How to smash your short-course swim PB

Once you’ve successfully completed a triathlon or two, it’s natural to want to take it to the next level and improve your performance. If you’re comfortable in open water, feel free to focus on pushing the pace and competing against others.

As the short-course distances are necessarily shorter, speed and strategy become an important part of the game, as does endurance so you can sustain that speed for the full distance.

Successful short-course racing can be challenging from a strategic standpoint because you’re often faced with the dilemma of choosing between pushing the early pace to stay in contact with a faster group, or holding back at the beginning to ensure you optimally pace the race for your abilities.

Develop speed and stamina

Both approaches have drawbacks as well. Going out too fast can cause you to fatigue prematurely while going out too slow can force you to get stuck in or swim through a slow pack. Regardless, you’ll have to develop speed and stamina to execute both.

As speed, stamina and skill are best developed in the pool, much of your training time should remain in the pool. However, you’ll need to practise these same skills in open water as well.

How often should I swim?

This can be done once per week, or once every other week depending on water availability and your personal schedule. But committing 3-5 hours of water time per week is worth the investment.

Assuming you’re already comfortable in open water, your training should focus on practising the racing strategies you want to implement on race day. Whether that’s going out fast or finishing really strong, you need to be swimming with some speed and intensity in open water.

Because of the importance of speed in short-course racing, and the difficulty of creating speed in open water, this session (below) focuses on switching gears and pacing your speed.

Practise changing speed in open water

Regardless of how you choose to race, you’re going to need to make a move at some point, and practising that in open water is key.

Because there are no defined distances in open water, we’re going to use time-based intervals to govern the set. The times don’t have to be precise, it’s the concept of changing speed that’s important.

Short-course speed training session

• 5mins easy swim
• 5mins slowly increasing speed
• 5 x [30secs fast effort; 2mins steady and controlled effort]
• 5 x [2mins progressive build (start solid and end very strong after 2mins); 30secs easy effort]
• 5mins easy swim

Top image credit: Getty Images