ABTA BONDED · FULL FINANCIAL PROTECTIONABTA BONDED · FULL FINANCIAL PROTECTIONIf open water is the part of your triathlon that worries you most, you’re in good company — it’s the most commonly cited source of race-day nerves, even among strong pool swimmers. With the right preparation, it becomes manageable, and for a lot of triathletes, eventually one of the best parts of race day. Here’s how to get there.
Swimming in open water is a different experience to a pool — no lane lines, colder and murkier water, and waves or current to contend with. The only real fix is practice: get to a lake, river or the sea regularly enough that the water temperature and texture stop being a distraction, and swim with others when you can, since it’s safer and closer to race conditions.
Without pool walls and lane lines to guide you, you need to sight to stay on course — lifting your head briefly during your stroke to spot a landmark or buoy. Pick a clear, fixed marker, and practise lifting your head every few strokes without breaking your rhythm too much. It’s a skill, and like any skill it needs repetition before it feels automatic.
A mass triathlon start can feel chaotic — arms and legs everywhere in the first few hundred metres. Positioning yourself at the back or sides is a completely legitimate strategy if you’re not confident in a crowd, and practising in a group during training helps you get used to the jostling before it matters.
Bilateral breathing — alternating sides — means you’re never caught out by wind or waves coming from one direction. If you start to feel panicked, switching briefly to breaststroke to regroup is a completely normal and sensible move, not a failure.
Training in open water is useful; training under race-like pressure is more useful still. Practise a fast, slightly aggressive start for the first hundred metres before settling into your pace, and occasionally swim straight after a bike or run session so your body knows what a race-day swim feels like when it’s not your first discipline of the day.
SunTri’s camps run open water sessions directly from Playa de Muro, on the sheltered Bay of Alcúdia. Compared with more exposed Atlantic coastlines, the bay’s calmer conditions make it a genuinely good environment for building sighting confidence and technique without also fighting heavy swell — real open water, without unnecessary difficulty stacked on top while you’re still building confidence. Sessions are coached, so technique feedback happens in the water in real time rather than after the fact.
Open water swimming is as much mental as physical. Visualise a calm, controlled swim before race day, and when nerves creep in, remind yourself of the training you’ve actually done — it’s usually more than enough.
Ready to build real open-water confidence with coached sessions from the beach? Take a look at our triathlon training camps in Mallorca.
