Swim Flumes

As I write this I’m having my basement prepared for the installation of an Endless Pool, a flume pool that circulates a water current in the front end and out the back. In an earlier edition of this book, I described concerns about how the dynamics of swimming in place while water moves past you could hurt the efficiency that Total Immersion practice is designed to build. In the last few years, with experience in an Endless Pool, I’ve changed my mind.

With the current set at slower speeds, the Endless Pool has proven, for a growing number of TI coaches, to be a convenient and effective place for both teaching and practicing TI drills and skills. But if you keep the current cranked up high, the resulting stroke will be just as bad for you as swimming hard all the time. The primary virtues of a flume pool with a moderate current are these:

• Because there is no “wall” and no need to interrupt your swimming and head back the other way, you quite literally have an endless pool. A distraction of practicing TI drills or skills in a 25-yard pool is that you often find yourself just getting into the rhythm, or tuning into the sensation you’re after as you approach the wall. The wall interrupts your concentration and you have to start all over again to “groove” the movement. In a flume pool, once you establish the movement quality or sensation, you can just keep going for as many cycles as you like, a powerful aid to building the right kind of muscle memory.

• With no laps or repeats to count or pace clocks to focus on, in a flume pool, it’s far easier to give all your attention to what reallymatters: how smooth and fluent your movements are and how you feel when your stroke is Fishlike. Thus, there’s the potential of an almost Zen-like purity to the practice one can do in a moving current.

I plan to use my Endless Pool both for teaching and as a way of practicing my own swimming. I’m looking forward to being able to swim anytime I like, whether at 5 a.m. or 11 p.m., without leaving the house, and to enjoying the nirvana of one beautiful stroke after another for as long as I like.