“How do I prepare for a 6.5km swim in 10 weeks?”

Swimming coach Cassie Patten answers this reader Q about how to prepare for the around-Brownsea Island swim in June – a distance of 6.5km – with very little prior swim training

“I have been lucky enough to get an elusive spot on the around-Brownsea Island swim! But I don’t know how or where to start with preparing for it. It is in June, in about 10 weeks’ time! Which isn’t very long for someone who hasn’t done any proper swimming for about six months.

I have done similar swims in the past, so I know I can do the distance in theory. I have a reasonable front crawl steady pace, will probably take me the full 180 minutes – which is their cut off. I am reasonably fit, but nowhere near what I could be. It currently takes me about 45 minutes to swim a mile. It would be good to improve my swim time a little too.

I will have to do most of my training in a pool as water temperature still too cool. I was never a competitive swimmer, or part of any clubs or masters – so when I look up training plans on the internet I have no idea what I am really looking at. I often just go to the pool and do an hour of front crawl and see how far I can go. But I see training plans that are more about different things like arms and legs, body position. I also get bored swimming in a pool.

When it gets warmer, I have some distance swims planned in my local river with a friend. But what can I start to do now? I have kit – fins, kick board, webbed gloves – but I really am in a ‘all the gear and no idea’ situation. How much swimming should I be doing every week? How best to build up the distance? In the past when training, I have just swum as much as I can and then hoped for the best. But I would love to be in a stronger position this year and maybe enter another event in early autumn/late summer. Any help would be gratefully received.” Deb

Cassie’s answer

How exciting that you have such a great event in the diary! First, don’t panic! 6.5km is manageable with not a lot of training. However, we want it to be enjoyable, not just doable! Let’s go into detail and look at some other things that you mention. I completely understand that if you haven’t had a swimming background, some of the training jargon and kit needed can be quite a lot to take on board. So, what do you need to be doing?

Try and make sure that you are mixing up ‘just swimming’ with some tailored training. Let me explain why. If you get in and swim the same distance at the same pace, you are going to get a bit fitter through the low-level aerobic training, however, you will plateau quite quickly, and you’ll find it harder to get faster or fitter. If you add some intervals where you are pushing your body a little bit harder with punctuated rest intervals, you will find that both your fitness and speed will increase.

Training plan suggestion

A nice simple session to get started is to do a gentle warm-up of around 5-10 minutes and then swim up to 10×100m with 20 second rest, depending on your current fitness levels.

The first four 100s you want to swim at around 4/10 pace, focusing on technique and maintaining a good stroke rate (the amount of your arms go round in a minute). The next three 100s swim at around 5/10 pace, you should feel slightly more out of breath, that is okay. The next two 100s you’re pushing onto 6/10 effort, you may find that you need a little bit extra rest here to begin with, take an extra 5-10 seconds per 100m to allow your heart rate to come down before you push off again.

The final 100 swim at 7/10 effort.

Do this for a couple of weeks, then to make it harder you can either decrease the amount of rest you are having, or start at 5/10 and travel up to a finishing point of 8/10 effort. Finish off with a swim down.

You can do a similar session in open water, but you will go off time rather than precise distances, for example, instead of doing 4/3/2/1 x 100m you could do 10 minutes, then six minutes, then four minutes, then finish off with two minutes. Without seeing you in person, this is a generalised plan.

Without knowing how far you are swimming per week, it is a little tricky to prescribe how much you should be doing. However, a very general rule of thumb is, if you can swim just over your target distance in a week, you can hit that distance in a day. But over 20k this will change. It is important to train for an open water event. Too often I see people thinking ‘I’ll be okay on the day’ – you still have plenty of time to train for this.

I really hope that this helps you and your event goes well. If you want any more information on training programmes, I have a section on my website wavecrestswimming. com which has sample training sessions and I also can provide individualised remote training plans if that is something that you are interested in.