The Working Form · No. 02 · 8 September 2026

Buoyant? Negative

I don't float. Most people can lie on their back in a pool and just stay there, and I can't do that, I go down. It isn't dramatic and it isn't fast. This means that every stroke, no matter how much air I breathe in, is a fight against gravity.

Let me step back and explain.

I've run marathons and I've ridden centuries, so I have a reasonable idea of what hours of work feels like and what it takes to get there. None of that part is new to me. What is new is that I never received any swimming instruction beyond what I learned in day-camp decades ago. This isn't a case of my technique needing some polish, it needed a complete overhaul. For reference, when I started the honest answer to how far I could swim continuously was two lengths (50m), and I was out of breath at the end of them.

That combination is most of why I signed up. I've been looking for something engaging and difficult, and going back to marathons or centuries would have meant revisiting things I had already done (boring). The Ironman has something in it I have genuinely never done, and that made it a real test rather than a longer version of a test I had already considered passed. The swim is the whole reason it counts.

Race is Ironman Lake Placid, Sunday July 18th 2027.

Two lengths to two hundred and eighty five

My plan is a distance based progression over the training period. Every long session is written as a percentage of the race distance, so an eighty mile ride reads as 72% of 111.3mi, and I can see exactly how short I am at any given moment. That visible gap is most of the motivation.

For the swim that means going from 200m continuous in week one to 3,700m in open water, in a wetsuit, in chop, with a few hundred people swimming over the top of me. Three weeks in I am at 285m. The distance between those two numbers is the honest scale of this thing.

I decided early on to forget everything I thought I knew about swimming from day camp and rebuild from the ground up, reading books (shoutout Total Immersion!), watching videos, and talking to people. That has been eye opening, mostly because it turns out I had a lot of confidently held ideas that were just wrong.

The lane

Two days ago the pool was crowded and I ended up sharing a lane. I don't normally talk to people at the pool but the tighter lane sparked a conversation, and he gave me a couple of tips. His main points were as follows:

1. My legs were sinking, which is a known problem I have been dealing with the whole time.
2. My breathing timing could be better coordinated.

Neither was groundbreaking but it corroborated things I had heard from others and noticed myself, and it validated some of the progress I have made elsewhere with arm movement and staying long.

What has been more interesting is what it got me thinking about outside the pool.

If two people independently watching my swim mechanics can reach the same conclusions with vision alone, why can't a camera based system do the same thing?

I am not sure how far that idea goes yet. Vision is doing a lot of work in that sentence and a person on a pool deck has years of watching swimmers behind them, which a camera does not. Can't tell yet. But it is a question I keep coming back to, and I have started building toward an answer.

Next

Building a cardio base, Zone 2 training, and VO2 Max.

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