Thriving in Triathlon as a Swimmer

Elizabeth James: Hello and welcome to the TriDot Podcast. I'm Elizabeth James, professional triathlete, coach, and your guest host for the next few episodes. That's right, new host for just a few episodes — Andrew and his wife added a new little baby to their family, so he's a little preoccupied at the moment. It's a tough role to try and fill in for Andrew, but I promised him that as long as he sent me a few photos in return — which he's already made good on that promise — I would do my best to host so that he can take a little bit of time with their newest addition. So super excited to be here, and today I am joined by Coach Will Usher. Will is the founder of Precision Coaching, which is a top triathlon team based in the UK. Hey Will, welcome back to the show.

Will Usher: Thanks very much. Excited to be here and on one of my favorite topics as well.

Elizabeth: I know, this was just the perfect episode to have you on, and I know listeners love listening to you, so we will dive into things here today — possible pun intended. So Andrew may not be here, but we are keeping things mostly the same in terms of formatting. We treat this show like any good workout — we'll start off with our warm-up question, settle in for our main set conversation, and then wind things down by asking a question from our audience on the cooldown. Lots of good stuff, let's get to it.

Over the course of our triathlon journey, we will likely swim in a variety of places. For today's warm-up question, here we go — what pool or body of water have you logged the most swim time in? Will, what's this answer for you?

Will: Well, I grew up as a swimmer, and a bit of a shout-out to my local swim club that I trained most of my hours in — Calne Alpha 4, a little club in Wiltshire. The pool there — we were training six days a week and twice a day. So, yeah, I easily spent the most of my time in my swimming career certainly there. It actually got shut down for a bit and then the community got it reopened again, so I got to go swim there again — I think 20 years after I moved away — so it was a nice bit of a lark, but yeah, great little pool.

Elizabeth: Awesome. Well, I certainly haven't logged six days a week and twice a day of swimming like you, but for me this has to be the 50-meter outdoor pool, Lifetime Craig Ranch McKinney. It's gone through a change of ownership, so it didn't used to be called that, but I've been swimming there for eight years now — multiple times a week for eight years, still probably not reaching the same number of miles that you have, Will — but that's where I've logged the most. And we can't wait to hear from you, our audience — tell us where you have logged the most miles in the water. Bonus points for photos, we'd love to see those beautiful places that you've been swimming. All right, we are settling in for today's conversation. Now, Coach Will, you were selected for this episode because you are an athlete with a very strong swim background, as we alluded to there in the warm-up question — six days a week, twice a day for many, many years. You have brought that swim experience into triathlon, so maybe give us a little bit more information about your experience with swimming and how that played a role in getting you into multi-sport.

Will: Yeah, okay. So I grew up as a swimmer. I was also into athletics and running, but actually that became more of a functional output of my swimming fitness. I competed at national level throughout my childhood and youth, and I was actually a sprinter, believe it or not — a 50-meter butterfly swimmer. But we still, in that sort of time, had a lot of influence from Bill Sweetenham, who was the Australian coach and then came onto British swimming, and we did a lot of meters — 45,000, 50,000 meters a week, even as sprinters. As a result, we all wore those meters — I could still swim like a 17:10 1500 meter, because you just got huge volume, huge fitness. I got into triathlon because when I went to university, my main swim rival from back home turned up at university — I had no idea he was going to the same university. And he said, well, I want to have a go at the BUCSA, which is the British University Sporting Association triathlon, right, an intro university triathlon. I was like, right, I've got you here, because I know you'll beat me on the swim, probably, but I'm going to have you on the run, I'll take my chances on the bike. And sure enough, we went and entered our first triathlon, and I never looked back — and that was his last triathlon. It was the beginning of a brand new world for me, and I really enjoyed it.

Elizabeth: Gosh, that's so cool — so definitely a pivotal moment there where you went from swimmer to, I'm gonna give this a try, gotta beat the rival. And then, as you said, that was his first and last, and opened up a whole new world for you. Will, I'm curious — how did you feel as you picked up those other two sports? Did it seem to come naturally? Did you feel out of place coming from the pool? Tell us a little bit about that.

Will: Well, the run I ran to national level as well, but as I said, it was mostly a function of the swimming — actually one of the biggest advantages of coming from a swim background is really the strength of core. We did a lot of explosive work as well, but just the diesel engine as well, that I could just keep going. We'd go to many national cross-country races, we're never the fastest, but we can just keep going. It looked a little bit ridiculous — these swimmers with massive shoulders running around while you've got sort of Mo Farah lookalikes absolutely destroying this. But the run wasn't so bad, and I was pretty confident there — I'd run with my dad from age four as well, he was big into his running, this was sort of the initial surge of endurance and fun running, he was really into Comrades and all that in South Africa. But the bike — that was a different matter. And actually, that first triathlon I mentioned just now, it was a pool-based triathlon, and the way we see those in the UK, and most other parts of the world, is you see it on the swim time, because the bike and the run are difficult to see and you don't want people swimming over each other at different speeds. So I put in what I felt was a slow swim time, which it would have been in swimming circles, but in triathlon circles it was pretty fast, and it landed me in the last heat — I was like, all right, but pretty well came out ahead. And then I just heard all these disc wheels and it passed me, and that was really the last I saw of the competition. I was on the run course last, because I thought my leg strength from running would carry through to the bike — turns out it didn't, and that was the biggest area of improvement for me. I was also riding an old steel Raleigh Pursuit, as it was back then, with the gears on the down tube, proper old school. Coming into tri, the run was all right, but the bike took a bit of getting used to, for sure.

Elizabeth: Yes, yeah, it makes sense. I'm curious, because now that you have had this experience of going from swimming into triathlon, you also have the opportunity to coach a number of athletes from various sport backgrounds. So if an athlete comes to you and says, hey coach, I'm a swimmer, I want to start triathlon — what would be the first thing you say to that athlete as they want to make that transition?

Will: Well, I think they're coming to the sport with a massive advantage. Swimming is — I mean, I know we talk about this in Pool School, about what sports are technical and what aren't — you know, a bike clearly is technical, as is a run, however, swimming is comfortably the most technical in many regards, I think. And it also has that added issue of the vestibular system and being horizontal, as opposed to standing up, which is normal for us. So I think if you come from a swim background, you have a big advantage in that sense — the most technical discipline, you're very happy with, you're confident in water. Some people are sometimes nervous in open water — it's not a bad thing, but it's all in the realms of what's safe and what isn't. But yeah, the other advantage that you have is strength of core. It's something I talk to my kids a lot about, particularly my runners and cyclists actually, because often a runner and cyclist will look at the volume in a swim session and go, why am I doing this much — because, for example, quite often you'd see an intermediate swimmer doing three and a half thousand meters, or maybe more, which is double the distance, I'd say, of a 70.3, and yet you'd never really see them doing 180K when training for a 70.3. Equally, you never see them doing a marathon when training for a half marathon. So, why am I doing this? One of the key issues — the way I explain it to my athletes is that when you're walking around, or if I'm throwing a ball or something, my platform is my feet that are touched to the ground. If I was to kneel down, it would be my knees — we have a solid platform, our core works in the way it's supposed to and engages. When you swim, you don't have that platform of the ground beneath you — in order to put pressure on the water, you need to engage your core every single time. An average athlete would swim around 4,000 strokes over the course of an Ironman swim, and around about an hour, roughly, for a decent swim, and there's around five to six different muscle groups getting involved with that. So if you were to try and do 20,000 reps in the gym in an hour, you've got no chance, right? But that continual pressure on the core and on the shoulders and everything else means that when you come to the bike and run, you don't collapse. And you often see pure runners coming into the sport who are running slightly bent over — by the time they get to the run, because their core collapsed on the swim. So I'm certainly talking to my athletes when they're like, why aren't we doing this twice, double the distance — well, what we're doing is training your swim before the bike and run. And the other question I would say to them is that when you walk to the shops, or walk to the bus, or you're standing around watching kids play football, your core is actively being involved just to hold you up — just that low-level training. When was the last time you walked to the shop with your hands? And because we don't do that on a daily basis — someone can look absolutely ripped, have proper army arms, and yet in swimming terms be relatively weak. So we just need that high repetition, but you have that as a swimmer, which is a huge advantage.

Elizabeth: Yeah, that's awesome — we're gonna dive into a couple more of those benefits too, but the one thing that sparked — if an athlete comes to you with a swim background, is there a massive difference if they say, hey I want to do my first sprint tri, versus hey I want to do an Ironman? Or do you approach that in a similar way, looking at the swim volume they have and how that can translate into the bike and the run?

Will: So swimmers — maybe one of the biggest advantages and biggest disadvantages to manage is that they're used to a lot of miles in the pool. We all know quite sensibly that training is about time in zone — it just happens in swimming, traditionally you needed more volume, right, and even now, as things have changed slightly at the Olympic level, the volume is still considerable. So the advantage is that swimmers are used to doing lots of sessions throughout the week, okay, so there's no problem. The disadvantage is they go, all right, so I swim twice a day, so now I need to bike twice a day and run twice a day, and pretty quickly they're on like a 50-hour training week, which is impossible. So managing that expectation and saying, actually, you know what, you can back those things off, you don't need to — and also the level of stress induced from cycling, and in particular running, will require considerably more recovery time than the swimming pool. So I think that's something that needs to be managed with swimmers — big positives, they really understand that you need to do more than one session a week, for example.

Elizabeth: Yeah, yeah, I love just digging into the benefits of that, especially as they come from such a structured background. Now, you mentioned that swimmers are used to probably twice a day in the pool and maybe struggle to translate that into, okay, I don't need to do as much volume with the biking and running. Was that something you encountered as you were getting started — that you thought you had to cycle just as much and run just as much? Or did you have a good mentor or coach that was able to help you with that?

Will: So when I got into the sport initially, I was with the uni tri team and some good experience there, as you'll get in any sort of club system. We didn't have any coaches specifically at that point — triathlon was still relatively new, newish, in the '90s, certainly at university level. And I got a coach slightly later on — I think I was still swimming for university as well, so I was sort of balancing the two. The thing that shocked me the most was probably the cycling. I remember going out on a training ride, which was 50K, and I was hanging on for dear life, and I just blew up basically and fell off a bike sideways. So I think trying to manage that was difficult — understanding that volume was different in the cycling world. And then fueling — the pure distances that you can do in a couple hours on the bike is just so significantly more. As a kid we rode our bikes 16km, 10 miles, to your friends' house or something — mostly on a BMX, so it wasn't quite the same thing. So that was the biggest shift for me, and I really had no experience in cycling — I just picked that up as I went along.

Elizabeth: Awesome. Well, I can't move on from the benefits without touching on this, because this is something I come across as a coach so often — it seems like one of the biggest hurdles for athletes getting into the sport is just comfort in the water. Maybe talk to us a little bit about what an advantage swimmers have of being comfortable in the water — I mean, most of the time that's in the pool, but how that can translate into open water as well.

Will: Yeah, definitely. I remember racing in Dubai in 2019, and it's always stuck with me about how important — and I think about this for my kids too — how important it is to have them confident in the water. We'd done the race, the 70.3 Dubai, and we then hired a boat, it was like 16 of us, and we'd basically just had a nice time sailing around just off the beaches around Dubai. The ship's captain sort of moored up and said, if you want to jump in for a swim, feel free. And of the 16, there were only three of us that had swim backgrounds who were happy to jump into the water, even though everybody had just done a 70.3 in the open ocean. And there was crew, there was safety and everything involved, but people were still nervous, whereas the swimmer's like, yeah, watch this triple somersault. But it really struck me that that is one of the biggest advantages of coming from that swim background — that full confidence, your ability to just be in the water, not worry about what's underneath, and just be happy, really.

Elizabeth: Yes, yeah, I think that's one of the biggest hurdles I still see in the sport. So for swimmers coming in who are used to being in the water and feel very confident in their ability, it seems like they have a much easier transition, even from pool to open water, just with the confidence and history that they have in the water. So there's a lot of advantages — we've talked about three or four of them in detail — but I still think that's one that shines through as a great advantage for swimmers coming into the sport. But we do need to talk about the other side. So maybe, what do you see as a challenge that swimmers face coming into triathlon? We've talked a little bit about them thinking of volume in a different way, but are there other challenges you've seen for swimmers coming into triathlon?

Will: Yeah, one that's spoken about quite a lot, of course, is bone density. Quite naturally, we're not impacting, and gravity is not working the same way, pressing us down into the earth. When running, it's supposed to be around four times your body weight going through your joints — when you run downhill, eight times, right. So you don't get any of that in swimming — you get people who are very strong and pretty well balanced, but potentially without the bone density. However, I would say that is changing to some level. There was a time in British swimming that swimmers were banned from running because of the potential damage they could do to their joints, because of the lack of bone density and compacting of the joint. But this was a good few years ago — I was in Marseille, and they have the Cercle des Nageurs de Marseille, which is quite a famous swim team that works out of a place called Le Cercle, and lots of Olympic and world champions have come through that squad — through the winter, they now run consistently and ride in order to try to mitigate some of those issues around bone density. So what has been a problem in the past — training standards have changed, training ideas — and running is being brought more and more into swim squads, certainly in the off season. Clearly still not going to be at the same level as a runner, for example. Equally, you may not have the running injuries — swings and roundabouts. The other thing I think, nutrition and fueling — whilst you're going to get some big volume done as a swimmer, quite often the biggest interval you'll probably ever do in the pool is about 400 meters, right, as part of a set, maybe like five by 400 or something. Even if it's longer, ten 400s, a 4K set, it's still only five to six minutes of work, and that's like your biggest intervals typically.

It's only in swimming terms, just because you're looking at the races we race — most is a 1500, but that's quite unusual, and as a sprinter, certainly 400 felt like a quite long way anyway. So fueling for that is different — you didn't see swimmers typically with gels on poolside unless it was a really long session. But it's a different beast, of course, and the swim is just the start of the day — so getting into the habit of understanding that it's not just an hour, hour and a half, for which typically your normal glycogen stores would be sufficient. And even if you're training twice a day, maybe you've got about 10, 12 hours in between, so you have the opportunity to replenish that glycogen store. So I think that's quite different learning.

Elizabeth: Yeah, for sure. I coached a swimmer once and he had never, ever run — it was kind of that old-school mentality of, we don't want to ruin your ankle flexibility, we like how that is, we don't want to take away from the good technique you've got there, so you're only gonna swim. And when I coached him, he went for his very first run, and he's like, I ran around the neighborhood as a kid but I've never done any structured running. He grew up in a swim program, went to college for it. So that was a new one. I'm excited to hear — I didn't know that some of the training philosophies around that have changed for the swim programs, and I think that's another tick in the box in the right direction for creating some more multi-sport athletes as we go forward in the future — they maybe won't be as averse to the run if they've done a little bit more. That's exciting. Let's drill down a little bit more into each discipline — because when swimmers come to the sport, most of the time they're feeling really comfortable with that swim, we still want to continue that training, but there isn't as much of a learning curve there to translate what they've done previously into triathlon. But as you mentioned, getting on the bike was a brand new thing. So what are some things that someone coming from a swim background can really do to begin and then improve as a cyclist?

Will: The biggest — there's two things. So the handling is everything. You get people coming from swimming, or rowing, or different sports generally, and they can bend a bike on a turbo but they can't ride it around a corner. There's one athlete that I trained for years who was horrible at descending — so much so that you could actually take a break, go to the toilet, let him send it off down the hill, get back on your bike, and beat him down the hill. It was ridiculous — incredible power, right, what he could do on a turbo was unrivaled almost. So handling — one of the best places I learned was joining a cycle club. We didn't have a tri team — I was in the military and we didn't have a tri scene where I was based, but there was a local cycle club, and that was phenomenal. Riding in groups, understanding the safety signals, and just how to be on a bike, basically. You get some of the older, regular riders sort of take you under their wing a little bit and teach you the rules of the road. And I think one of the things I loved about triathlon, which then supports itself into doing training with other groups like cycle clubs, is that in swimming, I did one final, 50 fly final, where all eight of us were within the same tenth of a second in the final. You're training huge amounts of time, and it gets super competitive, and you don't like to give away too much sometimes about what you're doing. Whereas triathlon teaches you that everybody's got something to give, and so everyone's much more open, much more friendly — that's one of the reasons I fell in love with the sport. And that was also true when you go to cycling — you give off that sort of attitude, and people are very excited to bring you into the mix and show you what they know, and being curious — be curious and everything will be good. But yeah, so handling, key one. And then the other piece — actually, I never used to push people into this, but power meters. Being able to measure the effort you're putting down for intervals specifically is super important. You can use heart rate, but there's a cardiac lag — if I wanted to go hard for five minutes, my heart rate is only going to get into a threshold zone probably in the last minute and a half, two minutes, so it makes it very difficult to gauge the effort, whereas a power meter gives you that exact reference point of what you're doing. I never used to push people about ten years ago — you know, a power meter was two and a half thousand pounds, what's that, like $3,200 or something, it's a lot, right, and that was often more than people's bikes. But now you can pick up a really good power meter for a couple hundred pounds, equally a smart turbo, and it changes your perception, because that was the hardest thing — okay, go hard on the bike, what does that mean, particularly as a swimmer where going hard for, like, 400 would be — it's a big race, it's a distance race, and you're doing that for four minutes, 4:10, 4:12, something like that, so it's not very long. In cycling, you're not even getting warmed up at that point — you're not even doing a 10-mile time trial at that point. So having a power meter to help gauge training and effort is really useful.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I love that, and I think that covers both ends of it too — we want to understand the effort being put out, and as you mentioned, the difference between a long swimming race and something long on the bike is significantly different — we're talking minutes in the swim to hours and hours on the bike. So trying to pace those efforts and really use a power meter to understand how that's going is key.

Will: Yeah, even at the longest pool race you can do, the 1500 meters — most good youth swimmers are going to swim that in around 17, 18 minutes, and that's already quicker than most people can do the majority of a 10-mile time trial, even a professional athlete. It's polar opposites, really. So having that to benchmark is really useful.

Elizabeth: Let's move into the run then. We've talked about some key things a swimmer can do experimenting with the bike, getting started there. Now you were fortunate to have a little bit more of a run background, but how about somebody who's brand new to running — what would you advise a swimmer that's ready to get started on the run?

Will: There's two things really — I think it's start slowly. Your fitness will betray you — I don't mean that in a negative-positive way, or positive-negative — it's, one, great, you've got the fitness, you've got an amazing diesel engine that will go forever because you're just fit. But that may make you push too hard and run beyond your musculoskeletal system's ability, because you're not feeling tired running whatever minute-per-K that you're doing, but your body's like, this is way too much, mate — and you won't realize until it's too late. So start slow. If you ever feel — and this is advice for running generally — say you're doing five one-Ks, and you feel stuff tightening up, or you feel something's not quite right, and it's outside of just general discomfort from running, it's pain — always stop. If you've done three good reps and you're supposed to do five, well, fine, do the three, call it a day, because getting an injury puts you back six to eight weeks every time, and if you don't rehab well, it puts you further and further back.

So I guess to counter that — a big thing I'd say is strength training specific to running. Make sure it's specific to running — some of the stuff we see a lot from PTs, not being deliberately misleading, but personal trainer strength training quite often is based from bodybuilding, and it's about having the perfect shape of muscle, perfect length of the muscle, etc. But as humans, we're basically broadly stacked at 120 degrees — like when you push hard on the bike, it's from 120 degrees of knee bend. When you run, you don't run with a 90-degree bend — if you did, you'd be lunge-walking, which would be insanely tiring. So consequently, you want to train specific to the run — in that instance, doing a quarter squat at 120 degrees rather than 90, a half squat, is the relevant exercise to do, plus you can actually lift about 10% heavier, but the point is it's specific to task. One of the areas that will typically get injured is around that ankle joint, and what we're looking to build is elastic recoil — tendons and ligaments in the foot — we're trying to ensure you build a strong springboard from which to drive into the floor and then accelerate yourself forward. And that's something swimmers don't have in abundance — the only time you really use that sort of elastic recoil, and it's not really reactive in the same way, it's more like an explosive squat, is in the turns or off a start, and it's just a different beast. If I was to swim for a minute, let's say I do 100 meters in a minute, I'm gonna have three opportunities in a 25-meter pool, two opportunities in a 50-meter pool, to use that muscle group, whereas if I ran for a minute, we should be aiming to hit about 180 strides per minute — so that's 180 pushes every minute. So you can see the volume is just so much bigger than the swim.

Elizabeth: Yeah, versus those two or three — significantly more, yeah. No, I relate to this so much. I've shared on the podcast the last couple episodes that I've been rehabbing an ankle injury — my swim fitness right now is the best it's ever been, it's phenomenal, but I'm not ever gonna be able to take what I've been doing with 40,000 yards in the pool a week and just automatically go back to the run — I'm gonna have to earn that and really make sure the strength and durability is there in the ankle before I go run again. I think that's very much what you're saying — if somebody's coming from a swim background, the fitness is there, but it doesn't mean the body is ready to handle that load and stress that running produces, versus a swim session.

Will: Absolutely. And that's actually one of the ways I use the TriDot system to train really effectively. I've had various injuries over the years — I've been in this sport nearly three decades, it's shocking. But, like I say, for example, my zone four is — let's just say I'm between four minutes and 4:20 per kilometer — I'll use that upper end, the faster end, the four minute, as my seatbelt, and for that mesocycle, I will not allow myself or athletes for that matter to go beyond it, because I feel like I can, right, because I've come to run back around, swim back around, been an athlete all that time, so I can build back quite quickly — but if I don't use that seatbelt, then I will get injured. And this is particularly useful for swimmers coming into using TriDot, for example — we can use the system, the TrainX scores, to encourage good behaviors in terms of staying injury free and progressing at the same time.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, because that's so key — as somebody transitions into that new sport, we want to make sure it's something they can do for a long period of time, not just quick, go in, do too much too soon, and as you said, it sets them back even further. All right, I'm gonna transition a little bit here. Now, when an athlete is coming into multi-sport, what would you say a swimmer needs to do to maximize the strength of their swim on race day, and then maybe minimize what they're still learning in terms of the bike and the run?

Will: So a good swim — a good performance in any discipline, to be fair, but it's about relaxed power. This won't mean as much to your American listeners, but in 2003 England won the World Cup in rugby, and one of the players, Lawrence Dallaglio, was quoted as saying one of my favorite quotes — it's about basically, you don't go out with a gung-ho, crazy, right, which you would do in a sprint swim or something like that. You build the score. Same advice I give for swimmers is build the score — like, you're not going to win it on the swim, but you could lose it. I had one of my hardest and worst races — I was in a relay, I was only doing the swim, right, and it's the Blenheim Triathlon, which — great race, I thoroughly recommend it, beautiful English country park, country house, everything. Anyway, I was just in the swim, and one of my partner's work colleagues was racing, and we get in the water, and he goes, yeah, I'm gonna sit on your feet. It's like, no, you're not — to myself. Clearly I smiled and said, yeah okay great. So I went out the gate like a man possessed. It's a 750-meter swim — 400 meters in, I could feel it coming, I was like, I'm blowing it, I'm going to blow a gasket. And sure enough, I had to do breaststroke at one point just to survive the swim — head up, proper granny breaststroke. And then, when you get out of Blenheim to get to the bike to tag the cyclist, you have to run up a 20% incline. I was like, what is this? I could barely get out on the pontoon, let alone run up this hill. So yeah, pacing — you can lose it by going out too hard, but if you build the score and it's relaxed power, you put yourself in a really good place. I'd say that for an Ironman swim — back in 2017, I'd trained down to 48 minutes, Ironman swim, but in the pool, but I was then able to cruise a 52 minute, because I didn't really need to be much faster, and the gains I'd make later on in the day would be significantly more than those four minutes there.

Elizabeth: Gosh, that's so cool — it reminds me, I was listening to Jan Sibbersen speak, and he's from Germany, the former Kona record holder for the swim, and he was talking about that record swim he did — he went all out on the swim, his goal was to get the swim record, but he's sick, just sitting there in T1, and like, my gosh, I've got to do the bike and the run. And the CEO of Ironman actually came over to him and was like, dude, you gotta finish the rest of the race if you want the record — it doesn't stand unless you finish the rest of the race. And it dawned on him that, okay, I've got that, but I also blew all my matches, and he said it was a very slow rest of the day. He got the swim record, but if he was going for like an overall better finish time, he's like, there's no way I would race like that for an overall good finish. So it always makes me think of that scene of him sitting there in T1 — he had the best swim out of everybody until a few years ago, and just blew it all kind of on that. No, that kind of maximizes the swim to build into the day. Would you say that also helps them perform best on the bike and the run, just building into that, and probably not expending the same amount of energy that somebody who struggles a little more with the swim would do when they get to the bike?

Will: Yeah, totally. I think you're just that much more comfortable. Something people can struggle with sometimes is the movement from the vestibular system, from being flat to sort of — well, 45 degrees I guess, more on the bike — that can be dealt with practice. It's more the run, actually, and I alluded to this earlier, with the amount of pressure that goes through the core when you swim, and you don't really realize it, that deep core strength that swimmers have innately from years of training — they will run better typically. I often say to my people, you swim for the run — that's where they go to swim training. If they don't like swimming, they're swimming so that they can run well, and that's the biggest advantage. The flip side of that is sometimes a swimmer from a pure swim background might be a lot more muscular up top, and you've got to cart that around — it's useful for the swim, but then it becomes limiting after having massive shoulders or something.

Elizabeth: Now I'm curious about this — as someone who is not coming to the sport with a swim background, I'm so nervous before the swim, I mean I've been known to cry behind the goggles because I'm just so nervous, I don't like that portion of the race. I'm getting better, but it's definitely my least favorite, and I get out of the water and I'm like, thank goodness I'm on land again. Do you think swimmers maybe have a little bit of an advantage there with pre-race nerves, starting with the strength, or not being so worried about that portion of the race?

Will: Yes, and also no. So I remember — one of the things you have to deal with as a swimmer is other swimmers. I remember doing a national champs, a sprint tri at Holme Pierrepont in Nottingham, which is like a rowing lake, and this was 2013, and it was one of the most hotly contested nationals we'd had in years, because it was a qualifier for the Worlds, which were on the Olympic course from 2012 in London — so it was massive. I was swimming — I must have been swimming about 68-second hundreds at the time, so I was swimming pretty well, but in tri times, yeah, I'd be right at the front of the field.

750 meters, with such an aggressive start, where there's a massive start with like 200 people going off, and within 100 meters I was like, get me out of here — because if I was to beat somebody over 400 meters, for example, by five seconds, in swimming terms in the pool I'd broadly embarrass them in a swimming competition, right, because you just don't get those massive gaps at the top end of swimming. But to build five seconds out in a triathlon when you've got people converging on each other — there's no lanes, there's no anti-wave lane ropes or a convenient black line to follow — you're getting bashed about, and consequently your biggest advantage, your swimming, gets negated in many ways.

And actually, it's one of the reasons I've been a massive fan of the rolling starts in Ironman nowadays — purely, the biggest advantage of course is it really reduces the risk of serious events happening, with cold shock and just general too-much-adrenaline and everything else, but from a swimmer's perspective, it's such a much better start to the day, because you've got space around you. So yes, it's an advantage because you're doing a discipline that you like — the disadvantage being the crowding of people. If you're a swimmer, cyclist, or runner — this has always been a fascinating question for me — which has the biggest advantage going into triathlon?

Elizabeth: Yeah, yep.

Will: I'd say it's definitely not a swimmer. There's a broad ratio in terms of time spent and effort of about one to four between swim to bike to run, or swim to run to bike. You'll see that in an Olympic-distance triathlon — a 10K works well with a 40K bike, but then it should be a two-and-a-half-thousand meter swim, and it's not short effectively, right. We had a race series in the UK — I think it was called like Ice Man or something, years back — and what they did, they based it off a four-hour marathon, right, running marathon, and then looked at the distances, the average distances achieved in that time for the swim and the bike — and effectively it meant you were swimming 10K, right, and doing 150K on the bike, something like that. So it was mismatching the distances, and I thought that was interesting, but I just thought, basically only swimmers are going to go into that, because it's a 10,000-meter swim — hell, absolutely not. But the race I still maintain I'd love to see — this is dating me a little bit — back when it was like, Chris Froome was World Time Trial Champion, had Kenenisa Bekele who's the 10K track champion, someone — Yang, was like — or Arthur the Australian, name escapes me, 1500-meter champion — what I'd love to see would be each of those athletes race, or project, what they would race over 30 minutes, and then you've got to go race it, and you call it the World Record Race — because that is the distance the best athlete in the world can achieve in that time. And the pièce de résistance with this would be to have those athletes race alongside as a relay, to show you just how fast that really is — but you could genuinely say, after that, you were the best triathlete in the world, because that's what is humanly possible across all disciplines. But as it stands, I think in long distance, the bike is still important, but ultimately it comes down to the run — because it's how well you can run off the bike, which is everything. And with pace lines and everything else — legal drafting at 12, 15, or 20-meter gap if you're in Challenge — you're still getting an advantage if you can stick together. So yeah, I'd say the run is probably the biggest advantage, which is interesting, because that's the biggest demographic of potential triathletes.

Elizabeth: Yeah, exactly — running is incredibly popular, and there's a big demographic that can translate that into multi-sport. So, as we mentioned, there's plenty of advantages for those listening who are swimmers and interested in dabbling in triathlon, but a couple things to learn as well.

All right, we're gonna round this out with this question before we go to our cooldown. For the athletes listening today who related big time to this episode — I'm a swimmer, I've been thinking about this, maybe I've got a couple nuggets steering me toward trying the sport of triathlon — let's give them a few examples of somebody in the pro field, or it doesn't have to be pro field, somebody else they can root for who was a swimmer turned triathlete.

Will: So the obvious one, and sort of the poster girl of triathlon, certainly middle and long distance, certainly on this side of the pond — Lucy Charles-Barclay. Probably one of Kona's most consistent athletes in many ways — been runner-up many times, but to be runner-up is incredibly difficult, obviously being champion as well, 70.3 champion. Still competes, or did some competition recently in the British Olympic trials. Clearly an incredible swimmer and often sort of checks the guys. However, I think when people think of Lucy outright, which is absolutely correct — but there's some interesting people who've had big swim backgrounds. Kristian Blummenfelt was a swimmer first.

Elizabeth: Really? I didn't know that.

Will: Probably the best — I'm going to create an argument now about who is the greatest of all time — but, you know, maybe certainly in the grouping for the best athlete of all time. Also Gustav Iden, right — it's very much part of that Norwegian piece, that you have to be able to swim. And actually, if we look at short-course athletes coming through, people like Kieran Lindars, British athlete, came eighth at Kona back in 2024, consistently performing well — the short-course athletes typically come from a swim-run background, and they teach them to ride a bike. Or they'll take a good swimmer and make them be able to run hard first, and then teach them the bike afterwards. That's been the pathway for a number of years, and you'll see that a lot with those short-course athletes coming through to long course. Another one, Chelsea Sodaro — which is an interesting one, because her swim then needs to be developed again prior to her win, but she used to swim for Berkeley, and was a swimmer first, then brought into triathlon. Joe Skipper, recently retired, British athlete, known for his cycling, but he was a swimmer first as a junior. So a lot of the top-end field comes from that swim background, for sure.

Elizabeth: Wow, yeah, there's names in there I would not have guessed had started as a swimmer. So I guess that's very encouraging to any of our swimmers listening — hey, you've got some major top names there that started off in the water and are now seeing the tops of the podium. So hopefully a little encouragement for our listeners that they can do that too. All right, we are gonna wrap things up with today's cooldown question. We always do a question from the audience, and this one comes from Steve in Tampa, Florida. Steve says: "I've done a few local triathlons, and I have noticed many of the other athletes dipping their goggles into the water a little bit before it's their turn to start. I'm sure it's to clear them and prevent fogging, but not everybody does it. Am I correct about the benefit, and if so, should all triathletes be doing this?" All right, well, help Steve out here.

Will: Okay, so this is definitely a swimmer's view, and yes, that's broadly why they're doing it — they're looking at it, putting the water in to try and make the goggles as clear as possible. They're not putting their fingers in and wiping them, because often you have an anti-fog sort of layering on the goggle, but I tried to avoid doing that where possible. One of the reasons that usually occurs is there's a temperature differential — you see people splashing their face as well, to get their face sort of acclimatized to the water. I don't do that, because any moisture you get in around the goggle, particularly on the underside, will then create a sort of misting in the goggle itself. So try to keep the goggle off your face as long as possible prior to starting, so it doesn't mist up because of the heat coming off your skin. I'd also say as a swimmer, you just get used to fogging up — anti-fog works for about 10 days after you've bought a new pair of goggles, and particularly as kids, we're just using them so much, we didn't dry them perfectly and put them back in their little case — you just sort of shove them in the back of the bag, maybe they got sat on in the car, whatever, and you just, every interval, wipe them. What I would say is that it's always — you can see enough. And by enough, I mean the colors of the buoy, or maybe you're swimming in a rowing lake where you can see there's a consistent side to where you're swimming, and that's where swim recces come in really useful, because you can gauge where you are on the course without really having to look in like 4K detail — you just don't need it. Also, a lot of times when I'm swimming well — I know this is common for other swimmers as well — I often swim with my eyes shut, and I'll only open them briefly to have a little look, because it relaxes me — it's like putting a hood on a bird, it just relaxes my shoulders, and I'll just swim, and then sight every now and then, obviously as you need to, but I'm not looking for massive detail. I think people worry too much about having to see every given detail — you need to broadly be able to see the direction and the big yellow, orange buoy, whatever it is you're aiming for.

Elizabeth: Yeah, so common knowledge. Now, Will, would you ever do like a newer pair of goggles so that anti-fog is still there?

Will: Yeah, if it's a big race, basically every big race I have a new set — same, exactly same model as I always use. And what I'm saying about goggles — this is a whole other topic — but some people like the big, big goggles, like something you see, almost like face masks, Aqua Sphere do one — I would say when you're trying new goggles like that, nearly everybody's skull shape is different, and the bigger the goggle, if it sits outside of the sockets of your eyes, then the chances are it's a less good fit, in my experience. Most people's sockets are similar size, most people's eyes are similar size, so you get one that goes inside the sockets, and actually you're in better shape. I use — I'm not sponsored by them, I'll happily mention it — Speedo Fastskin, they've been my best for years. So much so — and it is very individual — I could put the goggles on my eyes, take the strap off, and do tumble turns in full sprint 50s with the straps hanging around my face, such is the fit.

Elizabeth: Oh my gosh, so they're just suctioned, not in your eyes — wow.

Will: You do start with smaller — advice — but yeah, new ones for any big race, for sure, but nothing different in terms of the model.

Elizabeth: Awesome, lots of helpful advice there. So Steve, you got a little extra, but hope that helps — no need to put that extra water in before your next race. Well, thank you so much, Will, not only for that advice, but for being here on the episode and bearing with me as I filled in for Andrew today. For our swimmers out there, we would love to welcome you into the sport of triathlon. Hope you enjoyed this episode.