How to Be Ready. Really Ready

Good training doesn’t necessarily guarantee a good race. The lead spots go to those who’ve done their homework, from deciding how much warmup they’ll need to knowing how the event plays out, what to expect on every length.

If you’ve done the homework for a 1650-yard freestyle (the equivalent of the 1500-meter event) you can get yourself ready for most anything. Otherwise known as swimming’s metric mile, it’s 66 lengths of a 25-yard pool, and though it’s my personal favorite, I always approach it with a love-hate attitude. Love because it’s my best distance and the one in which I’ve always reached my highest national rankings (a couple of seconds). Hate because it promises lots of pain.

I’ve swum longer races that felt easier. I’ve run longer races more comfortably, even though I’m a much better swimmer than runner. A 45- to 50-minute 10K footrace doesn’t seem anywhere near as long as a 1650 in the pool, which I can knock off in maybe 18 or 19 minutes. Even a 5K open-water swim, which took me 68 minutes, was easier than any 1650-yard race I’ve ever swum in a pool.

Perhaps it’s because of the need for such fierce concentration on keeping your stroke efficient, with every lap feeling harder than the last. Perhaps it’s all the flip turns that make it hard to stay aerobic as the laps mount. But whatever the reason, this race tests it all: your mental focus, the staying power of your efficiency, and the quality of your conditioning. So getting ready for it is a virtual punch list for all prerace preparation. Based on personal experience, here’s how I advise leading up to and handling a 1650. If you’re prepping for a shorter distance, just adapt my routine to suit.

Several days before, I begin to think about what it will feel like if I’m willing to take it to the limit and not back off in the race when the body starts imploring me to. Will this be a redline effort or something less? Redline, of course.

Come competition day I get in the mood with a long, easy, pre-event warmup—typically at least forty to forty-five minutes for a race that takes less than half as long. This does several things. First, just swimming smoothly and easily takes the nervous edge off. Second, you can use the warmup to groove your stroke into what coaches call easy speed, a relaxed, familiar rhythm, a feeling of being controlled and effortless at your projected race pace. It takes at least several minutes to get that, but I don’t want to spend the first 500 of my 1650 groping around for it, so I rehearse the feeling now.

And I rehearse until it’s right, maybe six or eight 100-yard repeats—nearly half the distance of the race itself—trying to hit target pace precisely on each with that buoyant feeling of easy speed. To race sixteen identically paced 100s, you have to go a little harder on each as a new layer of fatigue settles into your muscles. The first few will feel nearly effortless, the last ones will feel like you’re lifting a piano. If I can hit six or eight of these with 15 to 20 seconds of rest between, I’m more confident that once the gun goes off, I’ll be able to reel off sixteen in a row, with no rest, at the same pace.

You’ll probably feel better in the early stages of a distance race if you finish your warmup/rehearsal just before your heat starts. There’s something to be said for going right from the warmup pool to the starting blocks, with your muscles prepared and your race rhythms all set. Done correctly, a long warmup like this right before the race gives you a net gain in the gas tank, since what you’ve been practicing is energy conservation.

You’ve also been setting that confidence-building “clock in the head,” the coach’s term for an unerring sense of pace. Pool racing is done one to a lane, so there’s no such thing as drafting behind anyone. And you might not want to try even if you could. The 1650 is too long to try to swim someone else’s race. You perform far better when you do it the way you’ve trained for it. That means having a goal time in mind and a pace plan for reaching it.

Finally it’s time to race. When the gun goes off and you dive in after this kind of prep work, you’ll become quite calm. From the first, your stroke feels just the way you want it to. Now’s the time to be patient. For the first 400 to 500 yards (16 to 20 lengths), avoid racing. You’re stalking. Keep your stroke as long as possible and your stroke rate as low as possible, and stay within striking distance of your rivals. Everything goes into efficiency, so it’s indelibly imprinted onto your nervous system and the coming fatigue and racing pressures can’t break it down.

Whatever you do, stay out of oxygen debt. You’re excited. You may be trying to keep up. It’s too easy to overswim the first part of any race and slip across the anaerobic threshold. Once you do, the only way to recover will be to slow down, and once you’ve slackened the pace, it’s nearly impossible to push it all the way up again. Oh, eventually you’ll have to go anaerobic just to hold on to your pace, but you want that to come as near the end of the race as possible. Stay aerobic for three quarters of the race, and you’ll have what it takes in the tanks for the last few 100s.

Eventually, you’ll be playing a cat-and-mouse game with fatigue. In a sheer act of will, you try to keep your stroke long, but as you get a little more tired your only recourse is to increase stroke rate—carefully. Do this with hip rolling, not muscle power. (Your muscles don’t have that much to spare by now anyhow.) Try to dial it up just a little on each 100 to exactly offset fatigue. It’s a delicate game, but if you’ve practiced enough, you can play it successfully.

You’re up to about 1200 yards now, but who’s counting? The answer is, friends are. At the end of the pool opposite the starting blocks, a card showing the lap number is shoved in front of your face just before every turn. This race takes so much concentration that it’s impossible to keep track of your lap count, so a friend kneels at the end of your lane and obligingly shoves those numbered cards into the water, shouting encouragement as you turn.

You’re closing in now. The last sixteen to twenty lengths, and it’s time to really bear down. Begin to count. The card reads 51, you’re headed into lap 52, and you’re thinking, Only fourteen to go—I can bring this home.

Time to find out what you’re made of. No matter how easily you swam the beginning, no matter how intelligent your pace in the middle, your whole body will start to ache for oxygen over the last few hundred yards. Every flip turn seems like an aerobic slap in the face, since the flip turn cuts off your oxygen for a few seconds at each wall. Great. Just what you need. An open turn with your face above water would be so nice, but it costs precious fractions at each wall and you didn’t come this far to throw time away now. Too bad it seems like you need the whole length to get your breath back from every turn and just when you have, you get slapped down again.

Eight lengths to go. Now six. Now just four. Each 50 gets harder, but each brings you closer to relief. Finally, you pour everything you have left into the last two lengths, thrust your hand to the touch pad, and it’s over!

For a couple of minutes even hanging exhausted on the gutter will hurt, as lactic acid pools in the muscles that generated it. So push off and swim a few massaging laps of easy backstroke to wash some of it out. You’re finished. You’ve taken your Total Immersion training into the contest and proven that even when the rest of the body falters, your muscles can go on autopilot if you’ve trained them well.

And for me at least, racing like this is an exercise in self-discovery. My final time interests me less than the broader revelation of how well my training has prepared me to race on this particular day. I’m more curious about testing my abilities to execute a good race plan than in what color medal I may have won. And every race I swim presents its own set of lessons, which I am always eager to apply when I return to the pool for my next practice.