Why Your Swim Training Isn't Translating to Race Day?

You know how to swim. So why does race day make it feel like you don’t?

You trained for months, completed the pool workouts and practiced in open water. Yet when the race begins, your stroke changes.

Manuel, Heather, Amaar and many other athletes we have helped came to us with the same frustration:

“I can’t translate the swim work I put in during training to race day.”

They’re dedicated and doing the right things. Some had already worked on technique, completed swim analyses, or joined Masters swimming. Yet when race day arrived, their stroke changed.

Some felt their legs sinking and forgot how to use their kick. Others started spinning their arms faster. Their glide disappeared, heart rate climbed or breathing became harder to control. The harder they fought the water, the more the water seemed to fight back.

The answer was not simply to become mentally tougher. It was not just doing more open-water swimming.

The problem was that nobody had connected what they were feeling and experiencing on race day with what was physically happening to their stroke.

To change the result, we had to connect several parts of their training.

- Technique- Pacing- Endurance- Open-water execution

And the ability to recognize and correct what was breaking before it turned into panic.

The result looked different for each athlete.