Swimming is the weakest of the three triathlon disciplines for me, and so I am always looking for ways to improve. I came across an interesting ‘rule of thumb’ about swimming this week.

The rule of thumb I am talking about, is detailed in the photograph accompanying this blog post.  It can be easily summarized as… if you don’t swim five or more times a week, it is going to be difficult to get a lot faster.

While that ‘rule’ sounds quite demoralizing, I honestly think it has a lot of truth to it.  I have been swimming very consistently over the past few years. I am getting better, but at a really slow rate.  Looking back, it has been rare for me to swim more than three times a week.

In January this year, I did start to swim more frequently.  At the time, I felt like it was helping me a lot. Then, I ran into pool availability issues, and got out of the habit. 

I am doing my best to get back to swimming frequently again.  I did get to the pool and swim five times this week, for a total of 12,200 yards.  By the end of the week, my feel for the water was improved, even though I wasn’t any faster.

My goal is to swim at least five times, this upcoming week.  If I can do that, then maybe I can make it a habit.  If that happens, perhaps I might finally start to get faster.