On October 19 I swam from Corsica to Sardinia–covering 15.5 km (9.6 miles) in 4 hours 31 minutes–with Tommi Patilla and Lennart Larsson. This is the story of that swim. Some swim for exercise, others for a sense of accomplishment or to achieve personal bests. Since my 50s, I’ve swum mostly for the sheer pleasure of it. […]

In a few weeks, I’ll mark the 50th anniversary of when I first got serious about swimming—i.e. training with an explicit goal of swimming fast. In November of 1965, I joined the newly-launched swim team at my high school, St. Mary’s in Manhasset NY. For the next five or six years, I got faster each […]

This post provides a ‘real life’ example of how one swimmer can improve her speed–and achieve a dream–by using the TI Principles-based approach I’ve described in several recent posts. This month I’ll spend a ‘fortnight’ in the UK leading workshops and training coaches. While there I’ll also spend a couple of hours with Helen Webster, editor of 220, […]

On Sept 19, TI Master Coach Suzanne Atkinson posted on Facebook that one of her athletes had just won a triathlon world championship. That would be exciting news in any case, but what made this feat particularly special was that the athlete was another TI Coach! Kirsten Sass was Women’s Overall Age Group Champion in […]

This is the third post in a series describing how to swim faster with a principles-based approach. In this post I share the thought process that guides my own training. Speed isn’t my highest priority, but I frequently use it to measure the effectiveness of my efforts. Five Core Truths of Speed To follow a […]

I began our series on swimming principles six weeks ago. Since then, each weekly post has described the advantages of ‘principles-based’ swimming. In the words of Elon Musk–founder of Paypal, Tesla, and SpaceX–the core idea of principles-based thinking is to “drill down to the foundations of a problem to view it in an entirely new […]

My recent series of posts on Swimming Principles has resonated strongly with readers, drawing an unusually large number of appreciative comments. However one response expressed some skepticism on a topic of interest to many readers: Must you swim hard to swim faster?  Here is an excerpt from that comment. (You may read it in full by scrolling down to the 10th […]

The primary reason the average swimmer converts only 3 percent of energy into forward motion is that our swimming actions are so strongly influenced by basic self-preservation instincts. Concerns about choking and sinking are so primal that they continue to affect how we swim long after we’ve lost our conscious fear and even after we’ve […]

Swimming Principle #1 is Always focus on saving energy before spending it. This is because a primal instinct for self-preservation transforms us into Energy Wasting Machines in the water. This was confirmed by a DARPA study in 2005 in which experienced lap swimmers wasted 97 percent of energy. Why should long-time swimmers convert only three […]

At the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Stany Kempompo Ngangola gained a measure of fame for swimming the 100-meter freestyle. Not for his speed, but simply for surviving. Stany was among a small group of athletes—mostly from small underdeveloped nations–who are invited to the Olympics in hopes that the exposure will encourage sports development in their […]