Coach Mike Olzinski

Welcome to episode three of the Low Tide Boyz, a swimrun podcast!

On this week’s show we chat about ramping up our training for Catalina and our swim build workout plan that was written by this show’s special guest, Michael Olzinski. More about him later.

We started swimming at a great outdoor Olympic-sized pool that is a huge upgrade from our current crappy 25 yard pool at our crappy gym. Long course swimming has been a great addition to our training given that swimrun is all about swimming long. We’ve started dialing up the swim volume and have been putting in some diabolical sets, curtesy of today’s guest!

We’ve gotten some great feedback about our Swimrun 101 episode so thank you for that. It was also brought to our attention that we didn’t talk about socks and what to wear under a wetsuit. For both of these it comes down to personal preference and we recommend testing whatever you’re going to use before the race.

We are lucky to have Michael Olzinski on the show this week. He’s a multisport coach with Purple Patch Fitness. He’s a stout athlete in his own right, has a ton of coaching certifications and he’s joining us to chat about swimrun training. Mike first heard about swimrun when some of Purple Patch’s international athletes started asking for training plans to their races.

We chatted with Mike about how to best train for swimrun, focusing on the Otillo Catalina course…since that’s what we have coming up. Acknowledging that training for these events are really an experiment in training and while there are some analogies to events like super league triathlon, where there are multiple short sets of swimming, biking and running. The overarching idea though is that swimrun athletes have to be just that, athletes. As much as swimrun is a swimming and running sport, there’s a lot of room for strength training to handle the impact on your legs and shoulders from all the transitions. This is especially true for newer athletes to the sport. Mike also recommends combining running and swimming often and mix it up to develop the adaptation for transitioning back and forth.

Courses like Otillo’s Catalina World Series race be aerobic event but it will have a lot of spikes and drops in effort levels and, as such, training should have a lot of fartleks thrown in to simulate the spikes in effort that athletes will experience during a race. For swim workouts, Mike is a big fan of doing deck ups at the pool. These are great for getting the body adapted to transitioning from swimming to running. Mike also recommends that during swimming sets, that it’s not necessary to do all your swims with paddles and buoy. Use paddles and buoy mostly for key sets in the water. Adding an ankle strap is also great. Mike recommends trying some fartlek swimming in open water and using swim strokes to count off the sets, such as 30 hard and 30 recovery, then 20 hard and 30 recovery and so forth. Finally, Mike recommends doing a lot of strength and core work to help with maintaining proper posture during long endurance efforts in the water and on land. Mike thinks that everyone should be doing deadlifts. Full stop!

You can find Mike on Instagram, on the Purple Patch platform and at the Nth Degree Athletic Club.

That’s it for this week’s show. If you are enjoying the Low Tide Boyz, please be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast player. We are on Apple Podcast, Spotify and Google Podcast. You can also follow along on Instagram and Twitter. You can also support us on Patreon, if you are so inclined. If you want to drop us a line, email us at lowtideboyz@gmail.com.