If you are a reasonably experienced swimmer you will have raced in open water. Perhaps you were even well prepared for the race, you felt good and the race conditions were excellent. But at the start you got trapped in the group without being able to avoid all the flailing arms and legs, even though your pace was faster than others.
Results: the gap between you and the faster swimmers soon became unbridgeable and, despite swimming a good race, you were disappointed with your performance.
This is what can happen when you are forced to deal with the various situations arising in such peculiar swimming conditions as open water racing.
Swimming in the midst of all the flailing arms and legs of a big group is a relatively unusual experience for many athletes, because it is tricky to replicate these conditions in a pool. Of course you can try and recreate this kind of situation, but swimming in the middle of a group of hundreds of athletes is a quite different matter.
In this article we will try and give you some handy advice for coping with all the different conditions likely to arise in open water racing.
Do not try and start from the front. Everybody wants to start at the front in line with the first buoy, so as to cover the shortest distance possible….
