Last Sunday I’d planned to join my close friend and fellow swim-explorer Lou Tharp for an open water group practice at West Neck Beach on Long Island’s North Shore, but an allergic reaction to a wasp sting got in the way. Lou wrote me an email about the practice that I so thoroughly enjoyed reading, that I asked him to write a guest post for my blog. This is the first in a series of posts by guest writers we’ll publish on Wednesdays for several weeks. Enjoy. 

Getting in the water without getting into a cooperative mindset first is the definition of taking a shower. And I wasn’t at West Neck Beach on the North Shore of Long Island last Sunday to take a shower.

I was looking at 2800 meters of still, high-70-degree water punctuated with four buoys in a straight line, scattered pleasure boats at anchor, and the signature North Shore rocky beach that meant you could ouch your way into the water barefoot or hope your flip flops didn’t get washed away with the tide while you were swimming.

The important part was that I was looking at it—approximately 2,800 meters if I went around the buoys twice. Even though I swim 15,000 yards a week and compete in open water and pool races, there has to be time and mental space before each swim for fear and respect on the way to recognition that water is your partner not your antagonist. It’s not a matter of muscle over mind – this pre-swim reconciliation of your solid and that liquid – it’s the aquatic equivalent of performer’s stage fright the way Greg Allman described it: “Stage fright is not a thing about ‘Am I any good?’ It’s about ‘Am I gonna be good tonight?’ It’s a right-now thing. It helps me. If I went out there thinkin’, ‘Eh, we’ll go slaughter ‘em,’ I’m positive something would go seriously wrong.”

Something can “go seriously wrong” more often than we want to admit in open water swimming, but while drowning is usually that something we automatically think of, it’s more often the serious mistake of not finding your comfortable place even within still water while swimming with (not racing) 65 other people. The visual is not the synchronicity of a school of fish. It’s more like paying eight quarters to look at your underwear through the washing machine window. But I need to be the fish, not the Calvins.

The first signal of reconciliation is the appropriate heart rate. That morning, an organized practice for the August 6 West Neck open water event, my heart rate was in the low 50s as I used the 50-meter swim to the start buoy as a pre-check that I was enjoying sliding through the water quietly. Too many people had brought their chatter into the water as we waited at the buoy to start. Bringing chatter and a high heart rate to the start of a practice or a race is like bringing a stomach full of pasta to a marathon. It only feels good before. In a pool, you can jabber your way (on a kick-board) through a kick-set, or race the first 100 yards as your warm-up, then stand in 3.5-foot water and reboot. There’s no standing, and usually no 3.5-foot water in open water swimming, and definitely no reboots, so this whole chatter/high-heart-rate thing has to be re-examined.

On August 6, race day, I would be on an ocean-swimming holiday at Rehoboth Beach, so this practice was for a half-iron relay I’d be doing October 1at Montauk, Long Island, when the weather would be colder, the water rougher and my heart rate higher. This practice was to practice doing what trout do in a stream – cooperatively gliding through the current. Montauk would be more like salmon in spawning season – finding a way upstream through the rushing Columbia River heading for their home streams. But salmon don’t have to sight the way we do.

Open water swimming is anticipating and then dealing with challenges. The first one Sunday morning was sighting. Sighting can severely disrupt balance or it can allow breathing, seeing, and energizing in a smooth motion. That didn’t happen during the first 500 meters. The first clue that I was losing balance as I sighted was an unruly kick. Once I began to sight less – every 10-15 strokes – and raise my head just enough to get a visual whiff of a buoy or a group of swimmers, my kick settled down to a productive two-beat and I wasn’t chasing speed or the swimmers ahead. Both came back to me.

I have no idea how much time the swim took because it wasn’t a race. I think in practice it’s more important to spend time than to measure it. And I spent time learning and relearning how to swim, finding the right muscle memory before the wrong muscle activation.

The result:

I swam faster and had more energy at the end than at the beginning.

For the final three-quarters of the swim, I effortlessly caught and passed other swimmers.

I could have swum another 2,800 meters and another 2,800 after that.

I was in peaceful, focused control.

Louis Tharp, who began swimming at 45, is the former swim coach for the West Point triathlon team, a medalist in open water and pool competitions, and executive director of the Global Healthy Living Foundation. His book, “Overachiever’s Diary, how the Army triathlon team became national contenders,” is available at http://www.totalimmersion.net/store/books/overachiver-s-diary.html. Reviews and other information is available at http://www.overachieversdiary.com/. He can be reached at LTHARP@overachieversdiary.comLouis-Tharp_2017_photo