Greetings
This is my first post on this great site. I have learned a bunch from all of the posts so thanks for that. I swam my first OW swim yesterday and had a great time. My biggest problem was sighting and swimming straight. I always veer right and even made it into oncoming traffic on the out and back course. Hope the leaders took it in stride! Anyway my two big struggles were seeing anything meaningful when I sight and swimming straight. I breathe on the right only. Does that cause me to curl right all the time?
Anyway your thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks
Spudfin
Breathing to the right does not cause veering, although it can contribute to improper stroke technique, which does cause veering. The simplest way to straighten out is to adjust your hand placement on entry. Try moving your left hand out about 6 inches further out from your center line to correct veering to the right. Usually before each open water race I will do some steering correction warm-up; I aim at an object (marker buoy, etc.) swim 100 strokes, stop and see if I’m on target, if I’ve veered right, I’ll repeat the process moving my left hand out a bit and if I’ve veered left I move the right hand out. I repeat this until I can swim the 100 strokes straight to the object.
“seeing anything meaningful…” Unless you are out front there should be caps to follow, and there are course marking buoys, or a shore line or trees/buildings, or the sun. There are lots of meaningful things to use for sighting. You just need to become aware of what works best for you.
Spud,
After your take a sighting, keep a mental picture of the goal you just saw (buoy, tree, mountain, etc), then "throw" your hands at the goal until your next sighting. This works wonders.
Good luck,
Hopper
I'm also new to open water swimming. I guess I have one advantage in that I've always been a bilateral breather and seem to be able to swim pretty straight, so I can go a fair distance between sightings.
Lately I have been working on a technique for sighting, after watching others. I time it in between breaths and lift my head just enough to get the goggles out, but not enough to get my whole face out, since the full head-up body position is tiring. If I'm breathing every three strokes, I may switch to every four for a sighting, and lift my eyes out of the water on the 3rd stroke. I try to avoid having a my sighting turn into a breath or merging into a prior or subsequent breath's head rotation movement, by having a 1 or 2 stroke buffer between a sigting and a breath. The goal of this technique is to minimize effort, drag, and disruption of rhythm. I practiced it in the pool this week, but in a race today (lake padden, Bellingham, WA) it was not drilled into me enough to be second nature yet, and found myself lapsing into my prior technique which was to lift my face out immediately after a breath on one or the other side. Also it only seems to work well when your sighting point is not too distant. If it is far away you may have to lift your head even more to get a good look.
your body position is different with a wetsuit, so I think sighting is made a bit harder by a wetsuit. another technique is to just switch to breastroke for a little while. This has the added advantage of dislodging people who are drafting you. During today's race when I switched to breaststroke a couple times, within 10 seconds someone would bump into my feet, I'd let them pass and then I'd draft off of them for a while.
Thanks for all the suggestions. I am back to the lake tomorrow to do some experimenting. I will try them all out and see what happens. My second career race is next week so I will have venue to mark progress.
Regards
Spudfin
