Effortless Swimming

Our guest today is Ben de Rivaz from Breca. Breca hosts swimrun events which take place on trail and open water; team races in pairs wearing wetsuit and trainers, transitioning between running and swimming stages. Join us as we discuss topics about the format swimrun compared to triathlon, why it is appealing to a lot of athletes, different courses and locations and a possibility of a National Championship.

00:19 About Ben de Rivaz

To know more about Breca events, please visit:

Transcript:

Intro:                           Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. The show that helps swimmers and triathletes who love the water, become a better swimmer and                                              live a better life. Here is your host, Brenton Ford.

Brenton Ford:                    Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is Ben de Rivaz from Breca. Ben welcome to the podcast.

Ben de Rivaz:                     Thanks for having me on.

Brenton Ford:                    So Ben, well I heard about you through a mutual friend, John Hancock who is very heavily into swim run events, and you run the Breca swimrun events which … a whole bunch of events in New Zealand and the UK, specifically swimrun events. For those people listening, can you give just a bit of background on I guess your background and then Breca itself?

Ben de Rivaz:                     So my background from a sporting perspective do you mean or?

Brenton Ford:                    Yes. So how did you come to run or to organize swimrun events and I guess some really well known swimrun events now? I’ve got a lot of athletes who come to our camps and come to our clinics and do our coaching, that are doing the Breca events on an annual basis now. So you’ve sort of got something really good going here. So how did all sort of come about?

Ben de Rivaz:                     Sure okay, thanks. Yeah, so my background. I live in London and I used to work in finance. I was working very, very long hours, completely desk bound at the beginning of my career and I needed some an out, and I found that out in endurance sport. And I just got really, really into events and sort of the classic thing of starting with some short distance runs, got into track long, then go into some quite extreme track longs, ultra running.

As time went by, just started trying to find more and more extreme events. And certainly the sort of things that I was looking for with these races … I think when you’re … I just wanted a complete getaway from this, immerse myself in these landscapes somewhere. Normally there was a bit of a trip involved. I’m going to have to get a flight or drove for a number of hours to get out somewhere as far away as possible to clear my head space.

Year and years and years went by doing these events, and finally I came across this event called the Otillo in Sweden. And the Otillo was the first of the swimrun race. And since 2012, myself and one of my racing buddies turned up to this event. We were awfully under prepared. We’ve never trained together. We had not prepared our kits, we hadn’t practiced with the kit. We just thought we’d turn up and had a go.

I did the event and I absolutely fell in love with the sport. It was the most fun I’ve ever had racing and it was sort of the confluence of all of the things that I look for in endurance sports. I think that’s really down to performance. So for the uninitiated swimrunners that’s … So basically it’s a swimming and running event. But perhaps what’s not so clear is that the format means you race as a pair, so you race in a team of two and you have to stick together at all time. Some people ask, can one person do the runs, can one person do the swims. Absolutely not. You are doing it side by side and supporting each other through this course.

The second thing is that there are multiple swims, multiple runs on these courses. So a course could have anywhere from four swims and five runs up to something like maybe 10 runswims and 12 runs. And because you are talking and changing, getting in and out of the water all the time, you actually can’t have a set of the clothes with the transitions that you might have with triathlon. So instead, the way the sport has evolved is that people just wear … they essentially the kit that they started with throughout the race, so you have to run in your wetsuit and you have to swim in your trainers. So that sounds like a lot when you first hear about it. The thought of running in a wetsuit just sounds horrendous. But actually I’d say the dirty little secret of swimrunning that it’s not so bad and actually the wetsuit manufacturers are going behind the sport in swimming to produce swimrun specific suits which make the whole task much easier than perhaps it sounds.

Brenton Ford:                    Yeah. I did an event about two years ago now with John as my partner, and I had no wetsuit. I cut it up, I cut the sleeves off and I hadn’t tried it, I hadn’t tested it on, and I got the worst chafe under my arm from the sleeve because there was a bit of wetsuit material that was catching every time that I run. And I think I’ve still got the scar today from that. So having the manufacturers that make swimrun specific wetsuit is as great thing just based on my own experience, because the event that I did with John was about … I had to do 10 kilometers of swimming and close to 40k of running in the end.

And it sounds like a lot of and I talk about that now, that it’s a long way. But it goes relatively quick when it’s broken up into so many different legs. It’s quite a different sport than anything that I’ve done before.

What do you think the appeal is of … Why is there so much momentum behind the sport at the moment? Where does that appeal lie for most people?

Ben de Rivaz:                     Sure yeah. I think a lot of the people here come into sport. You’ve got people who are coming into it with running backgrounds, some true running backgrounds. You’ve got a lot of triathletes coming into it and a lot of open water swimmers. I think you appear as multi tested. I think there’s a real sense of hemorrhage at the events. I’ve found that when you’re doing individual endurance sports, you tend to have your head down at the events and be very focused on your performance. And rightly so, your best race you thus do well.

The difference then with the swimrunners at your starting point is that you’re racing with someone else and you’re working at someone else’s race. And it just tends to lead to a more relaxed atmosphere at the events, almost like festival. Everyone talks to each other, there’s great comradery on the course, and then you have the aspects of … the elements of racing with your best swimrun buddy by your side which is just really, really cool. So that’s really unique.

I think the second thing is that the courses themselves, there’s a real draw to the locations that swimruns are going to take place, and especially the locations that we tend to look for.

This is something that’s particularly true for triathletes. It’s quite common if you look at a lot of triathlon courses. This is not to take anything away from triathloners, it’s just the way the school is structured. It’s quite common that you might have circular swim leg, followed by a bike that goes in a loop around wherever the swim transition point was and the assembly course for the run.

Conceptually I think that’s great racing, but conceptually to me that doesn’t my get my juices flowing. Whereas in a swimrun race, the places that we look for, we look for really wild locations, beautiful places to run. We look for place where we’re all far from social services, where we are away from manmade structures, where we can really put our athletes into something that’s really wild and extreme.

And then the courses themselves, if you look at our routes, they tend to be these point to point events that take you on this journey through the places that we’ve selected for our courses. And in our experience we find that even people who’ve lived locally to our events, sometimes find that they … they take these places they’ve never actually been to before, even when the race on their doorstep.

So I think that conceptually this course it’s a really exciting experience to race them. And I guess the third thing and this is probably of particular interest into your … for your listeners who have a swimming background is that the swimrun events often have a much … that the emphasis on swimming, on the swimming element I’d say is much higher than within triathlon.

I mean you can turn up to a 99 triathlon and you can be awful in the swim. If you are strong on the bike and strong on the run, it won’t make too much difference to your day. Obviously it’d be better to go quick in the swim but it’s not going to break or make your race. Whereas in swimrun, if you’re a strong swimmer, that is really going to impact your performance, you’re going to have a really, really good day.

So I think it’s just great that I tend to be strong at some swim than on the other … I tend to be strongest on the swimming stages, and it’s great to have a multi sport event where the swimmers are rewarded for their abilities.

Brenton Ford:                    Yeah. You certainly don’t get that in triathlon do you? Yeah, not even close, but with the swimrun event, with it being … Some of your events up to close to 10k of swimming, so you’ve really got to be strong on the swim. And I’m going to ask you a tough question now, and it’s like choosing your favorite child. But what’s your favorite course that Breca does?

Ben de Rivaz:                     That is really difficult. This is [inaudible 00:10:07] choice. That’s really tough. I mean I’m probably going to give you a politician’s answer.

Brenton Ford:                    I thought you might and I don’t blame you either.

Ben de Rivaz:                     Yeah. Actually, I’m going to answer that in a different way. I think that the core thing about these events is the course, but there’s no set distances that people are looking to achieve in the swimruns. So we didn’t go out and say, “Okay, you found this place we think will work and we’ve got this other three distance that we’ve got to fit a course from now.” We didn’t have to do that. Instead we can turn out some way and just say, “What is the coolest course that we can put together and what makes to this location.”

And what that leads to is really, really different courses on all the different locations that we work on. So take for example of our New Zealand. We’ve got two events in New Zealand, Breca Bay of Islands and Breca Wanaka.

Now Breca Wanaka has got 45 kilometers running, 8.5 kilometers of swimming. It’s close [inaudible 00:11:10] current from this. We do but it’s a surf island, mountains, lake, trails. That is clearly a course that rewards both strong swimmers, but there’s big emphasis on running. I mean 45 kilometers running is no joke when you’ve got all of that swimming still around it.

The other place, Breca Bay of Islands has got only 25 kilometers running but 8.5 kilometers of swimming. And then on the swim, sort of being leap bound, you’re actually in the sea which can get pretty wild. So that clearly is a course which features the strongest swimmers. And actually in the inaugural event that we had this year, we had a lot of really, really strong ocean swimmers from New Zealand and Australia coming to take part.

Yeah, I think that’s … The core thing is that you just get such a huge variety between the different courses, and I just think that’s one of the really exciting aspects of the sport.

Brenton Ford:                    Yeah, that’s really cool. And one thing that I like to do when I’m either running or swimming or riding is, like you look at the map and you go. And after you’ve done like a big run or swim or ride, and you look at the map and you see where you’ve gone, to me that’s really exciting. So that sort of sense of adventure.

I sort of look at a few different spots there. Like there’s the rip in Melbourne which is the entrance to the Port Vila Bay. And there’s a race that they run there and I did that last year. And just to sort of look at the map and go, “That’s really cool. I swam from that point to that point,” and sort of you know all about how much water flows through there and it’s quite a dangerous part of the ocean there. And to look at that and go, “I’ve swam that,” is a really rewarding thing to do.

And the same thing with the swimrun events. The one I did was down in the Mornington Peninsula. I don’t think they run it anymore, but again it was just quite a distance, and when you say that on the map it’s a really good thing to sort of have as of what you’ve accomplished.

So particularly like looking at the Bay of Islands course, that’s really exciting. It looks a little bit like the Otillo course in terms of there’s so many different islands and runs and swims in it, that I think that seems to be a big appeal for people and I can see why, which is really cool.

Do you participate in these events or you’re just busy running them on the day?

Ben de Rivaz:                     Man I wish I could. I’ve got a serious case of [inaudible 00:13:44] whenever we hold one of our events. I’m just sitting on the sidelines, looking at the glam, watching everyone charging around the course.

Now at the moment I’ve got to be the guy with the clipboard, helping put things together, but I’m hoping I can put my racing shoes back on one day, actually race alongside some of the guys who are doing the event. The only thing is that I really feel like if I do that, now the pressure is on, I’m really going to have to perform, and it’s going to be a top 10 or top five place, otherwise it’s not going to be good.

Brenton Ford:                    Yeah, that’s it. Is it six events that Breca runs now?

Ben de Rivaz:                     Yeah. We’ve got four events in the UK and two in New Zealand.

Brenton Ford:                    And are there plans for any more locations or it’s really just about making them as good as they can be and making sure they all run smoothly, or you are looking elsewhere as well for more courses?

Ben de Rivaz:                     We are always looking for more courses. So we’d love to hear recommendations from your listeners. Get up, jump onto the Breca swimrun website. Send us if you know an area that you think is going to be perfect for swimrun, jump onto the contact page and send us a message. Having said that so yeah, we are looking for more courses.

I think what we are also trying to do is put a system in place to a lot of people who race in our series to compete against each other. So we are going to be announcing this shortly, but that’s going this year, that’s going to consist … I said this year, in 2019. That’s going to be a national championship both in the UK and we’ll also have a southern hemisphere championship with our New Zealand events. So I think that’s going to be really cool.

Brenton Ford:                    Awesome. Yeah, that’s exciting. I’m definitely going to do one day, whether it’ll be next year or the year after. Yeah, whether it be New Zealand events. I’d love to do it because I can’t ride a bike to save myself, but I can swim and I can run. So yeah, that’s why swimrun appeals to me.

And yeah, I appreciate that you’ve been able to put these events together. Was it harder or what you expected, putting these stuff together when you first got into it? How challenging was it from I guess an organization perspective compared to what you thought going in?

Ben de Rivaz:                     If anyone had told me how hard it was to Brenton, I probably wouldn’t be talking to you today. It’s challenging. I mean that there’re challenging courses to race, and anything where you’re putting people into the water in all those different locations, it’s going to be really difficult to actually deliver your detail [inaudible 00:16:26] to people.

So there is a big piece involved in making sure that … We do want to take people to these peaceful, wild places but we also want to make sure that we are looking out for everyone. And so getting that a bit right is a lot of work, but you can weed that. It’s been such a cool journey going to where we are and we wouldn’t have done it any other way.

Brenton Ford:                    Yeah, I’ve probably found the same thing with [inaudible 00:16:53] as soon as we do it at Hawi Camp and Hawaii Camp as well. You want to be able to give people the best experience in the swim and that sense of adventure of fun and freedom, but you also have to do it within the, I guess the constraints of making sure that everyone’s fine at the end of it. So it’s that fine balance between the two, but it’s really well worth it.

We ran our Hawaii Camp this year for the first time in March, and we did the YKK Raforda course. So it’s [inaudible 00:17:27] so we just swam it as a group. And myself and the other coach we were out there on paddle boards, just making sure it runs fine. And it went really well but it still … You’ve got to be on your toes when you’re doing it, but it was just awesome being about 500, 600 meters out from the beach and it’s just this clear day, glassy water, and everyone just had a great time to swim, everyone made it. It’s really rewarding to be able to do that in the end. But as an organizer, in the back of my mind I’m thinking, I’m checking everyone, making sure they’re okay, looking out for boats and everything.

So you can’t relax as the organizer but you can really relax if you’re in there doing the events. And that’s what it I guess your responsibility as a coach or as an organizer, whereas everyone else gets to enjoy and you just have to make sure things are under plan.

Ben de Rivaz:                     Absolutely yeah. And we’ve had some pretty good success of our planning. Do you think in miles or kilometers? No, it’s miles, right?

Brenton Ford:                    Kilometers.

Ben de Rivaz:                     Kilometers. Okay. One of our events in Wales, it’s called Breca Gower. Gower is this area, Southwest Wales and it’s a pretty famous surfing spot, so it does … In the right conditions, it can get … Competitors, they can really go there. The night before the inaugural event, last year we had 115, 120 kilometers wins, so it’s sweeping through the area. I mean it comes down on the day but you can imagine the effect that that had on the swell on the currents and everything. It was really tough.

I think that’s all part of … That’s the cool thing about these races I think is that you can really find yourself tested in some really interesting conditions. And actually the guys who did best at that event, we have a number of GB triathletes and a number of really tough iron men racing there. And the guys who won were actually a couple of local surfers who were just happy as Larry in those conditions and they just knew exactly what lines to take and could read the sea really, really well.

I think its [inaudible 00:19:57] with some of the other competitors, but yeah.

Brenton Ford:                    That’s fantastic. Well what’s the next event that you’ve got coming up?

Ben de Rivaz:                     Our next event is … So we’re on the UK leg of our global series now. The next event that we’ve got is in a place called Breca Jersey. Jersey is an island in the Channel Islands. It’s probably [inaudible 00:20:22], so you [inaudible 00:20:23] and just swim around. It has the second biggest tidal range in the world, so 10 meter tides.

Brenton Ford:                    How many meters?

Ben de Rivaz:                     10 meter.

Brenton Ford:                    Wow.

Ben de Rivaz:                     Yeah. The island doubles in size everyday.

Brenton Ford:                    Jeez. And how does that affect the … I guess they’re probably not in the water long enough for it to be too much of an impact but I guess it does. Yeah, it would really change some of the points during the race. How did you find that works for everyone?

Ben de Rivaz:                     Well what we found, so this will be the third year that we’ve run it. Okay, it’s an amazing location. Like it’s this beautiful, beautiful island and the channel, really warm waters, incredible trails go round the island, beautiful bays, and great swimming. It’s fantastic. But yeah, the tides are definitely a factor. And actually it doesn’t tend to affect the guys in the water too much. Clearly there’s a lot of water moving around, but we pick the location so that they’re not swimming against currents where they’re going to go anywhere.

Really the main impact is on the lengths of the different run and swim legs. Because you can imagine if you’re doing a 10 hour race where the winner has finished in six instead of [inaudible 00:21:39] mostly 10 hours. The guys at the back are going to have a very different race to the guys at the front, particularly at the back end of the course.

So yeah, there’s a big of organizational sort of [inaudible 00:21:50] just to make sure that we are on top of that. But yeah, they’ll just have two different races. The swim distance is different, the run distance is different. But again that’s all part of the excitement.

Brenton Ford:                    Yeah, that’s right. Well that’s very exciting. So I’m going to commit now to doing a Breca even in at least yeah, 2019 or 2020 over in New Zealand, and yeah, I’m really looking forward to it because I’ve heard great things from a number of different people and quite a few people who did it this year in New Zealand and who are doing it again next year, and they really enjoyed it. So I appreciate you being on the podcast and sharing how it all started for you, and I appreciate you putting together these sorts of events because I can imagine they are not easy to run an organize and a lot of would go into it, but well worth it for the people who attend. So I appreciate you being on the podcast.

Ben de Rivaz:                     Same thanks very much. It has been great, I’ve enjoyed it.

Outro:                           Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to effortlessswimming.com

The post The SwimRun Revolution with Breca’s Ben de Rivaz appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

Getting beaten up by riot police. Setting his alarm 4 hours too early before the biggest race of his life. Not being able to walk for 4 days just weeks out from his last Olympic Games. These are just a few of the challenges 3x Olympian, Olympic bronze medallist and 100m Freestyle World Champion Brent Hayden shares on today’s podcast.

00:47 Brent’s achievements

To know more about Brent Hayden, please visit:

http://www.brenthayden.com

Transcript:

Intro: Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. The show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford.

Brenton Ford: Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. This is episode number 121, where my guest is three-time Olympian and Olympic bronze medalist Brent Hayden. Welcome to the call Brent.

Brent Hayden: Thanks for having me Brenton.

Brenton Ford: Apart from having a great name, you’ve had a lot of amazing achievements over the last couple years with your swimming. You’ve been in the swimming world for a very long time, and retired in 2012. What, for you, there’s a lot of achievements that you’ve done, for you, what’s probably the biggest one in terms of what are you most proud of?

Brent Hayden: I go back and forth between my bronze medal in London, and then my World Championship title in 2007. Both of those were, for me, big achievements. On paper, obviously, they look like big achievements, but they both have these underlying stories that made them bigger for myself personally, and so sometimes I don’t know which one’s the bigger achievement. But some days, the Olympic bronze medal is the biggest one, and then the next day I’m like, “You know what? I think my World Championship one was a little bit bigger.” I don’t have a better answer than that for you.

Brenton Ford: That’s what I think is really interesting, is the story behind the achievements that you see. You watch the Olympics and there’s a gold, there’s a silver, there’s a bronze, but so much work goes into getting to that place. For you, for the World Champs gold, what was the story behind that?

Brent Hayden: Well, the night before, I boarded the plane to fly down to Australia. My parents gave me a call and they told me I had to go to the hospital because my grandfather, he wasn’t doing so well, and so I went to the hospital and he was in a hospice. They knew that he was not going to last much longer, and I found out that night that he was probably going to die during my trip down to Australia. That night, while just sitting beside him, beside his bed, the last thing, and the only thing I actually got to tell him that night was that I was going to the World Championships tomorrow, and I’m going to win him a medal.

I got the email, actually my coach got an email from my dad, four or five days later, saying that he had passed away, so when I went out to swim, I was lane six, I’d never really done anything extraordinary in terms of individual performances. I’d had a lot of successes on the Canadian relay team, and I don’t think anybody was expecting me to get a medal, but I just felt like I had a little bit more reason to succeed than the other swimmers.

Ultimately, I think that’s why I succeeded and why I was able to dig deeper than I had ever dug before, was because of that promise I made to my grandfather. I actually felt like he was there in the stadium, and when I walked out on the pool deck, I actually told myself that he was in the stands somewhere.

Brenton Ford: That’s amazing. Did it affect you throughout the trip? Was it something you were constantly thinking about, and you were able to, I guess, draw strength from it? Or was there a time throughout that trip where it started to affect you in a negative way at all?

Brent Hayden: I don’t think it ever affected me in a negative way, because it was nothing but love. I knew that we didn’t really have much time with him before that as well, because I grandma had passed away years before, he was living on his own and his health had just been deteriorating very slowly ever since. It was like which year is it going to be? It wasn’t unexpected per se, around the time, but definitely in the moment, oh my god, it’s going to happen now, that was definitely unexpected.

I think when it happened, I was obviously very sad. I went into the locker room by myself and just cried it all out. The only thing was going to the pool that day, riding the bus, that was the most nervous I had ever felt out of any competition, including my London Olympics, where I literally just felt like my heart was just going to pound right through my chest, and possibly stop. I was feeling so scared, but I just get telling myself that I’m feeling this way because what I’m about to do is incredibly important. I think that in the end, that ended up helping lift me up to a level that I’d never been able to get to before. Again, it’s all out of love.

Brenton Ford: I remember my coach telling me that if you’ve got nerves, that’s a good thing. It means that this race means something to you. It sounds like having your heart pounding that hard on the bus on the way to the pool, that you knew how much it meant to you. Talk me through that race. How did it go down, and how did you pace it? What was like behind the blocks? Was it completely different than anything you have experienced before in terms of how you felt before the race?

Brent Hayden: Yeah. I totally never felt that way before, and I don’t think I’d ever felt that way again. Usually when I’m behind the blocks, I’m running through the race visually, I’m thinking about my start, my turns, my breakouts, my breath. I’m thinking about okay, well if I hit the wall where my body just screams stop, what am I going to tell myself to keep going? I’m thinking about everything I can, except for the result, because I’d really try to focus on the things that I can control, so the things that I’m doing in my own lane.

However, in this moment, I was only thinking about my grandpa, and I was just thinking about the reason why I had to succeed, just remembering the promise that I’d made to him. I didn’t even think about my starts, I didn’t think about my turn, I didn’t think about anything before the race, except for that promise, and just that he is somewhere in the stands right now, watching me. I just wanted to make him proud.

Brenton Ford: That’s awesome. Then the 2012 Olympics, what was the story leading up to that?

Brent Hayden: I think this is also one of the reasons why I chose to retire as well. From 2008 onwards, beginning at the 2008 Canadian trials, I started to experience crazy, chronic back spasms. At the 2008 trials, I qualified for the team and then immediately, getting out of the pool for my warm-down, I suffered a back spasm and had to spend the night in the hospital. My back was so contorted they actually couldn’t even take an X-ray of my back because they couldn’t get a clear image. I ended up not being able to compete in the 50 free, so that’s actually the reason why I didn’t swim that at the Beijing games.

These spasms had been hurting my career throughout, although if you look at my results, you wouldn’t really be able to tell because apart from the 2008 games, but my failure at those games had nothing to do with my back. That was all on me. But doing Commonwealth champion in 2010, double champion rather, and [inaudible 00:08:13] records 2011 silver medal, 2009 Canadian record with a fourth place finish at the World Champs, but then 2012, I’d always just seemed to be able to get through it and make it work, but for four days, only two weeks before those games, I had another back spasm while at staging camp, and I couldn’t walk for those four days because my back was just so spazzed up, so seized up, that just trying to get out of the bed to go brush my teeth was virtually an impossible task.

For four days I’m just thinking to myself, am I ever going to get to compete? We’re so close to the games. Usually when these happen, I have at least a couple of months, it’s almost like lots of time in a way, but now we’re just a couple of weeks out. Even if I’m walking again, am I going to be well enough to actually compete at the Olympics for a medal, or am I just going to basically be showing up and swim safe so I don’t have a back spasm.

I actually started thinking that I might actually just retire before the games, just take myself out of the equation, because I’d already failed really bad at two Olympics. I don’t think I would have been able to handle going through a third one and just bombing again, but my coach just looked at me one day and just said, he just looks at me, I actually looked at him and he just goes, “Well, what’s wrong with you right now?” I said, “I want to retire before the games.” H just gives me that look and he goes, “Well why don’t you just retire then?” The thought of that actually just made me so angry, and I actually ended up blowing up at coach, which I never do. Then two days after that, I was back in water, swimming as if nothing had ever gone wrong, and I know that in that moment, my coach was doing what good coaches do. They say exactly what they need to say in order to get exactly what they need out of you.

Leading up into the games now, I’m thinking about myself that I wasn’t able to walk for four days only two weeks before, my body has been feeling like it’s broken. Actually, the day of the final, my rib was actually out of place, just because of all the racing I’d already been doing, still remnants from that back spasm just tweaked a little muscle between the rib and pulled that out of place, so I felt like my rib was going to punch through my skin. I just felt like I had every reason why I shouldn’t have succeeded in London, but I had every reason why I should succeed in Beijing and I didn’t do it.

Going into the London games having all these reasons why you shouldn’t succeed, and ultimately that was when I did, I don’t know if any other color of medal could have actually been any better for me. For me, that bronze medal really does feel like gold, because I feel like I just had overcome this huge challenge than is greater than the results actually show.

Brenton Ford: Yeah, absolutely. With the back spasms, was that something that continues today? Did you ever get to the root of it?

Brent Hayden: Yeah, I still suffer from them today, but not nearly as much because I’m not pushing my body to the limits nearly as much as I once was, obviously. I have had a couple of them where I was unable to walk for four days, and I’m reliving those days in Italy all over again, but what I’ve been able to do is, in the gym, just taking the time to slowly build up my back because I don’t have a competition I’m getting ready for, so I don’t have a deadline on when I need to be strong and healthy. I’ve got the rest of my life ahead of me, so I’ve just been taking my time and just slowly building up my strength. Because I used to never be able to do any lower back exercises at all. They were completely off my training regimen, because any time I did anything with my lower back, spasms.

As we were doing that, the downside was that my lower body strength was also getting weaker and weaker and weaker, so my legs by the time I got to London, they’re were real chicken legs. Well I don’t really want to have chicken legs for the rest of my life, and I also don’t have massage and physio and chiro at my disposal anymore, so I’ve got to make sure that I get my body stronger. I’m doing deadlifts now, which eight years ago, or sorry, even six years ago, would never have even though I would have been able to do. I’m not going heavy, but just the fact that I’m doing them has been a big improvement.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. Because then that puts a lot of strain on your lower back I think, because I’ve got nothing like you’ve got, but just had a bad lower back for a couple of years, and just even the thought of deadlifts, I’d really have to start light with that. The fact that you’re doing them must mean you’ve got into a pretty good place with your back strength.

I think every Aussie listening to this would remember the 100 free from the London games was when the hope of Australia was riding on James Magnussen’s shoulders as he went so fast in the Olympic trials. I don’t know if he broke the world record or he was just off it, but he was at least half a second ahead of pretty much anyone in the world that year, and then he got pipped out by Nathan Adrian. Yeah, then you were not too far behind. I think all of Australia was watching that 100 meter freestyle final.

Brent Hayden: Yeah, well I definitely think I was surprised myself as well, [inaudible 00:13:57] with the rest of the world. You could watch that race over and over and over again, and just see how close that was. It was 1/100th, and then there was me, I think I was two or 4/100ths ahead of fourth place as well. There was a bit more of a gap between me and James, but it’s just crazy how just the slightest, littlest thing can just make you a hero, or people [inaudible 00:14:22], “Well what happened?”

In the end, I still think that a silver medal is still an incredible achievement. Who could ever think that when they’re a kid, they would be looking up in their future and think wow, one day I’m going to be an Olympic silver medalist, and that’s going to let people down.

Brenton Ford: That’s right. Exactly right.

Brent Hayden: [inaudible 00:14:47], it’s one 100th, it can put you on one side of the coin or the other.

Brenton Ford: Then it spiraled from there, whereas the 4×1 men’s relay, just I don’t even know if they got a medal. They did not race well at that Olympics, and then there was a whole review with Australia swimming. It was just like yeah, it wasn’t a great Olympics for the Aussies, and a lot of it started from there. As you said, it’s just such a minor thing, but it can make such a difference, when if you look at it in the grand scheme of things, it’s still an amazing swim, it’s just everyone had built it up so much in their minds. Yeah, I felt bad for him, I just felt so bad, and the same with Kate Campbell at the 2016 games. Just so much pressure, and unfortunately she wasn’t able to pull it off. But that’s sport. It can feel like life and death at times, but if you can take that step back, you go, “Okay, well life’s not that bad.”

Brent Hayden: Oh yeah. [inaudible 00:15:50] you’re like that is sport. Sport is unscripted. If sport was scripted, it just wouldn’t be sport, so we got to go with it, not matter whether it’s good or it’s bad.

Brenton Ford: Yeah, exactly right. That’s what makes it exciting.

Brent Hayden: Yeah.

Brenton Ford: I was looking up some things before we jumped on this call. I read about you, after 2004 Olympic games in Athens, about the riot police. Do you want to go into that at all? It’s just that I thought that was pretty funny.

Brent Hayden: Yeah, no problem. I think performance aside, I probably had the worst Olympic experience out of any athlete at those games. Because one, as I said, I mentioned earlier, I failed at my two previous Olympics. I failed really bad at the Athens Olympics because something as stupid as my alarm clock wasn’t set properly, so it went off at 3:30 in the morning. I got up thinking it was 7:00, I was feeling all Olympic that day, got to the cafeteria, just looked at the janitor and realized there’s nobody else here, something’s wrong. Looked at my phone, I’m like oh my god, it’s 3:30 in the morning, and I just totally ruined my Olympics. Those were the big days I was racing, and I couldn’t get my head back around then.

Totally botched the relay and my individual performances, everything, and so after we were done, it was the night before the closing ceremonies, just out with a bunch of other athletes, swimmers from other counties as well as other sports, we were just all out having a good time. I think in my mind, I’m trying to think okay, I’m just going to try to forget how bad my swimming was, and I’m just going to try and have a little bit of fun. When I probably should have gone back to the village some time after midnight, I was like, “Oh well, we’ll just go to one more place.” We’re walking down the street, and we just see this whole line of riot police blocking the end of the street. I’m thinking okay, well that’s not a good sign. They all that their shields on, their helmets, they’ve got their batons. We turned around, we started looking at each other like okay, well where do we go now?

Next thing you know, everybody that was just walking round the street, people that looked like they had just come from the club or the bar, they just started pulling dumpsters into the streets and picking up whatever rocks and bottles they were finding, and just throwing them down the street at the cops. Right away, you could just hear the rubber bullets starting to fire, and the tear gas starting to fire. The line that was standing shoulder-to-shoulder suddenly started running towards us, so me and the other athletes, we just ran back into the bar that we had just come from, just to get out of the street, because I didn’t want to get hit by a rubber bullet.

While I’m standing there thinking I’m safe, I just see this hand reached over my shoulder, grabbed me by the shirt, and yanks me out into the street. I got thrown face down in the street, and beaten with their Billy clubs, and again, kicked with their steel-toed boots. It lasted for a few minutes.

While I’m on the street, I’m covering my head with my arms, and with one arm, I reach into my pocket and I pull my accreditation, because I had it attached to my belt loop because you don’t want to lose that thing, and they ended up just ripping it off and just tossing it aside. One of the other athletes had to pick it up later. I still have it. It’s all completely mangled. It’s like they crumpled it up and threw it away, and they just continued to beat me even through they knew I was an athlete.

Eventually they stopped, I just threw my hands behind my back, I was like, “Just handcuff me, just don’t hit me anymore. I don’t care.” They took me down the street, threw me head-first into the corner of the building, and they just kept arresting more people and bringing them over, and just throwing them in the pile on top of me. Every time I tried to ask, “Okay, well what happened here? Why did you guys actually do this?” Pretty much I had tears in my eyes too, and they would just scream at me in Greek. A couple of times, they would threaten me by holding up a can of pepper spray in my face, they all threatening to spray, me.

Then eventually they just released me, and the only explantation from the one guy that I remember that was able to speak English was the reason why they arrested me was because I was the tallest one in the group and I was wearing a dark shirt. Basically I was the easiest target that they could see. [crosstalk 00:20:32] did, maybe running away in their mind, might have been like he must have done something. It was like, well no, I just don’t want to get hit by a rubber bullet. I’m not going to stand here.

When I got home, I didn’t want to talk about it, I didn’t want to let that get out because I was already dealing with a lot of embarrassment, a lot of negative things were being said about me in the press already, just because if you look at the relay, my leg of the relay is really what cost us the medal. While I was trying to deal with that, the whole riot incident ended up getting out as well, and then I had to relive that and start doing all these interviews about that. Then one reporter ended up getting the whole story wrong, and then said it happened the night before the relay, and so not me waking up early because of my alarm clock, now suddenly the reason why I did poorly on the relay was because I decided to go out partying the night before, and forget the fact that I got beat up by riot police.

Brenton Ford: Oh my god.

Brent Hayden: [crosstalk 00:21:37] race with a half broke or a semi-broken arm, because I couldn’t move my arm for almost a month after that, because of the good crack I took on the elbow while I was protecting my head.

Brenton Ford: You missed the World Short Course Champs because of it as well, is that right? Yeah.

Brent Hayden: Yeah.

Brenton Ford: Wow. Well it makes for a good story now though, looking at probably the only positive out of it.

Brent Hayden: I’m totally over it now, but at the time I actually was considering quitting swimming because I’d dreamed of going to the Olympics my entire life, and then I actually git there, Athens of all places too, it’s the birthplace of the Olympics, so it was like a dream come true. Then I sucked in the pool, and then I got beat up by riot police, I was like why do I even want to do this anymore? This is awful. But thank God I had a great coach, my coach Tom Johnson, who he really stuck by me and helped me worked through it. I was working with a sports psychologist, talking with my family and my parents all the time, or my friends, anybody who was willing to listen.

I had to let it out of the bottle so to speak, and eventually I just came to realize that that was a really crappy chapter of a much bigger book that I still have yet to write. Within that year, we came back to the World Champs in Montreal, almost a home crowd. When I say almost, it’s just I’m from Vancouver, so about as home crowd for World Championships as I can get. Two silver medals on relays, just less than a year after I thought I was going to quit.

Brenton Ford: It seems like it happens so often, the point where you’re almost ready to throw it all in, around that next corner is where your biggest success lies, or that next real high or reward of that hard work that you’ve put in. It sounds like that was the case in Montreal.

You were the only swimmer in the 2009 World Champs not to wear a super suit in the 100 free final.

Brent Hayden: Yeah. Probably not the best decision.

Brenton Ford: I was wondering. For those that don’t know, I guess give them a little bit of background on what the 2009 World Champs were like with the super suits and so on. But what was the decision behind that?

Brent Hayden: Well that was a decision that my coach and I made, but ultimately it came down to contract obligations. They got in the way of my performance. I had a [inaudible 00:24:15] contracts, and Swimming Canada had some agreements of what the swimmers would wear as well, so it basically came down to other people were telling me that I wasn’t allowed to wear the same suit as the rest of the swimmers. Unfortunately that was the reason why I actually wanted to wear and the suit, and I still get angry about it, even though I tried to just accept the fact that it is what it is. But I do get angry that I didn’t just not listen to them and just go rogue a little bit, just so I could wear that suit, because I believe in that performance I would have beaten César. I think I would have beaten the current world record holder right now.

Sure, it would have been in a body suit, but I never broke an individual world record, and that one would have been sweet. César still has it too, and I don’t think he’s complaining that it was in a body suit.

Brenton Ford: No. Good chance that could stand for a very long time. Although the way Caeleb Dressel’s swimming, it may be not. But because you went 47:2 and got fourth, and what’s the world record? 46:97?

Brent Hayden: Yeah.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. Because that’s a really quick swim without the super suit. Because it was something like 36 of 37 world records got broken at that meet, or something crazy. The whole record books just got wiped with people in those suits.

Brent Hayden: Yeah. It was absolutely ridiculous.people were surprised when a world record didn’t get broken.

Brenton Ford: Yeah.

Brent Hayden: It was like, “What? Nobody broke a world record in that race? Really?”

Brenton Ford: Yeah. What’s going wrong? But now the good thing is that people are starting to break those records again, well men with just the jammers and the women with the knee-length suits, which is great. I think swimming’s had to evolve to get past, or to be able to break those world records again, which has been really good to see. It’s happening in a lot of events.

Brent Hayden: Yeah. I’ve really enjoyed watching those world records get broken, but I think it just comes down to the fact that one, I think there’s a belief now that those records aren’t invincible anymore. After the first few finally got broken, all of a sudden, everybody started to believe in themselves and realize that that is possible. Then also too, just the advancements and just sports nutrition and recovery as well, and people just making tweaks to the techniques. I remember I grew up in high elbow freestyle days, and now they seem to be doing more open arm because they can get a higher turnover. It’s interesting these little tweaks that we can still do, that we can still actually figure how we can actually get faster without having to rely on technology to do it.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. It’s been really good to see. As you said, they’re teaching some very different things in terms of technique, like even with the sprinters, I think Dressel, he’s pretty much like a straight arm freestyler, and [inaudible 00:27:30] was the same back in the day. Then with breast stroke you’ve got Adam Peaty who’s got this super fast rating, Rebecca Soni who’s quite unique compared to some of the other breaststrokers. You’re seeing some of the technique, they’re not teaching just one style anymore, which is really good. It’s just, I guess, adapting to whoever the person is, depending on their height, their strength, or their strengths in the stroke. Yeah, it’s really exciting.

Brent Hayden: [inaudible 00:27:58]. There’s no cookie cutter technique anymore that’s going to work for everybody. Everybody’s going to have to do something that’s going to work just a little bit better for their body than it would have worked for somebody else. I think the one thing that’s really been great is that you’ve been seeing a bit of a renaissance among the coaches, as they’ve started to realize that there’s got to be more than one technique across swimmers. You used to walk to a club, and on the deck of a club and you’d see everybody would be doing the exact same free stroke, the exact same breast stroke, or butterfly or back stroke, and now you’re seeing a bunch of different styles on the one team, as swimmers are also more comfortable being able to listen to their own body’s analytics. Because there’s no better feedback than the feeling of water against your one skin. I think that’s just been really awesome to see.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. Look at even the 1500, look at Sun Yang compared to Paltrinieri, and there couldn’t be two more different types of freestyle there, yet they’re both as quick as one another. I’ve looked at Gregorio’s stroke in slow motion quite a bit, just to understand what he’s doing in each part of the stroke, and it doesn’t fit the typical box of what you’d expect with freestyle. It’s very unique and it’s not pretty, it’s not a beautiful stroke, but boy its quick.

Brent Hayden: Yeah, I know. That’s the thing, it doesn’t need to look pretty. The only think that people care about is what the clock says at the end of the race. Nobody cares what you look like while you were doing it.

Brenton Ford: Exactly right, yeah. Nob asks that question at the end and goes, “How did you look?” It’s like no, “What was your time?”

Brent Hayden: It’s not diving, it’s not figure skating, it’s not synchro swimming, it’s not a judged sport. Its not like you went sub 48 for a 50 freestyle, but point deductions because you lifted your head up too high in the breath or whatever. Not enough dolphin kicks underwater off the wall.

Brenton Ford: Yeah, completely true. I’ve started open water swimming a couple of years back, and I come from a pool background, and it was pretty much when I allowed myself to get a little bit scrappy and messy with the stroke that my times in the open water started to really improve, because if there’s any sort of chop in the water and you’re trying to swim with a traditional sort of freestyle stroke, the longest, smoothest stroke, it doesn’t work as well as being a bit more aggressive on the entry and with the recovery, and faster stroke rates. It’s just knowing when and how to make those adaptations depending on what event you’re doing.

Brent Hayden: Yeah, I even look back on my London race, and just seeing how strokes have evolved since then, I look at it and go, “You know what? I wish maybe I just stook around a little bit longer, because I would have liked to have tried opening up my arms a little bit.” I even look at that race and go, “My head position was actually up a little bit too high.” [inaudible 00:31:07] that medal, I still know that I still had room for improvement in terms of technique. It would have been cool to stick around a little bit more and play around with my stroke a little bit.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. It’s good to look back at that in hindsight isn’t it? I tell this story all the time, but with underwater filming, when I was about 13, 14, we had a guy come in, in a scuba suit, he’d sit on the bottom of the pool with this big camera in a waterproof case, and he’d just move the camera along as we swam past. Then we’d look at it on this grainy TV, and it was about 30 seconds of feedback. Didn’t really know what we were looking for, or we had no comparison video to any good swimmers, and so I just didn’t get any value from it. But now I run a lot of clinics and we do that underwater filming, and the Go Pro, iPad, and you are set. That is all you need to be able to analyze your stroke.

Brent Hayden: Well we run our own swim camps up here, and we actually have a Swim Pro package, Swim Pro from Australia, we actually bought one from those guys. We bring it out to our swim camps every once in a while, and even Swim BC, BC being British Columbia, when they bring me out to their camps, if they can’t get their video guy, they ask me to bring my video equipment as well.

It is so amazing, the feedback now, that you can get with those, or even just put them up on a projector, so as the swimmers swim in on a 15 second delay or a 30 second delay, after they swim, they can turn around and watch their technique right there, in almost real time. It’s actually incredible.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. It’s so much easier to do these days. I like that setup with the delay, because I went to an endless pool, what do they call it? Anyway, they got the cameras set up there, not too far from Melbourne, at an endless pool there, and they had a 30 second delay on. I was looking at my stroke, and then I was going okay, I need to go a little bit deeper with this hand, I need to do this. It took me a while to actually make the changes, but I had to make it feel really different than what I expected, to make those changes. If you try and change a little bit, normally nothing happens, so having that almost instant visual feedback can really save you two years of trying to make those changes.

Brent Hayden: It’s totally crazy because what you think you might change in your head, if it feels good or feels normal, then chances are you actually didn’t change anything. One of the things I ask my swimmers that I’m working with is, “Do you feel weird?” If they say, “No,” I’m like, “Well then you didn’t change anything.” I do things that will make them feel totally weird because when you make those changes, because swimming is one of those sports where you’re not looking at your own body, you can’t see what you’re doing, so you have to rely on how it feels and proprioception. Finally when they feel weird, then it’s like, “Okay. Well now you changed something.”

It’s so crazy how small of a change they’ve actually made, and it feels like they just changed their complete stroke, even if they just entered the water more in front of their shoulder as opposed to outside their shoulder. [crosstalk 00:34:28].

Brenton Ford: [crosstalk 00:34:28]. See that all the time in clinics, and sometimes it really takes a bit of pushing or encouragement to get them to be willing to do that as well. It’s like they’re stuck within what they’re comfortable doing, so to be able to get them to be comfortable trying to make those changes, and say, “It’s okay to feel weird. You’re probably going to feel a little bit awkward,” it’s like you’ve really just got to go, “Okay,” or what I say to them sometimes is, “Let’s just over-exaggerate this thing that we’re working on. If we need to bring it back a bit closer to where it was, we can, but to start with, let’s over-exaggerate it and just see where it ends up.” Just giving them permission to do that, they sometimes then can be okay with having it feel a little weird.

Brent Hayden: Yeah. I actually think that the best swimmers are the ones that are always open to change. Even if you’re a world champion or Olympic champion, you’re not sitting there thinking that okay, well this technique won today, it’s definitely going to win again in four years from now or two years from now. What won today might not win in four years.

When I won the World Championships, it was like a 48:45 or something like that, in a body suit. 48:4 in a body suit. I went a 47:8 in a jammer, and I still only got third. Obviously, even though I’d won at the 2007 World Championships, I didn’t think that was going to be enough to win later on down the road. Again, failed at Beijing for a completely different reason, but every other time, yeah definitely, I was like no, it’s not going to carry me through. It’s only good enough for today and I’ve got to look, got to figure out what I can do that’s going to make me better tomorrow.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. It’s interesting to see what going to happen in the next four, eight, 12 years, with the upcoming swimmers, I think particularly for breaststroke, just because it’s probably one of the more obvious changes in stroke, with Adam Peaty and Rebecca Soni. They’re fairly different than what you would traditionally have as the older breaststroke strokes. I think you’ll see a lot of swimmers come through with that sort of style now. Then maybe 15, 20 years down the track, we’ll se someone with a really long breaststroke, and then it might start to shift. It’s like fashion. Everyone’s wearing 80s, 90s fashion, and then it all goes in this cycle.

Brent Hayden: Yeah. I remember when I was a kid, they always said, on the recovery, you’ve got to have your palms up. The whole scoop the ice cream, eat the ice cream thing. Then later on, it was no, you’ve got to have your palms down because why would you turn your wrists up. Now you’re looking at [Peter 00:37:09] like wait, he’s got his palms up. What is it? I don’t even know. I was never a breaststroker, so maybe somebody else can enlighten me, but I never understood that.

Brenton Ford: If you were coaching today, what sort of things would you have your swimmers do? If they were sprinters, what do you see as being the key pillars of being able to sprint? I guess somewhats of the somewhat of technique aside, what are some of those key components that you feel like made you a really good sprinter?

Brent Hayden: Going from the 2008 games, up until 2012, my average distances for practice were actually getting shorter every single year. Before, 5K was short, 6500 was very normal. By the time I got to the London games, I was averaging about 3500 meters per workout, but what I was doing though was increasing the intensity, because if you’re going to swim fast, your muscles have to know how to actually go fast. I did a lot of really simple sets of just 25 pushes, on 45 seconds or a minute, depending on how many I’m doing. What I would try to do is I would try to start off trying to get it under 11 seconds flat. Then by the end of it, I’m trying to keep it still under 11 seconds flat, and sometimes, actually quite often, I would actually be able to go even faster. I’d be going 10:7s, 10:6s from a push.

One, I think there’s some times where you do your stretch cord stuff like this, to help, but there are things about your technique and how the water’s flowing over your body, that you can only really feel at high speeds. I think if I was coaching, first technique, 100%, is probably the most important, but then after that, you’ve got to be able to do exactly that technique incredibly fast, and then do the exact same technique incredibly slow.

We were at this training camp in Hawaii, and my coach, I didn’t know he was doing this, but he had me going through exactly this sprint set. He took some slow-motion video of me, and some photos while I was sprinting from head on, and then he had me just doing my between set easy swim, did the same thing. Then while I was swimming the cool-down, he did the exact same thing. Now sometimes when he does presentations, he actually puts these videos in there and shows that no matter what speed Brent was going, he only ever had one technique.

Brenton Ford: I like that.

Brent Hayden: Yeah, that’s actually a little trick that I actually tell younger swimmers, that when they actually get to cool-down, do that cool-down with the best technique that you actually can, because your muscle memory is going to remember the very last thing you did in the pool.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. What sort of drills, or how much drilling did you do, particularly in the last eight years of your career? It’s a big thing with junior swimmers, but how much drills, technique work were you doing in those three and a half, 4K sets?

Brent Hayden: Mostly my drills were just catch-up drill and single arm. I think those are probably the two easiest ones, and they’re great because you get to isolate the arms that you’re thinking about, so you don’t have to think about both your arms and your body roll and everything at the same time. You get to isolate things as well. But I also would always do this, basically a cheating catch-up. Whenever my coach said I could pick our own drill, I would always do a cheat catch-up, and then of course, that always upset my teammates because they all [inaudible 00:40:51], “That’s a real catch-up. You’re going too fast.”

I would start my pull just a little bit early. For me, it helped me with my timing and my rhythm, and it was just enough delay to work on my catch before I come back to center, because you always end up sinking a little bit there. I’m working on this catch-up drill while still being able to ride up a little bit higher in the water by just picking up my speed a little bit.

What I do when I’m teaching now, is I’ll go from full catch-up in 11 positions. I don’t like catch-up where your hands come into your streamline, because you never really enter directly in your centerline anyways, so put your hands out, and your shoulder width apart because that’s generally where you want to enter. Then you go from full catch-up to three-quarter catch-up, which is like the cheat catch-up, and then I go into half catch-up, and [inaudible 00:41:50] three quarters through the recovery and half through the recovery. The half catch-up is actually just full stroke freestyle, but by saying it like it’s a drill, even though the swimmers are swimming, they’re thinking about it like it’s a drill, so they’re thinking about the timing of that. Then I look down and go, “Okay, well how did that feel?” They look at me and go, “Well I felt like I was just swimming,” I’m like, “Exactly.”

Brenton Ford: Yeah, that’s good. I work with a lot of adults, and getting the timing of the stroke right is quite, well I wouldn’t say one of the most challenging things, but it’s something that I see a lot of, that once they get it, if they’re not currently having that timing right, pretty much where if you look at if from underwater, one hand is entering, and the other arm’s roughly underneath the shoulder, if we’re just watching the swim there. For the swimmers that aren’t doing that, when they do get to that right timing, just everything seems to connect and sync up, whereas before it’s like they’re on this treadmill that they can’t get off. There’s not relaxation in the stroke at all.

Brent Hayden: Yeah. I think sometimes that comes from they’re starting the catch too early, because they’re trying to get they’re stroke right [inaudible 00:42:59], and so they start to pull too early. The thing is, you’re always going to have one hand in front of your head before you start to pull back. I think for working on timing, the half catch-up is a good place to start, because your other arm, your arm in the recovery has to be at least at your shoulder, or just [inaudible 00:43:20] past your head. At the earliest possible, that’s when you’re going to start your catch, because if you pull before that, then you’re going to pull and then both of your arms are going to end up behind your head. Your arm’s not going to be quite at halfway yet and your other arm that you’re pulling is already going to be past your shoulders as well. Then you’ve got nothing to counterbalance the weight of your giant legs that are trailing out behind you, and [inaudible 00:43:42] you sink.

Brenton Ford: I love showing that, when we record people we often get the birds-eye view, so looking down. I love showing that shot for the people that are pulling through too soon. You see both arms behind the head, and it’s quite a funny shot to see because you go Jesus, how am I actually moving here? What’s going on? It helps them make that connection.

Brent Hayden: [crosstalk 00:44:04] go faster if you slow down your catch. Just leave your hand and let it ride up near the surface. Once your arm passes your head, then you can start your catch. You’ll find that your balance in the water, and your center line and everything, it’s just going to flow so much smoother.

Brenton Ford: What about gym work? How often were you in the gym?

Brent Hayden: We did that twice a week, for an hour to an hour and a half. But I admit, I’ve learned a lot more about the gym after I retired, because when I was on the team, training, I didn’t really have to know much, I would just do exactly what I was told to do.

Brenton Ford: Yeah.

Brent Hayden: I think if I went back and looked at how I was doing certain techniques, it probably wouldn’t have looked very good at all. Shrugging the shoulders when you’re doing bicep curls, that you’re just thinking about lifting the bar up, you’re not really focusing on the tension in the biceps. Just simple things like that.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. I have been the same when I was swimming. I think I wasn’t even really thinking too much about technique, because I didn’t know what to think about, and even strength work, you’d just be looking at yourself in the mirror in the gym, and that’s about it. Just doing the exercises. But looking at it from more of a coaching perspective, there’s all these little details and nuances that you want to make sure that your swimmers are doing, and there’s a lot that goes into it, but it’s a very different, often mindset that a coach and a swimmer has. Sometimes it can be good for the swimmer just to turn up, do their thing, and do it as best as possible. If you give them more detail than they actually need, it can be unnecessary, but there’s so much that goes into it, that I think when I was an athlete, I didn’t really have any concept of all of that detail that can go into swimming and strength, and all the other things surrounding swimming.

Brent Hayden: Yeah, for sure. I think, definitely for me at some points, I guess in swimming, our performance is measurable. We have to go a certain time, that’s how we base our performance. When we’re in the gym, we do that with the weights like we’re thinking more about how heavy can I make this and still be able to, say on a bench press, how heavy can I get the bar up? Well yeah, I could do two plates and up to another 15 pounds up per side, but that doesn’t mean that I was lifting it well. I could literally go down to one plate a side, do it with perfect technique, and almost be just as challenging, if I’m doing [inaudible 00:46:53] technique and I’m working on my timing, just thinking more about time under pressure and just doing everything perfect.

I think a lot of swimmers, our heads are too much in the actual weights. Our minds should be more in the muscles. The weights are just there to challenge the muscles, so add the weight that you need to challenge the muscle, not the weight that you want to be able to push. That’ll totally change the way that you work out, and I think when I started doing that on my own, I noticed way faster improvements. I still haven’t been able to get up to what I actually benched at my max, but I feel that my technique doing it has been so much better that if I had actually done it with the same bad technique that I’d done it back then, I’d probably be able to bench more. But honestly, that’s not the way to do it, and there is always the risk of injuring yourself as well.

Brenton Ford: Yeah, exactly right. What about kicking? Was there much focus on having a strong kick, being a sprinter, when you were training? Or was a lot of your focus on primarily the catch, what happens out in front?

Brent Hayden: No, there was a lot of focus on kicking. We would do whole practices that are just focused on kicking. The 400 kick for time was a staple measurement set that my [inaudible 00:48:15] would do at least a few times a season. I was never really a good kicker. I’ve got size 13 feet, yeah, they’re big, but I have the most inflexible ankles as well, and I don’t have hyper-flexible knees. When I do dolphin kick, I don’t get that big, hyperextension that you see on a lot of swimmers, and that huge awesome extra whip on their kick. My legs are very, other than being long and big feet, they work very average.

The fastest kicker on our team was actually Brian Johns. Now Brian, he was actually the world record holder for the 400 IM short course back in the mid 2000s I believe. He went a 4:02. He had size nine feet, just tiny, but this guy could kick like no other person that I’d ever seen in the world, because he just had the most flexible ankles, not to mention he was of course in shape. But it was only just so funny that the guy with the smallest feet was the fastest kicker that I know.

Brenton Ford: I remember seeing this video of, who was it? I can’t remember who the coach was. It might have been something like Laurie Lawrence, and he was coaching Ian Thorpe. There was this video, and this guy comes up to him, up to Ian Thorpe’s coach, this is back before he was Ian Thorpe, this is when he was probably 14 not 15, and this guy comes up to him and Laurie tells him how amazing this Ian Thorpe guy is. He’s going to be the next superstar. The guy goes, “He must have big feet.” He rips into this guy, he’s just like, “It’s got nothing to do with it mate.” It’s just what you were saying there, it’s like yes, beg feet can help to a certain extent, but yeah, if you’re the fastest kicker in the group and you’ve got size nine, then you don’t want to rely on that as an excuse.

Brent Hayden: Yeah. [inaudible 00:50:11], you see swimmers all the time rocking back on their ankles. They’re trying to get just a little extra ankle flexibility. That’s way more important than the size of your feet for sure.

Brenton Ford: Now you’ve started a clothing brand that supports Olympic athletes.

Brent Hayden: Yeah.

Brenton Ford: How long has that been going for, and what was your why behind created the Astra Athletica?

Brent Hayden: Well we started developing this in 2013, but we actually only launched the apparel just a couple of months ago. It was learning a lot of things about being an entrepreneur, and I had to learn a lot of new skills, and had to teach myself just a lot of things on the back, being a business owner, that it just took time to really try to learn everything to a point where it felt like we could actually launch this thing.

But the idea came because after the Olympics, I was doing a lot of motivational speaking, and I started almost getting depressed at that, because as soon as I left the room, that meant that I was no longer going to be onstage, trying to spread the message that it doesn’t matter how good or how bad you are at something, that everybody has greatness inside them. I failed swimming lessons. That’s my shtick. I went from failing swimming lessons to becoming one of the fastest swimmers in the world. I was world champion.

I wanted to create a brand that just inspired people to just keep chasing their dreams and just never giving up, and trying to, we say rise through challenge. Because I feel like my entire career lived on that. Nothing in my career came easy. But at the same time, I needed something that I could use to actually help other Olympic athletes chase their dreams, because I came from a family that was not wealthy, come from a small town, my dad was a full-time paramedic, my mom ran a small, home-based business. My dad and my mom were driving me over 900 kilometers a week just to make sure that I could actually get to swim practice, because the only team that I could train with was the next town over. 45 kilometers away. Doing that 10 times a week.

Brenton Ford: Wow.

Brent Hayden: Luckily, I got some financial help with the Victor Davis Memorial Fund. I had a local business gave me a small check, and I don’t think I really realized how close I had actually come to my parents just telling me that they just can’t afford to keep taking me to swim practice anymore. If I hadn’t received that help, I don’t know if I would have been able to continue. I admit, I was totally oblivious to it. As far as I knew, my parents had money, because if they’re driving me to practice then they have money. I found out years later that that really wasn’t the case. That they were really stretching themselves really thin. I wanted to make sure that no athletes in Canada have to face those decisions when they have the talent, they have the drive, they have everything except the money. That they don’t have to sit there and go, “Okay, well I can’t put gas in my car to get to training.”

We’re not at the point yet where we’re able to write big, fat checks to our athletes, so the way it works is customers, when they come to our online store at astraathletica.com, they have a chance to actually choose an athlete that they want their purchase to support, and by choosing an athlete, we’ll actually give the customer a 10% discount as our way of saying thank you. Then we donate 10% of the purchase directly into the pocket of the athlete, just to make sure that they got gas in their car, making sure that they don’t have to opt for the prepackaged frozen dinners, that they’re actually buying good foods so they’re recovering well, or maybe even being able to get an airplane ticket so that they can go to that training camp that they so desperately need to go to. We just want to make sure that they don’t have to say not to something that can actually help them continue to chase their dreams.

Brenton Ford: Yeah, that’s a great idea. I like how you’ve been able to, I guess, find purpose in life after swimming, bu helping other swimmers, athletes who might be in a similar situation to you when you were early on in your career. What sort of comparisons have you drawn from swimming and business, that you’ve found has helped you getting to where you are at the moment with Astra Athletica?

Brent Hayden: It’s funny that our slogan right now is rise through challenge, because that’s exactly what this business has gone through. I literally was living that in sport, so I think that’s probably been the biggest skill that I probably learned from sport, just perseverance. Because as I was able to learn new skills and take on a lot of the workings of it myself, as well as with my wife who she’s actually still studying for her social media certification from Hootsuite, we were able to change and adapt, and take on anything that we needed to be able to take on in order to grow this.

But there were a lot of challenges that we ended up facing in manufacturing. One, we tried to have everything manufactured in Vancouver, and we spent a lot of money over about two years, working with pattern makers here, fabric suppliers, before we finally realized that when you calculate everything and look at what a real retail model is, that there’s no way the business would have actually been able to survive if we had actually had it all manufactured here. We spent a lot of money and a lot of time before we were finally able to learn that, so we had to take it all overseas.

Now we ended up actually getting better quality over there, and everything works a lot smoother, but one of the challenges is actually sometimes we had to get the orders all the way over here, and then run them through quality control where we’re wearing them and throwing them in the wash, and then realizing that oh, this stuff isn’t ready to release yet, and have to talk to the manufacturer and have them actually redo some of the orders.

We actually thought we were going to launch late 2016, early 2017, now we didn’t end up launching until early summer 2018 because of all these delays. But one thing we knew was we weren’t going to launch unless everything was absolutely perfect, and so just because that we’re facing a challenge, we weren’t just going to just let’s just do it anyways because we need to make money. No. It has to be perfect, and maybe that’s the Olympian in me. It’s always got to be the absolute best and nothing but the best I’m not going to settle for anything unless it’s the best.

I think the brand itself evolved through the message that we’re trying to convey, that you’re going to face challenges and that’s okay. When you get challenged, you have to either adapt or re-strategize, but there is always a way to continue moving forward.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. Well don’t on pushing through that time. Now when I look at any project that I want to do, I normally try and times it by two with how long I think it will take and how much it will cost to do, because it’s just what I’ve learnt over the last couple of years with doing nearly anything. Because I’m going though the same process at the moment with starting a swim product, swim equipment business that’s related to or tied to Effortless Swimming, and working with a product designer who’s licensed products to Speedo. He’s almost like a mad scientist when it comes to designing those products.

That’s one phase of it, but then there’s the manufacturing phase, and making sure, again, its like making sure it’s the right quality, that these products have the right buoyancy, and there’s a lot that goes into it. I remember when I first started chatting to him, he was [inaudible 00:58:58], “I’ve got these designs, we can probably get these out, ready to go in two or three months time. It won’t take that long.” This is four, five months ago, and these things take so much time that it’s really easy to underestimate the time to do that. Yeah, well done on finally launching it. It must have been a good moment for you, to finally get there.

Brent Hayden: Yeah, it was. First of all, congratulations on your swim equipment business. That sounds fantastic. Yeah, it was definitely a good moment for us, but at the same time, it’s like I think that’s just the one thing that I got from sport, that as soon as you’ve done one race or one championship, you’re already looking at the next one. There isn’t really a whole lot of time to really celebrate before you’ve got to get back to business and [inaudible 00:59:51].

When we launched, we definitely felt very good, we had a glass of wine that night, to celebrate, but it wasn’t anything crazy because we’re already thinking okay, we launched. Now we’ve got to move the product out the door. We’ve got to onboard these athletes and we’ve got to start making them money, so that way, what we are doing is actually making a difference in their lives, and we’re not just a company that just give athletes free clothes. Because there are so many companies out there that do that. We want to make sure that we’re actually the guys that are actually going to be helping them along the way.

Now one thing that’s really cool too, about our program that ill say too, is that we also designed the endorsement or the sponsorship deal with these athletes, that we’re not really sponsoring them, that we are funding them. If we actually do help them get to that performance where suddenly they actually had that breakthrough performance because we made sure they were getting to practice or training, or because of the gas and all the other things I already mentioned, then another bigger brand want to come along and say, “Hey, you know what? We love you, we love your story, and we want to sign you. Here’s a big fat check, you want to take it?” That we can actually say, “You know what? Go for it. We are so happy that we helped you get to that point.” There’s no trying to hang on to the athlete. We just want to help them get to whatever is best for them.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. I think that’s so important in wanting the best for the athletes. Think back to the 2009 World Champs where there was no contract obligation for you to miss out on what everyone else is getting because of a certain brand has control over you that way. I think maybe short-term that might hurt the business financially, but long-term I think it’s a better play. Actually having the athlete’s interests at heart is much more important long-term for any person or any business.

That’s the approach that I’ve tried to have running Effortless Swimming, where on our website, when we have clinics, I say there’s a seven day cancellation policy. If you don’t cancel before 7 days prior to the clinic, it’s non-refundable and stuff, but we still end up refunding people and moving them to the next clinic. People get sick on the day, whatever it might be, and I just think well we took a hit, that’s fine. Better off long-term to look after people and do the right thing. Because if I was in their shoes, that’s what I’d. I make decisions with that in mind, about well how would I feel if I was in their shoes? So far it’s worked out really well.

Brent Hayden: Yeah. No, for me too. It’s like I got inspired when I was younger, people helped me when I was younger, I’ve got to be able to do the same thing. If I’m not doing that, then if I’m not doing that then I’m not going to be able to sleep at night. I think that’s the way that business are started to move now. I think a lot more business now are starting to take on more social responsible, and starting to have a more higher moral standards, beyond what just the bottom line is, just what the profits are. That they are trying to make a difference in the communities that they reside in now as well.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. I think part of the reason with that too is it’s word spreads so quickly now with social media, and well, Instagram, Twitter, and everyone’s so contactable and they’ve got big networks that if you do the wrong thing, then people find out very quickly.

Brent Hayden: That’s correct.

Brenton Ford: Which is a good and bad thing in some ways. I think some people, they cop it too much in the media for a minor thing that they’ve done. They might have the 24 hour news cycle just hit them, like you probably had when you got beat up by riot police. I think people cop that pretty bad these days, just with how much stuff people can put out online.

Brent Hayden: Yeah. We didn’t have online back then, or we might have had online newspapers, but we didn’t have Twitter or Facebook or anything yet. But even with that, I was walking in downtown Vancouver, and people were coming up to me like, “Why did you go out the night before the relay and party? You are such a disgrace to the country.” I had people leaving messages on my parent’s answering machine because they were in the phone book. Just leaving all sorts of nasty messages. I can only imagine how much worse that actually would have been had something like Twitter or Instagram or somebody, or one of those actually existed. As great as they are, but like you said, there’s always that downside that some negative news, whether its real or not, actually does, it spreads like crazy.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. I guess the only good thing, or the good thing these days is you would have a chance to defend yourself through Twitter or Instagram. You could actually tell your side of the story, whereas back then, yeah, it’s just this is what the newspaper says, so it must be true.

Brent Hayden: Yeah.

Brenton Ford: Well I want to thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. I’ve really enjoyed chatting about your story when it comes to three Olympics and an Olympic bronze, and seeing what you’re up to now. Congratulations on your career as a swimmer, and all the best for this new venture. I hope it goes well and that you don’t face too many more challenges like that, but I’m sure they’ll come up, they always do. But really appreciate your time, and for sharing your story on the podcast.

Brent Hayden: Thanks so much Brenton for having me on to chat. I really appreciated it.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, got to effortlessswimming.com.

The post Rising Through Challenge with 100m Free World Champion Brent Hayden appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

This week I’m joined by Rory Buck to discuss the intricacies of swimming and coaching. Rory Buck is an ex-competitive swimmer turned coach, who went from being a collegiate swimmer to representing South Africa at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester. Turning to coaching to learn more about swimming, Rory now coaches from Dubai. Join us as we discuss topics such as swim culture, the right age to start swimming, a feel for the water, mentality, sighting, effort in swimming and self-perception as well as much more.

01:10 – Rory’s competitive background.

Transcript:

Announcer: Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast, the show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford.

Brenton Ford: Welcome to episode number 120 of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. My guest today is Rory Buck, who is an ex-competitive swimmer turned coach, so similar to me. So, Rory, thanks for joining me on the podcast.

Rory Buck: No problem, Brenton. Thanks for having me.

Brenton Ford: Oh, yeah. You sent me an email a couple of months ago, just replying to a newsletter that I sent out through Effortless Swimming, and then we kind of just got chatting. And I thought you’d be a really good guest to have on the podcast, just to discuss some of the things that I come across with my coaching and what I’ve seen through my competitive background in swimming.

And we’re kind of very similar in that, in terms of coming from a competitive background to now coaching, working with a lot of triathletes and open water swimmers, and I think kind of having to learn the other side of swimming, which is to really fully understand it and understand the technique and how to teach it, rather than just being able to do it.

So for the listeners, can you give them a little bit of background on what you achieved with your competitive swimming background, because it’s pretty outstanding what you did achieve?

Rory Buck: Oh, I appreciate that little intro there. Yeah, I, similar to you, came from a competitive swimming background. I only learned to swim, or not learned to swim, but I only started training competitively at a very late age. I was 16 when I picked up the sport and went into a squad. I could swim prior to that, but was quite late on the scene of sort of training, and so constantly felt like I was having to catch up with the guys that I was racing against that had picked up the sport when they were four or five and kind of gone through the age group ranks.

So through starting late, I sort of had to force myself to become a student of the water and learn how to shortcut processes in order to get competitive. So I picked it up, training at 16. I managed to qualify for Malawi, which is where I was going to school, growing up in a little, small country in the middle of Africa. I managed to qualify for the Commonwealth Games in 2002 for them, which opened my eyes to the big guys, the big world of competitive swimming.

I watched Ian Thorpe break the 400 freestyle record in Manchester in 2002, and it was just an incredible experience for me as a youngster, but it gave me an itch that needed to be scratched, and that was that I did actually want to get very competitive in the sport.

So I spent a number of years dedicating myself to the craft and found that coaching was a way of educating myself even more about the sport. They say, “If you want to really understand something, start teaching it.” So I started coaching very shortly after the Commonwealth Games, and learned through that process.

I got more and more competitive. I swam for South Africa, which is the country that I hold a passport for, at the World University Games in 2011, and then just missed out on the qualification for the 2012 Olympics, and then hung up my suit competitively after that and went into full-time coaching, but moved to working exclusively with adults.

And along came triathlon with that. I just enjoy working with adults a lot more. I find it a lot more stimulating working with adults than with children. And so, yeah, since 2012 have been exclusively working with adults and triathletes.

Brenton Ford: And you’re now based in Dubai, so you do a lot of sort of one-on-ones and small group sessions over there. What’s the, I guess, experience, the background of a lot of the athletes over in Dubai, in terms of their swimming ability? Because I’m thinking in Australia we’ve got a big swim culture here, so a lot of people still didn’t learn to swim as a kid. Kids these days, it’s a requirement for them to learn through school, but most people have some sort of basic swimming background. But what’s it like over there?

Rory Buck: Oh, that’s a great question. Dubai is a melting pot of nationalities and people from all different walks of life. And they’re definitely groups of people that come from more swimming backgrounds than others, as you pointed out, the Australians.

If you grew up around water on the coast, and the weather is somewhat favorable, then a lot of people at least have a level of confidence in the water, whereas I have a lot of clients from the UK, from India, those sorts of places where the weather’s not all that favorable and access to pools and access to water is difficult to reach. And so those guys tend to come to me with absolutely no experience whatsoever.

And I have kind of a mixed bag of clients that I work with. Those that grew up not going into water at all and are starting from ground zero with their swimming as adults, and then others that swam a little bit when they were kids, and then life got in the way, and now they’ve picked up triathlon meets around as adults, and they sort of have a level of comfort, but don’t understand technique at all and can’t sort of put anything together, and then guys that are on the far end of this spectrum where they are comfortable, do have a fairly good grasp on technique, but are looking to be more and more competitive at the higher end.

So sort of a mixed bag across the spectrum, but there are definitely nationalities that are more prone to being comfortable in the water than those that aren’t.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. I’m very grateful that I got to learn to swim at a younger age. It’s pretty incredible that you picked up competitive swimming at 15, 16 and were able to get to where you did.

It’s a real testament that you don’t necessarily need to learn to swim at four or five years of age to really do well. A lot of the research is saying that you’re better off doing a mix of sports or multiple sports through your sort of early teenage years and childhood and then starting to specialize after that.

And I think that’s a real testament to sort of what you’ve been able to do, just from a coordination perspective. And doing some land-based sports, and both sports, and just really mixing it up, I think it’s really important for young kids to have that experience, because it can help them later on.

And a friend of mine, who’s a coach, Wayne Goldsmith, he says that there’s no champion 10-year-olds. There’s no elite 10-year-olds. And it doesn’t matter how someone swims at that very early age. To me, success in sport, in any sport, is, “Do you want to continue doing that later on in life?” I think so many kids just get worn out from training too hard too early.

Yeah, what was it like for you getting into it at such a late age?

Rory Buck: I think it was a huge advantage, to be honest with you. And, to be quite frank, it’s one of the reasons why I made a switch in 2012 to working with adults exclusively. It wasn’t the kids that I had a hard time working with. It was parents that I had a hard time working with, because there was so much emphasis on trying to push times at such a young age.

And I agree 100% with what Wayne Goldsmith said about it. Phelps is probably the only phenomenon that has gone from being a 10-year-old to going all the way through, but there’s very few others. Everybody else gets burned out.

And I think one of the benefits that I had starting so late is it was almost a case of attrition that I kept going and everybody that I was swimming against started retiring. I started at 15, 16, and there was a drop off at 18 of a whole bunch of guys that stopped, that I was swimming against. And then there was another drop off at 20, 21. And so if you just keep going long enough, yes, you get faster, but everybody else starts to fall away.

I think that there’s so much pressure put on kids, and especially in a sport like swimming, where if you aren’t competitive … Guys are starting to do daily doubles from the age of 13, 12. It’s just such a big time investment that, as a teenager, you lose out on so many other opportunities, and the resentment starts to build up if there isn’t major return on investment.

And I think that return on investment for girls tends to come a little bit earlier, because girls sort of peak in the water a little bit earlier. But that investment for guys, it only sort of comes as you reach your physical maturity, and that doesn’t happen until you get to 18, 19, 20. And so if you burn out in a sport at 16, you’ve lost the opportunity to see actually how good you can be.

So I think I had a major advantage starting at 16. Like you said, I was fortunate enough that I had played rugby, I’d played cricket, I’d played soccer, and I’d done a little bit of running, so I had a general physical preparedness. And then, because I’d grown up around the ocean, I had a level of comfort with the water. And those two things combined with a load of hours spent training and studying the sport set me up for success as I got older.

And I started at 15 and finished when I was 25, which is still a ten year block of work, but done at a later stage than sort of 10 to 20. 15 to 25 is a very different time frame, from a physical maturity perspective, and I think that did me a huge favor.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? You can look at it from someone who starts at, say, six, goes straight till 16, then 15 to 25. And the person who’s going to have the most success, defined as what your results are, what you achieve in the sport, is nearly always going to go to the person who’s gone from 15 to 25, which is quite interesting.

And one of the things that we sort of were just chatting with over email and we were wanting to discuss was the amount of effort that goes into swimming effortlessly. And when I first started coaching, fuck, I think I was 19 at the time. 18 or 19. I started coaching at Melbourne University. I was there for about a year, just coaching twice a week. There was an adult squad.

So I was just fresh into it, had really not much idea with what I was doing, in terms of coaching, but I just couldn’t get why the swimmers there couldn’t just change their technique straightaway and why they were having to work so hard to hit the times that they were doing. I didn’t understand the amount of effort, and concentration, and hard work that goes into swimming fast, and efficiently, and effortlessly. Yeah, being so fresh into coaching, it took me a while to learn it.

And now, what am I, about 11, 12 years into coaching, that I feel like I’ve got a much better understanding of the progress or the learning curve that people need to go through to be able to really change their swimming. And with that understanding, it’s so much easier to work with people.

Is there any clients, any swimmers or triathletes that you’ve worked with over a period of time where you’ve really sort of seen that happen, that come to fruition, where they’ve been maybe a little bit awkward, uncomfortable in the water, and they’ve been able to turn that around?

Rory Buck: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve got a few clients. And I think it’s interesting, because with the rise in popularity of triathlon and triathloners, and IRONMAN specifically, it’s sort of become a bucket list item for a lot of people. So I see a lot of people come through who just want to complete the bucket list item of getting through an IRONMAN or a 70.3, and so they don’t always stick it out that long. It’s a year process or a nine-month process to kind of get them ready, and then they move on.

But I have had the privilege of working with a couple of athletes who have higher aspirations of wanting to qualify for Kona or wanting to qualify for 70.3 World Champs who have understood that there is a longer process involved. And I’ve had the opportunity to work with them for three, four, five years, and to watch them come through that sort of circle, that being very awkward, being very uncomfortable in the water, and starting to work through the phases of technique, the phases of training, and really start to get a grasp and understanding of what’s involved in moving themselves forward through the water faster.

And it’s a fun journey to watch, because it’s not similar to pretty much anything else that I’ve seen. It’s not the same way that somebody would move through a progression of running, and certainly not the way that I moved through a progression of running, coming from a swimming background, not the same way that you move through the progression of cycling. It’s a different process.

So I have one lady in particular who came from an ultra running background. She’d done Marathon des Sables, which is one of the hardest off-road running races in the world. I think it’s a six or seven day multi-stage race. It might be five, six, seven days, something like that, through the Sahara Desert. Incredibly difficult race. And she’s podiumed at that, and sort of got bored of the running stuff and wanted to come across to triathlon. And I’ve been working with her for four years.

She started as a … Gosh, we were doing maybe 400 meters in an hour total. And if I had her doing a 200 meter swim, she would be 230, 240. And she’s 54 now, and she’s just broken the two minute per 100 meter mark on her CSS test. So it’s sort of taken her for years.

And she’s not built like a swimmer. She’s probably 5’1″ or 5’2″, so very short, in her mid-50s, as a female. So the raw strength is not there. So it’s been a process of sort of refining. And then she comes from this ultra background where it’s just sort of long and slow as the primary training stimulus that she’s used to.

So there’s been so many things sort of against her, that it’s been fun to watch her go through that process of being very uncomfortable in the water and swimming quite slowly to now being very comfortable in the water, but having to try and find speed, and get uncomfortable, and push the boundaries of what she’s mentally and physically willing to do and used to, to see the progress that she’s seen.

Brenton Ford: Yeah, it’s really about knowing the right thing to work on at the right time. And I think that’s something I’ve gotten a lot better with over the last couple of years. When working with so many different swimmers through the clinics and the camps that we run, and the online membership as well, I think what I’ve sort of seen is that if you just keep it very simple, in terms of what you’re facing in that point in time, it might be one, or two, or three things, getting them to become comfortable with it and competent at it. And that might take a number of weeks or months to really sort of dial that in. And then moving onto the next thing and going from there.

Let’s say, okay, she swims 400 meters in an hour, there’s no point worrying about trying to vary her pace, get her to be able to sprint and swim at an aerobic pace. They’re not the right things to be working on at that point in time. It’s going to be just some very basic technical stuff about balance, and body position, and maybe breathing, just getting her comfortable. And if you can kind of find the right thing to work on at that point in time, then you can really make those improvements like you have.

So what was it, in the very beginning, with her that you worked on, to go with someone who’s probably really struggling in the water and not comfortable in the slightest?

Rory Buck Right. So there’s a framework that I’ll work through with my athletes. And depending on what sort of timeframe we’re working with, we’ll speed up or work through the process at different rates. But the way I see it is, in triathletes, and Leslie in particular who came from the ultra distance running background, they’re aerobically fit. So they come with massive capacity. So why do they struggle with swimming? Well, that obviously comes down to technique. The reason that they can’t translate their aerobic capacity from the running or the riding into the water comes down to missing technique.

So what are the three influences, for me, that sort of dictate your ability to swim with good technique? Well, the first is understanding what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. So that’s where we take video. And you do video analysis. I do video analysis.

So you work with a coach to understand, to just kind of grasp, “What is it that I’m doing with my body in the water,” because our ability to process what we’re doing in the water is absolutely shocking. Our [inaudible 00:19:36] perception is poor. And, until you see it on video, most people have no idea. “So I thought my legs were there. I thought my head was here. And I thought my arms were there. And now I see it on video, and it’s completely different.” So having an understanding of what you’re actually doing in the water, and then some sort of idea of what you should be doing.

So that’s where we started with Leslie, is just giving her an idea of, “Look, this is what you look like in the water. You’re short and scrunchy. Your hips are dropped down. Your head is lifted high.” So just the very basic fundamentals of body position was where we started with.

Then the second piece that goes into it is body awareness or body control. And there’s two parts to that. One is your ability to put your body in the right positions. So do you have the flexibility? And I know this is something that you’ve spoken about from time to time. I think it may even be in the course that you have. If I’m not mistaken, you have a section on flexibility in there.

Because you can know what you’re supposed to do, but if you can’t physically put your body into that position, it’s pointless. So if you lack the flexibility through your shoulders, through your chest, you can know that you’re supposed to keep your elbow at this angle, and know that you’re supposed to extend it in this way, but if you can’t physically put yourself into that position, then you’re knocking your head against a brick wall.

I think that this is where the sort of variations in freestyle come from. So there is no one perfect stroke for everybody, because everybody’s body is different. So depending on your height, your size, your background, your flexibility, those sorts of things, we’re going to [inaudible 00:21:30] vary how we put you into certain positions, but the fact remains that there are fundamental positions that you have to hit in order to move through the water with limited resistance and be able to maximize propulsion.

So whether you are five foot tall or seven foot tall, it doesn’t necessarily matter what type of body you have, there are fundamental principles to minimizing resistance and maximizing propulsion. And we tweak those based on the individual differences.

So for Leslie, who’s a little bit shorter and not as strong, we made adjustments to her stroke rate, to how she kicks, little details that sort of tailor the stroke, if you will, to how she’s swimming. So that’s the second point.

And then the third point is the idea of trust and confidence. And sometimes we have to start with this one, because, again, you can know that when you take a breath, and that’s normally the point in the stroke that everything falls apart at … You can know that when you take a breath, because you’ve seen it on video, your head comes way up out of the water, and you push down with one arm to help support the breath, but if you don’t have the confidence in yourself and the trust to get a breath low to the water, and keep your head down, you can know you’re doing it wrong, but you’re never going to be able to correct the problem. So you have to build the trust or build the confidence in your ability to take a breath low to the water in order to make that adjustment.

And this is where the training piece starts to come in. Our brains have evolved for an environment very different to the water. We are land-based animals. Especially when we learn to swim as adults, we’ve spent decades interacting with a constant supply of air. And now, as a 50-year-old, I put you in the water and go, “You’ve got to utilize your aerobic capacity that you’ve done a fantastic of working with as an ultra runner. You’ve got to somehow utilize that aerobic capacity in an environment with limited oxygen. Off you go.” And it doesn’t exactly just kick in a day.

So building that trust and building that confidence in your body going, “I don’t want to die. I’ve done way too much with my life, at 50, to die swimming now. So I’m not going to allow you to breathe half an inch away from the surface of the water. I need your mouth at least six inches away from the surface of the water. So we’re going to lift up way above. I don’t care what coach is telling you, and I don’t care what you think you should be doing. It’s not safe to breathe here.”

And so we need to develop that confidence in that trust that even if we get a little bit of water in our mouth, even if we are risky with the breath, that things are not going to end here. We can spit the water out. We can cough, and we can choke, and we can keep moving forward.

So those are sort of the processes that we move through. One, identifying what we’re doing right, and what we’re doing wrong, and what we should be doing. Two, making sure that our bodies are capable of doing it, hitting the positions, working through the flexibility, the range of motion. And then, three, making sure that we have the confidence and the trust that we’re not going to kill ourself in hitting those positions and doing the things that we need to do right to move more efficiently through the water.

Brenton Ford: Yeah, you’ve really got to be in the water on a regular basis to be able to do that too. I have a lot of people who sort of apply for our membership, and one of the questions I ask them is, “How many times a week can you get in the water?” And for the swimmers who can only get in once a week, I say to them, “Look, it’s not going to be enough to really get the most out of the coaching.”

So really a minimum, it’s got to be two times a week. Three or more is ideal. And I know people are time pressed. And if you’re in triathlon, you’re going to be training quite a few hours a week, so it is difficult to get to the pool enough to be able to do that. But to become more familiar in that sort of environment, yeah, my rule of thumb is generally three times a week is ideal, but two, you can sort of maintain, depending on what level you’re at, but it’s got to be a regular thing.

And I’ve swum twice now in the past … I think it’s about eight weeks now, because I’ve got an eight-week-old baby. And so it’s just been pretty flat-out in the household at the moment. But I got in yesterday for, well, the second time in, whatever it is, six or seven weeks, and it didn’t feel good. It didn’t feel good at all. And that’s with thousands and thousands and thousands of laps behind me, but as soon as I take much time off, I really, really feel it. And I’ve still been running. I’m still fit, but just that swim fitness is very specific. And, yeah, you can’t get away without really getting in the water. There’s not much that can compensate for it.

Rory Buck: Right. I think there’s two pieces to this, or two parts to this, and it depends on what level you’re at. So for somebody like you, or somebody like me who come from a swimming background, the feel for the water is a very legitimate thing. It’s very hard to sort of define, and it’s very hard to explain.

But the easiest way I think I can explain feel for the water is, we understand very well, as humans, how to interact with gravity and how to interact spatially with objects around us when we are standing up vertically. We’ve had a lot of practice with that. So we understand that very well.

Feel for the water is that same concept, but when you are horizontal and interacting with the aquatic environment. So it’s the ability to understand how your body balances. It’s the ability to find pressure and to feel connection with the water that is going to allow you to increase propulsion. Yeah, your ability to sort of interact with the aquatic environment.

And I think for somebody who comes from a swimming background, or for somebody who is at a level where their technique has got to a point where it’s fairly well-locked-in, and even taking time away from the water is not going to cause their technique as a whole to massively regress, getting back in after you’ve spent time outside of the water is just a matter of reestablishing that feel for the water. And that can come back, if you touch the water again, fairly easily and fairly quickly.

I think a good way to explain it is, if you, or I, or anybody had to get into bed and not get out for a week or two weeks, the first couple of steps we’d take after standing up, when we did get out of bed again, would feel very weird. I don’t know if you’ve ever been sick or had a surgery where you’ve been bed-bound for a period of time, but the first couple of steps that you take after that period feels very strange. It feels very weird. And I think that’s exactly the same experience that you have after not swimming for eight weeks, is going back to that feel thing.

On the other side-

Brenton Ford: Yeah, that’s a good comparison.

Rory Buck: Yeah. I went through surgery in 2006, and I’m actually going to go through exactly the same surgery again next month unfortunately, where that happened where I couldn’t walk. And I was in bed for about 10 days. And the first steps are just very weird.

Then the other side of that is for swimmers, or for people who are new to swimming and new to the water, especially when we’re talking about adults, and I think this directly relates to the confidence and the trust issue, because our brains have evolved for something so different to the water, we have to constantly and consistently expose ourselves to the water in order to gain a new level of confidence and a new level of trust.

And the best analogy I can kind of think of to explain this well is, when you’re learning a new skill, or if I gave you the task of learning a presentation or learning a talk, the best situation or the best setup that you can put yourself into is place yourself physically in a place where there’s no distractions. Kind of cut out all noise, cut out all distractions completely, so that you can focus exclusively on the thing that you need to learn.

And I guess that’s why libraries are created as quiet zones, because they’re supposed to be conducive to studying. That’s why when I sit down to work, I’ll put in headphones with noise cancellation so nothing else is distracting me.

I think when you get into the water, you have the same task of learning something, but your mind is distracted by a thousand different things, most of which threaten your survival. So your brain’s primary responsibility is to look after your well-being and your survival.

If you put yourself in an environment where you can’t breathe as a beginner, and you say, “Hey, you need to concentrate on your kick, or you need to concentrate on your catch, or you need to concentrate on this position or that position,” your brain goes, “Bro, I don’t care. I need air. I really don’t care about how I’m supposed to be kicking right now. Get me to the other side. You won’t get me to the next breath.” And when it’s preoccupied by those thoughts, it becomes very difficult to focus on the technical aspects of what we’re supposed to be learning to improve our technique.

And when we don’t hit the water consistently and we’re not touching the water, like you said, two, three times a week or every 36, 48 hours, our brains forget that it’s okay to be in that environment. They don’t get comfortable with being in the aquatic environment. They forget about what it’s like. And so each time you go back in again after a week out of the water, you have to go through this re-acclimatizing to the water. You have to go through the process of your brain not seeing it as so much of a threat anymore. You have to re-normalize it in order to then be able to focus on the technique.

So it’s like you sort of forget what you’re supposed to be doing technique-wise, but you’re also more preoccupied with your own survival and just getting in that next breath that it becomes very difficult to build on what you learned last time. Whereas, if you are in the water consistently every 48 hours or so, the level of normal kind of gets set, and so your brain spends less time preoccupied by survival and can allocate more resources to learning the technical aspects of the stroke that you’re supposed to be focusing on.

Brenton Ford: Yeah, it’s like public speaking, where the first time that you do it or the first couple of times that you do it, it almost feels like a matter of survival. It’s just like the nerves hit. “Everyone’s looking at me. I’m trying to think about what I’m saying. How do I look? Am I stumbling over my words?”

And actually a good comparison is the first couple of podcasts that I did. This was, oh, look, I think it was probably 2012, 2013. And you couldn’t pay me enough money to go back and listen to those initial podcasts that I recorded, because I would just … Yeah, I have to listen to them again, but I know that they were just so bad that there’s just no … Yeah, I was just nervous about everything. But now it’s just easy. It just happens.

Rory Buck: It’s a conversation.

Brenton Ford: It’s a conversation. Yeah, but before, I was interviewing people. There was no sort of conversation at all. I wouldn’t chip in with anything. It was almost like I could’ve been a journalist and writing an article for a newspaper. I was just putting questions to people and they answered, but there was no back-and-forth.

Yeah, it’s like any skill where the first time that you do it or first couple of times, you’re not going to be able to get into any sort of flow. You’re not going to be able to relax with it at all. Yeah, it really takes a while to get to the sort of competence to be able to relax while you’re doing it.

But particularly for swimming, if you’re in that sort of flight mode and you’re not able to just relax, it makes anything else almost impossible to do, if you’re in panic mode. And that-

Rory Buck: To learn, yeah. Yeah. And I think that the breathing thing in particular is the biggest hurdle. And one of the tools that I utilized quite a lot early-on is a snorkel, just because it takes that need to breathe out of the equation. If we can learn to breathe through the snorkel, because we’ve got continuous access to the air, it quietens down that flight mode, as you called it. I like that. It sort of shuts that voice down and allows us to focus on elements of the stroke that we need to be working on.

But, yeah, you’re spot-on, on relating it to public speaking. It’s exactly the same. I think it’s my number one message that I pushed through to people, both on my sites and my writing, and with the clients that I work with one-on-one, is that this is just a skill. It’s a difficult skill to learn, but it’s just a skill, in the same way that public speaking is a skill, in the same way that anything is a skill. It can be mastered. And there are certain genetic predispositions that you can have that can make you better at it.

But to be completely brute and honest, the level of swimming in triathlon is not particularly high, if you compare it to actual specialist swimmers. And I see no reason why any triathlete cannot swim at sort of 50% of the pack or upper half of the pack in any race, because if they focus their attention and focus their efforts on the right things at the right time, it’s not a mythical thing that’s only bestowed upon certain people. It’s a skill. The more you practice it, the better you’ll get at it. And particularly in triathlon, you don’t have to get to an elite level to be competitive. So anyone can master it.

Brenton Ford: Yeah, I’d agree with that too, and particularly if you can also have good open water swimming skills alongside that, that can also overcome shortcomings in your stroke too. So even just being half decent at drafting, swimming straight, boy, you can save some time with that.

I did a race. When was it? I think it was April. As a team, it was a half IRONMAN event here in Melbourne. So it was a 1.9 kilometer swim. I think I swam about an extra 90 or so meters. And I kind of had to go around people, because we were the last pack. So there was probably a couple of hundred swimmers in before me. So I kept a pretty good line, except for having to go around some people.

And I had a look, just on STRIVR, some of the different files of the people that I follow there, and there was people who were doing 2100, 2200 meters. And if you’re swimming two minutes per 100, that’s four, five, six minutes that you’ve added on top-

Rory Buck: Six minutes, yeah.

Brenton Ford:  Yeah. For no extra effort whatsoever, you could be swimming six minutes quicker, just by being able to sight well, and swim straight, and follow the right line. And that’s just one of the skills that you’ve got in open water. So there’s a lot of opportunities available there for swimmers, where they can swim faster without just working on their technique.

And that’s what I love about open water swimming too. I hated it. I think I was 15 or 16 when I first did it. I got beaten by a friend of mine who I’d always beat in the pool, but he beat me in the open water because I didn’t pace it right. I went out too hard. I didn’t know how to sight, draft, anything like that. And he beat me. And I think I did that swim one more time. And then I didn’t swim again in open water until I was 19 or 20, I think it was.

And now I really love it because of the strategy involved. And it’s not just you in the lane swimming up and down. There are so many different factors that are involved. And it’s a lot of fun, especially if you love a little bit of sort of crash and bash and being able to sort of strategizing in the race. I really enjoy it.

Rory Buck: Yeah. I agree with you. My personal feelings on it is slightly different. I don’t particularly enjoy open water. It’s part of the deal of triathlon. It’s one of the skills that I’ve had to learn to master and learn to get better at, but it’s not a controlled environment, and as an A type personality, I much prefer the controlled environments. But it’s something that you accept as part of the sport.

But I think, yeah, the confidence piece comes in again here, like you said, if you enjoy the sort of crash and bash, the washing machine affect. If your brain is preoccupied by survival, you cannot execute a race strategy, no matter how good that strategy might be.

You may have the perfect take up speed, you may have your ability to dial it in to your actual race pace after a good short sort of burst, you may have the ability to take the gap, you may have all the skills and fitness that you need, but if you’re not confident in the open water, and you’re not confident in having people all around you, those skills, that strategy all goes out the window and your brain goes, “Just get me through this. Just get me through this.” So, yeah, I’m 100% with that.

And I think sighting in particular, as you pointed out, it may not sound like a lot of extra distance to go either an extra 100 meters or an extra 200 meters, but like you say, if you’re swimming at two minutes per 100, that’s a four-minute difference. And if you’re a good runner, that’s like running 22 Ks at the end, which no one’s going to want to do an extra K at the end of the race. So it does make a massive difference in that, with just learning to sight sufficiently.

And that’s something I work on with my guys in the pool ad nauseam is just learning how to sight without having a major impact to body position, to body line, without increasing efforts, and seeing how close we can get doing 100s.

If we’re doing 100s, for example, let’s do 100s without sighting, and then let’s throw in a sighting stroke on the odd lengths, sighting four, five, six times. And what’s the difference in our pace between the two? How much slower are we with the sighting strokes? Can we get them to a point where we’re just as efficient at sighting as we are not sighting, so that when we get out into the open water, if we need to sight every four strokes, every six strokes, it’s not having a major impact on how fast we’re swimming? Because I’d rather have you sight every four and swim 1900 meters, than sight every 12 or 13, swim faster, but have to go 2100 or 2200 because you’re not holding a good line.

Brenton Ford: That’s good. I’m going to have to borrow that one from you. I like that as a way to just sort of compare if you can sight without changing your rhythm, and your timing, and your body position. It’s a good way to track it. And I would say that I think probably 80% of the people that I come across aren’t sighting correctly. And just from my own experience, I know that, yeah, you mention sighting to people and they go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Like, “Yeah, I sight.” And it’s like, “Yeah, I pull through the water. Yeah, I do that.”

But most people I don’t think are doing it in the most effective way possible. Because you might see the same thing where they’ll breathe and then sight, so turn their head to the side and then lift their head up, and look forwards, and then sight that way.

And it can work for some people. I’ve seen some very good swimmers who do use it, but nearly everyone else it’s sight and breathe. It’s just to be able to kind of look up, crocodile eyes, turn their head to the side on the next stroke. And that’s a way where your body position’s not impacted. It’s very sort of fluent in terms of your normal rhythm of the stroke. And you can sight even every two or four strokes if you need to that way without really affecting your speed.

And I’ve found that, if you’re specializing in that, if you’re really focused on it, all it takes is a good sort of half hour spent on it to really get that dialed-in and working well, but it can save you so much time in the open water, if you’re not already doing it.

Rory Buck: Right, 100%. Yeah, I appreciate what you say there. “Yeah, sighting. Yeah, I can do that.” And they sort of just go tick the box, “Yep, I can do that.” And then you get down into the details and take a look at it and realize how inefficient oftentimes it is. And the reason for that, for the most part, is because they watched a YouTube video once and go, “Yep, okay, I can copy that.” And they’ve gone off and just copied it, not actually going through a process of learning how to do it efficiently.

So, yeah, I work between the sight and breathe method, like you’ve just talked about, and I also work a lot with my guys on just sighting. So straight up, straight down, and then sight, and then breathing on the next stroke cycle. It takes a little bit more oxygen, but the body line tends to stay a lot better. I also find that with a lot of my guys changing to that just straight up, straight down method, that they’re able to lock into the point that they’re aiming for a lot more effectively.

So what I found personally with the sight and breathe method is that I would lift up once, and then when I turned my head, in my mind’s eye, the target would shift slightly because of the immediate movements of my head, if that makes sense. So I’m lifting up, and then I’m breathing to the left. So I’d lift up and turn to the left. And as my head turns, the exact point that I’m shooting for has now shifted slightly to the left as I go for my breath. And so I’d have to repeat that two or three times to get a good idea of where exactly I’m locked into.

Whereas, if I go sight and sight, so I’ll just lift up, crocodile eyes, and then straight back down, and then turn the head. Because I’m going straight up and straight down, in my mind’s eye, I have a much better idea of the direction that I’m going into. It doesn’t get distorted or distracted. I’m not distracted by the turn of the head.

So I’ll work with the sight and breathe or with that straight up, straight down method. And for some people, the straight up, straight down tends to be more effective and efficient. And, for some, the sight and breathe. It just depends on a number of variables: whether you wear glasses, how good your eyes are, all of those sort of factors come into play on which one will work most effectively for you.

In the same way that we have a variation of stroke rates, some people have much higher stroke rates, some people a much lower stroke rate, depends on your body, I find that sighting is very similar. And as long as we, like I said earlier, sort of test swimming 100s where we don’t sight, and 100s where we do sights, as long as we’re managing that drop-off or that margin, the actual method that we use can vary as long as we’re adhering to the fundamental principles of resistance and getting the sights in, which is the most important. When you lift your eyes, if you don’t spot your target, it’s an absolute waste.

Brenton Ford: Yeah, that’s it. And just sighting and then going back down, like you said, you might need to do that two or three times to actually see where the next buoy is, because there can be sun in the way, there can be swimmers, there can be chopping waves. So if you can just do it fast, go straight back down, that’s a really good way to make sure that you are swimming straight.

And it’s very hard to really get good at those open water skills without going in open water. You can certainly improve them and get them to a point, but just to be able to race well in open water, at least from my experience, it’s really just been a matter of doing more and more open water swims, and races, and training sessions with people to get good at them. And it can be hard for swimmers, depending on where they’re based, but like any skill, the more you practice it in the actual situation and scenario-

Rory Buck:Environments, yeah.

Brenton Ford: yeah, in the environment, it makes a big, big difference, too, to how well you can do it.

Rory Buck: Right. I think that’s spot-on. I often encourage my guys to do what you did, where you’d joined up in a relay team, if it doesn’t fit your training program to do a full race, whether it’s a sprints Olympic or a 70.3. But if you have the opportunity to go and join, as a relay team, and you just do the swim portion and work on that skill without impacting your training for your A race, or whatever you have coming up later in the season, it gives you the opportunity to get the experience or the exposure in, by still getting the swim done, and then if there are any swim-specific open water races, to go and do them.

I’m not sure how they work in Australia, but we often have sort of the festivals, where you’ll have a 400, an 800, a 1500. We don’t have any 5Ks yet, but those are all three different events, and they don’t run them at the same time. So you could go and do a 400 meter open water swim race, and then an hour later do the 800, and then an hour later do the 1500, and just give yourself exposure to racing in the open water.

So by doing relays as part of a triathlon team, or getting involved in actual open water races, just giving yourself that experience of having people all around you, a mass start, learning how to turn, learning how to sight, in the pressure situation, is invaluable.

Brenton Ford: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got someone who’s just become a member. He’s a triathlete, very, very solid black guy, very solid runner. And his swim is getting now … I think he’s down to about, I think, just under the hour for an IRONMAN swim, maybe just above it. But he’s been putting in big, big Ks over the last couple of months. And I think he’s up around 40Ks for a few weeks, plus all the other legs as well.

And he’s really improved his swimming, but now I think it’s just the technical stuff and the open water skills that are just slowing him down now. So he’s sort of done the work that he needs in terms of getting in the pool regularly, but now he’s missing those two things.

And one of the things I’m going to suggest to him over the sort of warmer months as there starts to be more open water swims is just go down and enter a few of those swims that you’ve got up around you, because there’s a ton up where he is, and you’ll learn a lot more about swimming open water when you’re amongst, I guess, better quality swimmers in just that leg than you will in just doing it, yeah, in a triathlon. So it’s a really good way to do it.

And in New Zealand there’s the Epic Swim, which is in Lake Taupo. So there’s a 2.5, a 5K, and a 10K swim. And the same thing there, not held all at the same time. So there’s people who, they call it the epic Epic, which is they do all of those swims-

Rory Buck: All of them.

Brenton Ford: yeah, within the day. So it’s 17.5K. Not a whole lot of people do it, but there are people who are training for the Cook Strait Crossing, Lake Taupo Crossing, and a number of things like that. So, yeah, they just make the most of the event being put on. So they just do a lazy 17.5K in the day.

Rory Buck: Right. Yeah, it’s good exposure. I think, to sort of hop onto the client that’s joined your membership program, and something that’s a pet peeve of mine, and I see it happen so often with guys at that level and guys at all levels, is watching triathletes or working with triathletes for a period of six months, nine months, a year, and seeing the effort that goes into progressing, and getting faster, and shaving off the minutes from their swim time, and then watching them get to their A race. Because my focus is swimming for triathlon, I pay attention to not just what happens in the swim.

Here’s an example. I had a lady who raced a 70.3 South Africa in January. And this lady grinded hard. She came from no swimming background whatsoever. This was her first 70.3. And she really worked hard to get down to the time that she did for about eight months, and then she took four and a half minutes in transition. And I said to Amy, “What the heck were you doing? Were you blow drying your hair before you got on the bike?” And she said, “No, it was just something that I didn’t think about, that I didn’t practice.”

And it’s a pet peeve of mine to watch guys really grind hard for a long time, because progress in the swim doesn’t always come easy. It takes a lot of effort and a lot of intensity. And then to throw those four minutes, that you’ve spent the last six, seven months working for, away in a slow transition is just a painful thing to have to sit and watch. You’d have saved yourself a hell of a lot of time, and effort, and energy by just swimming four and a half minutes slower and going through transition faster.

So it’s the little details of how we put a full race together. But, yeah, when you said the skills that your new guy that’s joined your membership program is coming to work on is open water, it’s definitely something to work on. It’s also those little details that come after that, that make a big difference, and how you attack transition is a factor.

Brenton Ford: Yeah, absolutely. I had a very similar story actually. I was running some clinics up in North Queensland, and one of the ladies who came along, she had just IRONMAN Cannes, the full-distance IRONMAN event. She missed out on a [kiner 00:55:28] spot by one placing, and it was 20 seconds. Well, she obviously was there to get faster in her swim, but she was looking at her transition times. And I think it was T1 where she took something similar. She took, yeah, four or five minutes. Everyone else was at least sort of a minute or two quicker. And she looks back at that and goes, “What was I thinking?” And she really wanted this kiner spot.

So, yeah, hindsight’s a wonderful thing. And in the heat of the moment, it can be hard to be thinking of everything, but when you look back at it and you analyze, you go, “All right, next time that’s not happening. I’m getting out of that transition quickly.” And even in a race that might take you nine or 10 hours, those seconds can matter. And you want to look at everything that you’re doing and analyzing and seeing where you can get better.

Rory Buck: Right. Absolutely. And it’s all relative to the goals. But there are easier ways to cut four minutes from your swim time in a 70.3 than grinding out hard for nine months, if you can get those transition times down. Yeah, again, we’re looking at the whole big picture.

And I think this is something, coming back to training and effort like we were talking about earlier, how you go onto the bike, how you come out of the water and go onto the bike dictates a lot about how your whole race sort of plays out and it goes. If you come out of the water in a place where you feel, “That is where I should’ve come out,” or sort of, “My swim was a good swim,” the mindset that you carry onto the bike is very different to when you come out of the water behind where you thought you should have been.

And there’s a lot of psychology, that I’ve spent quite a lot of time thinking about and talking with my athletes on, about kind of how you manage yourself coming out of the water and getting onto the bike. Because in the controlled environment of the pool, it’s always 25 meters are always 50 meters that you’re swimming, the water temperature’s always the same, we’ve got the lane lines in, so the environment is very controlled, and the time that you swim generally tends to reflect the efforts that you’ve put in, the fitness level that you’re at, and the technique that you’re holding.

That isn’t always true in the open water. And you can have races in the open water where everybody is slower, for whatever reason. Currents, conditions, temperature, whatever. But you aren’t always aware of that in the moment. And you only learn that after the fact, when you get out and can analyze it later.

I raced 70.3 Colombo in February this year. It was an out and back course, and I was holding 107 per 100s, according to my Garmin, looking after the fact. So I was holding 107s per 100 on the way out, and 133s on the way back. But you don’t know that. I could feel that there was a current on the way back, but you don’t know exactly what the effect is.

And you come out of the water and you look at your watch, and if it’s not in the range of what you sort of had in mind, part of your plan, the way you get onto your bike and sort of the way you hit that first 30K on the bike, or that first piece of the bike can be heavily influenced by the time that you came out of the water.

There’s a fun psychology piece that I really enjoy working with my athletes on. You can have a great plan, but that plan may change, depending on what happens on race day. And you won’t actually know until after the fact. So how do you deal with that mentally?

Brenton Ford: Yeah. That’s something that Grant Giles, who’s a triathlon coach I’ve had on the podcast a few times … He was talking about something similar, just about being able to adapt in the moment and on race days. And one of the things he said was, “If you find your nutrition plan, but your guts isn’t agreeing with you and you’re on the edge of needing to throw up because the gels aren’t sitting well, there’s no point downing another gel if it’s just going to make that feeling even worse. It’s okay to adjust what you’re doing. And you want to be able to prepare for that in training.”

So let’s say in a few runs you might not take any fuel with you, and you might get to the point where you bonk, where you hit food flat. Just kind of going through all those situations in training so that you know that you’ve been through them, once you’re in race day.

And kind of on the sort of mindset mentality, too, people will come to clinics sometimes and they’ll say, “Look, I’m not a good swimmer,” or just, “I suck at swimming.” And one of the first things that I sort of want to say to that is, “Stop telling yourself that. That’s a very hard hurdle to get over without having to go through a long period of time of just seeing that gradual improvement. So the best thing you can do initially is just to change your mindset. It might be, ‘I’m getting faster in my swimming.’ Just something along those lines, but what you tell yourself in your own head can really impact your progression and how you think about the sport.”

Rory Buck: You got a chill up my spine, because what you just said hits the nail on the head so hard. I think anyone that’s had a level of success in any area, whether it’s sports, or their profession, or whatever, if you’ve reached a pinnacle, or kind of broken through to a top-tier, a majority of those people will tell you that there was a level of delusion involved, that their ability to believe that they were better than they were or could be better than they are existed.

And I think that that’s something that I identify with. So I got the chill up my spine, because I identify with it so much. As a 16-year-old, to have the balls and the audacity to say, “I want to be world-class,” or “I want to make an Olympic team,” when I started that late, there would be no way that I would’ve gone on to reach the level that I had reached had I not had that delusional belief that it was possible.

And if you approach your swimming in a way that, “I suck at swimming,” or “I am a terrible swimmer,” you will never reach the level that you aspire to reach, until you change that mindset. So that thinking process now doesn’t have to be a process of, “I will be the best triathlon swimmer or the best swimmer that ever walked this planet,” but changing that mindset of, “I can do this. It is just a skill,” is definitely the first step that you have to take to improving it. Without that mindset change, you will just bang your head against the wall over and over and over again, and you’ll reinforce the belief that you are not a good swimmer or that you suck at swimming.

And I’ve changed it now, but that was actually the message that I sent to anybody that had signed up for my newsletter. The first one that went out for my website was, “Change the way you think, because until that happens, I can’t help you. I can Band-Aid things and kind of give you all the tips and tricks in the book that you want to hear, but if you continue to reinforce the message that you suck, that this is too difficult and that you’ll never get good at it, it doesn’t matter. You could have the best program in the world, you could have the best coach telling you what you’re doing, but if you don’t believe it, we’re going nowhere.”

So I think, yeah, you nailed that one on the head right there.

Brenton Ford: I just had Angela Naeth on the podcast, who’s a professional triathlete, and that was episode 118. And she kind of said a very similar thing. At the pointy end, at that very elite level, most of those guys are doing very similar types of training, and they’re all very similar in terms of their fitness and ability.

But especially when it comes to Kona, the World Champs and that sort of thing, a lot of the time the guys who are hitting the podium, they’re the ones who are the strongest mentally and have got the best … I sort of call it the tape that your mind plays on a 15 minute loop. They’ve got that really working for themselves, because when it comes to the crunch, the last 10, 15Ks of the run at Kona, where you’ve probably got nothing left, the difference is physically probably very little between you and the person next to you, but it’s how you think about it that will get you through to the end.

And there’s a lot more that we can talk about, and I’d like to get you back on the podcast in the future, because we’ve sort of got a few things that we’ve wrote down that we want to talk about, and we’ve only just touched the surface, so I’ll definitely get you back on the podcast.

So I appreciate you being a guest. And for the people listening, where can they find you? And what are your sort of social media handles and so on?

Rory Buck: Yeah, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking with you, Brenton. I appreciate you having me on. Thank you.

You can find me at ICanSwimFast.com. That is my website. ICanSwimFast.com.

Brenton Ford: Talk about positive thoughts, eh?

Rory Buck: Nailed it on the head. Yeah, that’s exactly where that title came from.

So I’ve got a Fundamentals of Triathlon Swimming Guide that’s up there for free, and that kind of touches base on all the fundamental principles of triathlon swimming. So that’s ICanSwimFast.com/Fundamentals. And I’ve actually been in hibernation and writing mode for the last two and a half months.

And I’ve got a couple of other things that I’m about to release out on there. So ICanSwimFast.com is where you can find all of that.

And then I am most active on Instagram, which is ICSwimFast@ICSwimFast. And I’ll post up stuff on there on a weekly basis. So those are the two places that you can find me.

And then if you’re in Dubai, send me an email. And it’s [email protected]. And I’d be more than happy to find a spot for you in a squad or in a small group.

Brenton Ford: Awesome. And maybe the next podcast, although it’ll have to be next time you’re in South Africa because they don’t allow Skype unfortunately. So we might need to find a workaround or just do the long-distance call thing and just save up for a month and do that.

Brenton Ford: But it was great to have you on the podcast. And, yeah, I’ve enjoyed talking about these topics. And I think we’ve got very similar backgrounds, and we’re sort of going through a very similar time in the moment with coaching, but I think there’s still some things that each coach is sort of nuanced at and they have different approaches. And I really enjoyed seeing what other coaches’ approaches are. And there’s always things to learn, and I certainly took away a lot from today.

So, Rory, I appreciate it, and I’ll talk you soon.

Rory Buck: Thanks very much, Brenton. Shout to you soon.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to effortlessswimming.com.

The post From Commonwealth Games to Coach with Rory Buck appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

This week’s podcast features Jason Hamilton as our guest. An athlete and triathlete

Transcript:

Brenton Ford: Welcome to episode number 119 of the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is Jason Hamilton, who’s an athlete who joined me over in Thailand for a hell week camp last year. And on day two of hell camp, everyone sits down and sets their goals for the next six to twelve months whatever sport whatever event they’re doing. And two of Jason’s goals were, number one qualify for the world champs, which is coming up in September on the Gold Coast. And number two was to swim under 22 minutes 30 for his Olympic distance triathlon which is a 1500 meter swim. And he achieved both of those goals recently. So he’s qualified for the world champs and he swam just under 22 minutes for the 1500 meter swim. So, he achieved both of those goals. So I wanted to get him on the podcast to share what he’s done in the past six to nine months to help get him down there. A lot of it comes down to putting in the hard work getting in the pool on a regular basis. And there’s also a number of other things that he mentions there.

Now, one person, we didn’t mention on the podcast but he wanted me to make sure that I mentioned in the intro it was Giorgio Romano who runs the master swim squad up in Darwin known as the Darwin Stingers masters club. So I wanted to give him credit as well for helping him in his training and setting his programs. So let’s jump into the podcast. Here’s Jason Hamilton sharing how he was able to achieve both of those goals in the space of nine months and what he did too to bridge the gap from where he was, which was around a 25 minute 1500 meter swim to get down in just under 22 minutes.

Speaker 2: Welcome to the effortless swimming podcast the show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host Brenton Ford.

Brenton Ford: Welcome to episode number 119 of the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is Jason Hamilton who is a triathlete or an athlete who came to hell week camp in 2017 and set himself some goals that he wanted to achieve in 2018 and basically hit those goals and he’s on track to have a really good 2018 season. So, Jass welcome to the podcast.

Jason Hamilton: Thank you, thanks for having me.

Brenton Ford: So you came along to hell week in Thailand last year and you had the two goals of qualifying for world champs in the Olympic distance tri and to go 22 and 30 swims within an Olympic distance race. So, where were you at the time, I guess in October, when we first met where were you in terms of on track for that? What was your swim time and was the situation there?

Jason Hamilton: When I came to Thailand in October I was sitting around on a 25 minute 1500, so that was a minute 40 per hundred. Prior to that I had really only been actively swimming for about nine months prior to that and before that, not at all, just purely focusing on the running scene.

Brenton Ford: And your background is but long distance running. Have you done one ultra or you’ve done it more than that?

Jason Hamilton: A background is quite a short history in this type of sport actually. So, in the beginning of 2016 is when I first started running. That was the first sport I went into and in that time I’ve done a couple marathons and one ultra marathon up to 96 kilometers that one was.

Brenton Ford: Wow. So, you haven’t got a huge background in, I guess, endurance sports, So, it’s all fairly new to you. And since October you pretty much hit your qualifying for world champs and the time. Do you wanna talk a little bit about what you got with the qualification and also they swim time what it’s down to?

Jason Hamilton: So, in terms of qualification it required me to have to participate in, they say, at least a minimum of three qualifying events. At the beginning of July each year they set out which specific Olympic distance races will be qualifying races were you can accumulate points for. And I had targeted three races in the state to achieve that and had a couple extra up my sleeve in case I was going to fall short. This year the World Championships are in Australia. And given that triathlons a self-funded sport at the age group level, generally speaking, the competition becomes quite face to secure a place for me Australian team in the lead up to a local World Championship. So, I’ve given I was fairly fresh into the sport. I thought I’d really have to have as many cards up my sleeve as possible to give myself a chance of making the team.

So I went out and participated in three and I was watching the final point sort of come together and there are only two races available left on the calendar that I have a crack at and I was looking like I was going to fall short miss out on the top 25 places which were the maximum number of people per age group they would take by only a few points. So, I threw my hat in the ring and took off to St Kilda at short notice and was lucky enough to place a seventh on the day in my age group. Sent my fastest swim time, my fastest overall time on the Olympic distance and lock away that place for the World Championships. So that final swim time ended up being just under 22 minutes on the day.

Brenton Ford: That’s awesome and what do you feel has got you from around 25 minutes to 22. What’s made the difference for you?

Jason Hamilton: I’d say it’s a combination of two things not having any swimming background at all, having that time in the water is really a big factor. Speaking to a lot of people early in the pace that are talking anything upwards of three times a week up to even five times a week you want to be in the water. And even if that’s not going out and doing big long sets or doing a lot of very hard repeat sessions, it’s just a case of being in the water getting a feel and getting the rhythm. And then the second part of that is having a coach. And a coach from the point of view being able to understand who you are or where you’re coming from and putting some structure around helping you achieve those goals. Because as with anything if you set those goals yourself the life, sickness, injury that sort of thing can get in the way. So, it’s good to have somebody else standing by your side and keeping you honest in the same breath as well. When you’re chasing these goals.

Brenton Ford: And that’s that’s Nathan Shearer?

Jason Hamilton: Yeah, Nathan Shearer.

Brenton Ford: He won, what did he win, Ironman Taupo the same year that I raced, we’re in the same age group. And he’s turned pro now as a triathlete. Very good triathlete and by all reports a really good coach as well and a gun runner at that too. I think he went, was it a two 50 for the marathon at the back end of his last Ironman event, which is a really quick time. So, having that sort of accountability, what’s it look like for you when you guys chat? You’re talking on your phone, is it just through training peaks? How does that accountability look to you?

Jason Hamilton: So, the benefit of putting our training plans through training peaks gives him clear line of sight in what I’m doing week in week out. And it allows me to also set in place some upcoming races likely that are on the calendar here in Darwin. So it’s very current I suppose between the two of us. And then as he sets out each of the weekly plans and schedules he’ll factor in those goals and I’ll put down whether or not this is one race I really wanna do. Or this is an optional one if you think it will add value to where we’re going what we’re doing. Early in the pace, it was just about getting an understanding of where he’s coming from when he sets up specific training sessions, what he’d like to see out of it. What things need to be aware of or conscious of particularly on the back of being new to the sport and new to doing back to back training sessions day after day across three disciplines.

But that sort of transferred now six months, well, it’s almost nine months down the track now into each of the weekly goals being set out. I’ll see the program I’ll know specifically what he’s wanting to do. And only if I’m needing a little bit of clarification, I’ll touch base with him throughout the course of the week. But if it’s coming up to a fairly major event and I just need that second opinion or just made somebody to sound something out he’s there to be able to pick up the phone and have a chat to or to Skype with. Whatever’s available at the time.

Brenton Ford: Awesome and now in the last I guess nine, twelve months since you’ve been out to get a bit more swimming under your belt and coming from not much of a background do you think about your swimming differently in terms of you get to the pool? Are you more confident with your swimming? Do you enjoy it more? Has anything changed there?

Jason Hamilton: I think the enjoyment piece around the swimming came fairly early in the piece because I saw some very quick improvements there. And starting out from not having any swimming background and racing locally here in Darwin, I see myself progress past a lot of the other triathletes who had been doing the sport a lot longer than me. So, that that enjoyment fed into that confidence that you know possibly I’ve got something here to take a bit further. And where was initially going to those swimming sessions it was more of a case of I had a little bit of a fear of water, particularly open water swimming in this case if I’m doing this for myself to become a better swimmer, to begin with.

And so I will go into the swimming sessions going, okay, I am doing this to survive this time and eventually it’s gonna make better. But as I’ve spent more time in the water I’ve been exposed to a lot more swimmers and triathletes. That’s transferred into me, really looking forward to each of the sessions and going into each session with a specific goal or a purpose in mind saying, last week that one 35 was pretty comfortable, let’s see if we can just sharpen it up a little bit further. Having said you have good days bad days you’re going in and out from one training session to the next across the three disciplines. So, you do have those waves. But I find that having that structure really does help me to hit the focus and keep the enjoyment there as well.

Brenton Ford: Yeah, that’s one of the key things is those, I think, those little improvements can really keep the motivation high and it doesn’t need to be much at all it’s like, oh, great I was one second two seconds quicker here than I was four weeks ago eight weeks ago. And just that steady improvement is what can really keep you hungry and keep you going. And you’re always going to go through those ups and downs especially if training a lot like you are, if you’re doing more than one session a day you’re doing multiple sports, you’re going to be tired at some point during the week you’re going to have sessions where you feel like you’ve forgotten how to swim or you’ve forgotten how to run properly. But it’s just knowing that that’s normal and then just sucking up and getting through that session and then hoping that the next one is going to feel better.

And it’s not just a steady rise it’s you’re always gonna have the ups and downs. And you’ve had a pretty, I’d say almost sort of, exponential rise in terms of your ability and your speed in triathlon and swimming and it’s really, really good to see and having only done the sport for sort of one, two years. It’s really exciting to see what you can get to, because I think you’re probably quite a natural athlete and you’re built well for a triathlon. So, it’s still very early days which is exciting. So, what’s the next thing for you in the next six to twelve months? What are the goals that you’ve set out?

Jason Hamilton: Well, given how much I’ve traveled and competed in state this year I’m sort of drawing a line in the sand at least for this year in terms where my goals are and the major event on the calendar now has qualified for the world champs is to do really well at that event. So, I’m really focusing on the swim leg and bike leg as my two weaker points compared to the competition over the next 10 weeks. But between now and then quite lucky we’re being based in Darwin. Our triathlon calendars are fairly active. Active calendar. We’ve got over 22 events I think we’ve got 23 on the calendar for next year. So, you can race almost every second week. We’ve also got the local swimming series firing out the road cycling series and road running series. So, between now and then I’m keeping myself quite active in racing those individual sports with the goal of racing games, so it’s purest. Learning what I can from each of those individual events and having me bring it together a lot better on the day of the world championships. So yeah.

Brenton Ford: That’s important. I think racing people who are specialists in each of those areas gives you an understanding of the level that you can get to in that sport, but also just helps with putting that into triathlon. I was speaking to a guy last week who has been working his butt off to improve his swim for Ironman and he was basically doing up to 40 K weeks, and he’s training for Ironman, 40 kilometer swim weeks because that was his weakness. So, a huge amount of training in the pool.

And he probably needs a little bit of work with his open water skills and I think probably the best way to him to do that in the offseason is he’s going to be entering just open water swims and getting used to swimming with the pack in the bunch and just improving the skills that way. And you can do that on a regular basis if it’s just a run race or just a swim race. So, I think that’s a really, really smart approach. And I didn’t know they had such a big series up in Darwin with that many triathlons throughout the season, that’s that’s huge. I wouldn’t have expected that.

Jason Hamilton: Yeah we’re very lucky up here. I mean contrary to what people think it’s quite warm and wet season comes through, it can be tough getting out there on the bike or even going out for a run and that’s … The warmer weather gives us a luxury that the guys down the south don’t is that we get to train during the winter months and it’s absolute bliss at the moment and this is when we get to bring in our longer events. So, back end of July we’ve got the long course championships. The long territory titles for that. And a week after that we’ve got an event called the Katherine ultra challenge, which is a six leg multi-sport event totaling a 100 kilometers in total. So, that’s a short quick turnaround. A week later after the long course. But gotta make the most of it while they’re there.

Brenton Ford: Yeah, that’s awesome. I was up in, where was I, Cairns and Townsville the other weekend and similar sort of climate to Darwin in terms of it’s up the north end and it was 25 degrees each day that I was there and just beautiful mornings there. It was a little fresh in the morning but just enough to wake you up. But the climate during the winter months up in Darwin, up in northern Queensland is just so spectacular that I can see why people live there. I’ve only been there in the summer months where it was mid to high 30s, super humid and was just dripping sweat from stepping off the plane, but especially during these months it is amazing there and I can imagine it makes it very easy to train.

Jason Hamilton: I’d still definitely test you, but if you can get out there and do a little bit and be consistent about it as well, you definitely reap the benefits when you do head back home. If you’re coming up here for a short time or head down south to compete. Yeah, we’re very lucky to be where we are.

Brenton Ford: Yeah, and I mean for those, for people who don’t know the climate of Darwin I mean what sort of temperatures do you see in the wet season?

Jason Hamilton: The wet season, the temperature doesn’t get up crazy high you’re talking about 32s, 33s, 34s, but it’s more the humidity that has the biggest impact on you, particularly when you get out there and start moving around, like you said, you get off the plane and you just feel the thickness in the air and you just start sweating straight away. So, it’s really just coping with that humidity, which will roll from 80 to 90 percent day in day out. And you get into the peak of the build-up you’ll have a daily thunderstorm rolled through maybe two sometimes and in the back end of the wet season you’ve got cyclones coming through or the possibility of cyclones coming through as well so, keeps it interesting.

Brenton Ford: Yeah, it sounds like it. And you’re coming back to hell week this year. I know you made some good friends at hell week last year, which is awesome and you got to catch up with those guys at the half Ironman in Cairns just recently. And yeah, it’d be good to see you back there. You’re bringing along a friend as well, which will be great and I’m looking forward to catching up you there. So, all the best for the worlds in the meantime and looking forward to seeing what you can do there ’cause you’re just making improvement after improvement, which is awesome. So, all the best and I appreciate you being on the podcast.

Jason Hamilton: No problem, thank you.

Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to the effortless swimming podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to effortlessswimming.com.

The post How to Swim 10% Faster in 9 Months with Jason Hamilton appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

This week’s podcast is an informal one; I talk to you about the importance of your beliefs in relation to your mindset.

Over time, it has come to my attention that there is something holding back a majority of swimmers, and that is their beliefs. Whether it be something they see another swimmer do and believe it will help them, or whether it is something a coach has said that they have believed, they have been influenced in some way by an incorrect statement or idea, and it has held them back as a swimmer.

Today’s podcast addresses the above and asks you to become self-aware about your own beliefs and the effects they might be having on your swimming.

If you want one on one coaching from anywhere in the world, check out the Effortless Swimming Online Coaching Program.

The post What You Believe Will Make You Freeze appeared first on Effortless Swimming.

This week Vicky Tate, who has recently become one of less than a hundred swimmers to complete the 40-kilometer crossing of Lake Taupo, joins us in the podcast.  I met Vicky last year when she joined us for Hell Week in Thailand and we talk about everything from how Hell Week helped her, to the pacing of a long swim, feeding during the swim, motivation during the swim and much more.

Join us as we talk about her experience.

00:30 – From not being able to swim a “k” to a 40 km straight swim.

The post Conquering The 40km Crossing Of Lake Taupo With Vicky Tate appeared first on Effortless Swimming.