand the book just fine. But once I start swimming, the bubbles and other assorted swimming noises drown out a lot of the words, and I just can’t quite understand everything.

On top of that, I would like to listen to audiobooks while I’m in the hot tub doing my stretches for 15 minutes every day, but with the SwiMp3 I can’t do that because it’s attached to the goggles, and I don’t want to wear the goggles on my head in the hot tub, plus if I don’t actually have the goggles over my eyes then the SwiMP3 is a bit out of place and is uncomfortable and I can’t hear it that well.

One more issue–I use an iPod Shuffle while I’m running and biking, but that means I have to keep my files on the two MP3 players synced manually, which is also a bit of a pain.

So, bottom line–if you only want to listen to music, while you’re swimming and nowhere else, then the SwiMP3 is great. If you want to listen to audiobooks, it won’t work for you. For me, I’m thinking of taking a look at the H2O Audio Interval Waterproof Headphone System for iPod Shuffle since those earphones are in-ear buds that double as earplugs.

I’ve been using Barracuda swim goggles for the past two years, and I liked them. They were better than the Nike goggles and other cheap $5 goggles I tried before. I didn’t have problems with leaking, the fogging wasn’t that bad, and I had a good field of vision. The one problem was that the top of the goggles would push so hard on my temples, right under my eyebrows but above my eye in that soft area, that it hurt quite a bit. It always felt like I had a permanent bruise. But still, that was the only problem I had with them. But I had no idea what I was missing out on.

When I first saw the Aqua Sphere goggles I thought “Ummm, those are huge, wouldn’t that cause a bunch of drag?” But my coach swears by them, and I could see immediately that there wouldn’t be a problem with them hurting the area above my eyes, so I decided to try them out.

The first thing I noticed when I tried them on was that they were super comfortable. Yes, it kind of does feel like you’re wearing a full-on scuba mask, but hey, they were comfortable for sure. My main problem was already solved. As I swam, I had no problems with leaks, nor did I feel like they were causing any sort of drag issue. In fact, when it comes to leaks these goggles seem much easier to seal, perhaps because there’s such a large area that seals to your face. And what a view! I could see all over the place, plus they give you a little bottle of anti-fog solution that I put on per the instructions, and man, that stuff is awesome. I’ve never, ever, swam in goggles that were so clear. I swam for a half hour and there wasn’t a hint of fogging up. I could see better than I’ve ever been able to see by a long shot.

In addition, these goggles are much easier to adjust the strap on than any other goggle. There’s a sort of button on each side that allows the strap to slip through and then lock in place.

So, while I’ve only swam in a few pairs of goggles, I can’t say enough about these. They’re awesome. Go get some.

1. Change into swim gear

2. Shower/rinse

3. Swim

4. Shower/rinse off chlorine

5. Change into running gear

6. Run

7. Change into swim gear

8. Shower/rinse

9. Stretch in hot tub

10. Full shower

However, if I were to run first instead of swimming, the steps would be:

1. Run (I’m already in my run gear when I get to the gym, so I don’t have to change into it at the gym)

2. Change into swim gear

3. Shower/rinse

4. Swim

5. Stretch in hot tub

6. Full shower

In other words, I cut 10 steps down to 6 because I don’t have to do an extra two changes and extra set of showering/rinsing to go along with the changes. So I asked my coach the following question:

Me: How much of a difference does it make to do the workouts in the order you specify? For example, today you had me do swimming, then running. If I had done running, then swimming, would that make a difference?

Coach: In general, it doesn’t matter, but there are some exceptions. The ability to do a quality swim after a run is significantly compromised. The swim requires the most sensitive muscle memory, and swimming fatigued reinforces sloppy form. Always best to swim when fresh. There may be some days when you have no choice, and that is OK, but 80% of your swimming should be when you are rested.

So there you go, it does matter, and this makes sense. I was swimming after my other exercises previously, and once I switched to swimming first, I noticed a huge difference in how I felt while swimming. Whether that will translate into difference in performance in races I don’t have personal experience with yet, but we’ll see.

Swimming in a pool is tough mentally. Not because you need to concentrate, but because it’s repetitive and boring if you’re doing a long distance swim. You can break it up with drills, you can get a waterproof set of earphones and a waterproof case for your iPod (I really, really need one of those), and that can help make things more interesting. But one side effect of the boredom of swimming, for me, is that my mind wanders. It’s bad enough that I’m ADD as it stands, but swimming exacerbates it. This has made keeping track of how far I’ve swum (is that really a word?) an exercise in futility. By the time I’ve swam…swum? three laps, I’m already wondering if I’ve swum two laps or four, and if I need to swim 40 laps then by the time I get to the end of my workout I could be off by as many as 10 laps. My brain just doesn’t seem to see the point in tracking and retaining that information.

Enter the Finis Lap Counter. I bought mine for $75 from a local store about two years ago, but Amazon sells it today for $58. This thing has been a lifesaver. It’s a simple device. You stick it to the tile of the pool wall with suction cups, or if it won’t stick to the pool wall (as is the case with the pool at my gym) then there is machinery so you can hang it over the edge of the pool. No matter what, it comes with all the parts to make it work. There’s a large button on the back, and every time you swim a lap you press the front, which presses the button on the back against the wall of the pool, and that either counts down your laps, counts up your laps, or measures the time of your lap. Actually, it does all that at the same time plus a bit more depending on your settings. For me, I primarily use it to count down my laps and show me my total time and average time per lap and I ignore any of the fancier features.

The only problems I’ve experienced with the Finis Lap Counter is that sometimes I can’t see the display and I have to lower my head to be able to see the numbers. In addition, sometimes I hit the thing but am not sure whether I activated the button or not, which means I might end up swimming an extra lap, or if I hit it again I might end up swimming one lap too few. But these are fairly minor issues and don’t cause me too much annoyance, and in the case of the latter there’s really not much they can do. After all it beeps and lights flash when you hit it, so what more can you expect?

Now it may not be the ideal lap counter. For me, it would be more ideal to have a watch that counts my laps. I have the Garmin 305 which I love for biking and running, but it’s not made for swimming. My ideal lap counter would be a watch that hooks up to my computer, and that can be used for all three sports, and which has some sort of device inside like the iPhone so it can tell when I’m reversing direction so I don’t even have to touch it to count a lap. It’d also be nice if the watch measured my heart rate through my wrist rather than through a chest-located heart rate monitor. I’m not up on all the gadgets out there because I don’t have the money to always be buying the latest and greatest, but if this exists please let me know so I know what to ask my wife to get me for Christmas.