A trainee signs up for a sprint triathlon eight weeks out. His swim experience: school PE, twenty years ago. His training between sign-up and race day: two pool sessions, both struggling with continuous laps. Race day is open water — not pool — fourteen degrees, mass start chaos. He panics at 200 metres into the 750-metre swim. Safety kayak. Pulled out. Posts about "open water being a different beast."
The pool didn't prepare him for the open water. The "swim like a fish" influencer videos didn't either. The two are different modalities, sharing only the medium.
Inside this one
- Freestyle mechanics — body position, pull cycle, bilateral breathing, kick contribution
- Pool training periodisation for novice through Masters
- Aqua fitness and deep-water running — what they're good for and what they're not
- Water immersion and aquatic therapy applications
- The pool-to-open-water transition framework (and why it's a transition, not a swap)
- Programming for recreational, Masters, and triathlon-prep contexts
The standard it is held to
Every factual claim in this volume names its source, and every claim carries a confidence grade — settled, strong, emerging or contested. Where the evidence is thin, the text says so. How it’s made, in full → · What we’ve got wrong →