First non stop Mile

Nice job on your first mile. How to make it to a 5 mile open water swim? Well just like your 1 mile pool swim you have to work up to it. You obviously have some conditioning if you can swim a mile. Have you ever swam open water before, other than goofing off. Take a friend to swim with you or have some one in a kayak next to you. Safety first. Don't go out to far your first time, as you need to make it back. Open water swims can be disorienting as visability, direction and speed are difficult to judge. So start safely, and you can quickly build to your goal. Good luck

First, Congratulations on your first non-stop mile!!! Barry makes some good points about open water training. Being comfortable and relaxed in the swim are important factors in having fun and finishing. As for training for a 5-miler, keep up the distance swimming, working up to swimming the mile without the pull buoy (leg floats). To accomplish this, you may want to find a masters coach to help your stroke technique. Swimming with a pull buoy can improve your body position (raising the hips and legs) which is great as long as you can retain that position once you shed the pull buoy. I suggest you keep the pull buoy as a training aid, while working towards swimming a comfortable mile without it. Also, swimming a 34 minute pace for 5 miles will have you finishing 5 miles in about 2 hours and 50 minutes. Make sure the race has fluids for the swimmers along the course. If possible try to drink at around the 2, 3, and 4 mile marks. And good luck.

I plan on getting into some open water before my big swim but the water around here this time of the year is really cold so it will have to wait until the air temp warms up so I dont go from cold to cold. I heard that there are some obstacle that I need to overcome in the open water that takes practice so that will be one more thing to work on. Thanks for the support.

Congrats on the mile. I believe I read somewhere that only 2% of Americans can swim 500 yards, so doing a mile puts you in even more "elite" company. You will need to shed the pull buoy eventually; I happen to believe that Total Immersion technique is an excellent way to go and has helped me greatly in longer swims. As to actual training, once you're confident in your technique, I'd suggest that you do a longer, slow work out once every 2 weeks and gradually build up the distance for same. I prefer to train by time on the longer workouts, since trying to keep track of that many laps makes me (more) psychotic. A typical progression of the longer workouts FOR ME (not you, but you'll see the pattern/idea) is: might be: Week 1: 1 hr Week 2: 1:30, Week 3: 1:45, Week4: 1:15 (a bit faster per lap than weeks 1-3) Week5: easy week Week6: 1:45 Week7: 2:00 Week8: 1:30 (a bit faster per lap than weeks 4,6,7) Week9: 1:45 Week10: easy week etc, etc Your program will be different to suit your life/abilites/experience/etc, but the principle of gradual adaptation, adeqaute rest and specificity of training applies to everyone. I also suggest that you only train seriously for 3 or 4 weeks at a time and then take an easy week to recover. Rob's advice about drinking is dead on and also applies to your workouts. I highly recommend Accelerade as a great workout drink. BTW, which 5 mile race are you planning to do? Due to the variable nature of open water swim courses, I suggest that you talk to people who have done it before and they can often give you tips to make it a better experience. Only 4.5 months until June! -LBJ

I did it 3 miles in 1 hour 41 minutes. Thanks for the support guys.

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