I am a longtime pool swimmer but relatively new to open water. In the last year, I've had a handful of good workout swims in the Gulf of Mexico (while on vacation) and in a lake (here at home), so I've gotten a chance to get a feel for things like sighting, navigating, and adapting my pull to choppy waters and surf--enough to have a decent understanding of what I need to work on, anyway, and enough to know I want to do more OW swimming. I've also always been a bilateral breather, so that's nothing new.
What I haven't been able to do to this point is river swimming, but I have signed up for a 1.2 mile river race in a few months. The first leg will be against the current. Is there anything I should be keeping in mind/training for that will help attack that current head-on? I know that kicking is often not as prominent in an OW technique, but I am a strong kicker, should I be playing around with the intensity of kicks, so I'm ready to ramp it up when I'm pushing against the current? Once upon a time I swam fly and IM in meets and still do a fair amount of fly in my workouts--would a dolphin kick serve any advantage against the current? Or is that a ridiculous notion that would wear me out too much too early? Or is the main thing adjusting my pull to be fast and strong?
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Thanks for your responses-sorry not to have said so sooner. I'm sure I'm overthinking things. That said, I've been playing around in workouts with various kick beats so that I can have multiple tools in my box, so to speak.
I guess it's finally sinking in that a lower kick count allows for a shorter pull with more turnover for powering through when need be. I'd seen so much about OW folks often using a 2-beat kick, even when not in a tri (and therefore not needing to "save" their legs for the other race stages), but it didn't make sense why not to just use a 4- or 6-beat.
But duh, there's only so fast you can flutter that many kicks per arm turnover without making it such a small motion that the kick becomes more of an energy suck than a power producer. So if you need that faster arm churn, the leg motion will need to coordinate in a different way. Right?
Thanks for your responses-sorry not to have said so sooner. I'm sure I'm overthinking things. That said, I've been playing around in workouts with various kick beats so that I can have multiple tools in my box, so to speak.
I guess it's finally sinking in that a lower kick count allows for a shorter pull with more turnover for powering through when need be. I'd seen so much about OW folks often using a 2-beat kick, even when not in a tri (and therefore not needing to "save" their legs for the other race stages), but it didn't make sense why not to just use a 4- or 6-beat.
But duh, there's only so fast you can flutter that many kicks per arm turnover without making it such a small motion that the kick becomes more of an energy suck than a power producer. So if you need that faster arm churn, the leg motion will need to coordinate in a different way. Right?
