September 15, 2002 was the day I became an Ironman.  Times have changed in 6 years.  Back in 2002, I was training close to 30 hours per week, whereas now I’m dividing up my time working and coaching.  I train whenever I can, but don’t have anywhere near the athletic conditioning I had back in 2002.  But my entire coaching career likely wouldn’t have happened without that race.  I had a great swim.  At a split of 49:03, I still rank 10th on the fastest all-time list for Ironman Wisconsin.  I want to talk about that swim in detail so you can learn from it and make your swimming better. 

I knew that there were some tough competitors with Division I college swimming experience in the field, and they were all better distance swimmers than me.  One of them was former University of Minnesota team-mate, Jono McCleod.  Jono was a fantastic Individual Medley and distance freestyler that I couldn’t hope to compete with.  I had the opportunity to swim with Jono frequently in 2002, and he destroyed me every time in any distance above a 50.

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Q:What is the most challenging part of a triathlon swim for a beginner?

A: I am sure every beginner’s answer is going to be different here. But I think all answers have one thing in common: the challenge is the unknown. You just don’t know how you will react in a big crowd of thrashing people in a fluid medium, regardless of your swimming ability. Even though I was a Division I college swimmer, I still didn’t know what to expect in my first triathlon. It took a lot of years of racing to get comfortable with people swimming over top of me.

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Coach Dobko will pick one of your questions each week and give you some insight into swimming. E-mail your questions to duanesworlddobko@worldnet.att.net.

How many times have you lost count of repeats you have done or how far you have swum? Here’s some ways to make counting easier. First of all, set your intervals to plus or minus 5 seconds from a minute. Instead of a 2 minute sendoff, use a 1:55 or 2:05. Thus, your second repeat starts on the 5, your third starts on the 10 and so on. You can then easily determine how many repeats you have done by the starting position on the clock! If you are doing long continuous swims, try breaking it up and do something different every 3rd or 4th 50 yards. 

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