Which came first: the chicken or the egg? It’s a perplexing question, isn’t it? Less than a year ago, I had a similar thought: do I hate swimming because I’m bad at it or am I bad at swimming because I hate it??? It’s cyclical and it’s actually a simple solve: swim more and you’ll get better at it and then you’ll enjoy it. Once you enjoy it, it will be easier to keep getting in the pool and you’ll keep getting better. The only problem was that I had to keep doing what I hated first! Now, I know I’m not alone here, so all you triathletes who just “get through” the swim so you can start racing, listen to my story…

My Half-Ironman swim training used to consist of getting in the pool twice a week at about 1,500 to 2,000 meters each time. I thought I was doing great. I mean, I was getting in the pool, right? I was overcoming all these hassles and getting in the pool…twice each week! Yay me!!! And anyway, swimming is all about technique, right? Wrong.

For so long, I just didn’t get it. I would look at video of myself swimming and my form looked decent. I was breathing bilaterally. Head down, hips up. Flutter kick from the hips. I felt like I was doing everything right…so why was I so slow? My reasoning was that I wasn’t built to swim. I have a short torso and long arms and legs. Fish are all torso, right? So, no matter how hard I try, I’ll probably never be a good swimmer. You hear all the time that swimming is the most technical of the three disciplines and that’s true, but it’s not the entire piece of the puzzle. You have to be fit, too. In the words of my coach, Dan Litwora, “You should think of your swimming not as a linear progression from good technique to speed to fitness. It’s really a circle in that it takes fitness to use good technique to go fast. It’s all interrelated.”