How To Be Assertive And Kick A$$ In Open Water with Damien Wildes

All right, there we go. Damien, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for all for having me. So Damien, you're coaching out there in Ireland, working with a lot of open water swimmers and triathletes. And today I wanna dig into some of your coaching strategies, coaching philosophies, how you like to approach things so that people can become stronger, more assertive swimmers. And maybe just for those that are listening, if you wanna give a bit of background on flow state swimming, which is your squad, your coaching business and kind of what you stand for. Quite like that when you mentioned that off there before. Yes, flow state was really born out of just a love for competing the open water. I don't come from a pool swimming background. Any of the competing that I did do was always based in the open water. And the bit that I always really liked and that I was kind of surprised that people didn't pursue more was the real tactical side of open water swimming. So something as simple as reviewing the course before you swim, understanding how you wanna approach a turn, approach dealing with groups, drafting, all that side of things. And what flow state is trying to do is prepare people for the open water. And when we talk about competing, it's not necessarily that we're looking for people to win races, whether that's at the top end or age group level, but it's just for people to be as competitive as possible, even with themselves. So we look at everything from people swimming at the right paces, working in the right zones. But when it comes to courses, how they're navigating it and put them in a position to race strong. But I suppose one of the things that I see us as being or as separating flow state from a lot of other coaching groups is that we're kind of actively pursuing people to swim hard, swim strong, and in some cases, aggressively, really impose themselves in a course so that they can put themselves in the best position to perform as well as possible and that they're not subject to, I suppose, the circumstances that appear around them, but that they can kind of control the environment that they're in and put themselves in the best position possible to perform as well as they can. Yeah, I love that. And one of the mottos I've had in open water swimming that I got from someone else was don't be a victim. You've got to be assertive, you've got to be aggressive if you want to do well. And it really like, open water swimming lends itself to that style of swimming rather than just being passive because you're gonna be around other people, you're gonna be dealing with challenging conditions. So if you can have that kind of mentality, even if you are outside of the pool, you might be very kind, very nice, you can still have that dog attitude about you when it comes to racing. And I see that with like a lot of the, if I've worked with any pro triathletes, lovely, lovely people out of the water, but I see it, like you can see it in their eye. You can see it when they get into competition that like they want to win. And you need that about you if you really want to do well. So I think it's a really good sort of attitude to have once you get into the open water. I think even though, as you said, some people are great but others aren't, like open water swimming is a full contact sport. And so if you want to get in the mix, you've got to prepare to take a hit, you have to prepare to give a hit if it comes your way. And I think unless you're willing to accept that that's there you are more than likely going to have to fade back away from that competition because you're not going to impose yourself on those scenarios. We do a lot of race simulation work where we'll set up very short courses, open water, and we'll try and put in three or four turns. And we might kind of handicap our stages. So we've saw our swimmers first, fastest swimmers coming through. So we're forcing people to draft on the quickest line. And the message always is, if you want to get in the mix, prepare to take a hit. If not, go wide, avoid scrum, leave that go. But like that, some people absolutely love it. And we tend to find that the more people get comfortable with it, the more they actually pursue it. I think there's nearly more of a mental block that people just don't want to be in there. I think there's all these fears that they're going to get buried under the water and never resurface again. Whereas they realize that it might just be a bit of jostling, two shoulders, two elbows, and they move on under the team water again. So it's a great way of learning and a great way of prepping people for racing. Absolutely. Now I want to get into some of the ways you like to coach, some of the key aspects you'd like to teach the athletes you're working with. One thing that you mentioned before we jumped on this call was the propulsion versus the glide, like just finding the sweet spot there. So what sort of stuff are you saying with the athletes you're working with there? And what's the message you're trying to convey to them with that? So I think generically what I would see in a lot of people who are competing or getting into the open water is there's a lot of people who are either coming to swimming quite late, they may have never done it as a child, or we get some kids who may be, and this is a more recent thing, who were impacted by COVID and who have spent time out of the pool and they're kind of coming back to it again. That tends to be quite well drilled, they're decent form, they know what they're doing. But for the most part, people who are coming to it later, they don't tend to have the understanding as to how they need to move to make it feel easy to get through the water. A lot of them may have come from, say a triathlon background where there's running or biking, where as a basic premise, the quicker your legs go, the faster you're going to go. That transfer of understanding to swimming just doesn't work because yes, your arms moving quickly, pay a parting allowing you to move fast, but for the speeds that these people are moving at, that doesn't translate. And so what we're trying to do is bring people back to a center point of trying to have equal focus on streamlining, as well as propulsion, so they get that benefit of the drive through the propulsive phase and allow themselves to glide. And once that penny drops where they actually feel they can produce pace, but also do it without feeling absolutely gassed, now you have someone in a position where they actually can start improving time significantly because their pace isn't reliant on cadence, it's reliant on propulsion. And then naturally, if you are propelling yourself, if you increase your arms and maintain the same shape, you're going to travel quicker. And so that's generally where our swimmers start and where we're trying to move them to. It's such a key thing to get across and understand. One way that I've found it to get that point across, if I'm doing like an example video on the iPad, showing them the different positions that we're going for, and when you think of someone at the top of their stroke, like they're on their side, they're reaching out, they're about to begin their catch, that position, I remember seeing on a race club video where they had the velocity, like they had the velocity, the thing that measures velocity, and they showed that the fastest point in the stroke is equal to another part of the stroke. But the fastest point in your stroke is at the top of it, when you've finished pressing back with your hand, when you've reached out onto your side. And one of the reasons that that's the fastest point in your stroke is because you're most streamlined at that point. And so like I say, right here, this is the fastest point in your stroke. So if you're coming in and just going straight down, trying to get your propulsion, going immediately into the catch without extending out, you're missing out on that fastest point in the stroke. So we wanna make the most of it, and not make the most of it where we're just hanging out all day and just gliding and losing our speed, but we need to be patient through there. So we hold that streamline for at least a little bit to enjoy the fruits of your work with your catch and your pull through. Well, and with that point, we've actually, one thing that we do like to do, like in addition to working on that front end, because what we find is that it's out of sight, out of mind. And so many swimmers are focused on just kind of what happens immediately within their range of vision. So once that lead arm goes in front of the head, while they might've had a clean entry, once it goes beyond that point, you see that kind of soft elbow on the weak wrist, and things start to slack off very quickly. So once we get into a position where we have people holding that front end really well, in that streamlined position, what we try and get them to do is feel that spike in acceleration, but also the drop off to get them to catch and drive on the opposite side. So we get them to focus on that peak and trough in terms of pace, say, okay, you're fastest, where you start to slow down. And now we look to start balancing out, find that middle line where you know that you can drive into your streamlined position, feel that pace, but now where do we have to pull to allow yourself to carry that pace forward and feel like you're moving at an even speed across an entire length. And again, once swimmers start feeling that, I think there's a big transformation in their stroke very, very quickly. And how do you go about getting them to feel that? So we usually try and over-exaggerate the positions and the propulsive phase. So it might be someone just putting paddles on. In a lot of cases, we just try and eliminate the requirement for the head turn, predominantly because if they get into a position where they are actually propelling themselves with that speed, breathing becomes so much easier. But if they aren't allowing themselves to feel that pace, the head turn is quite problematic. So a lot of the work that we would do is snorkel on and focus on the floor and make sure the head position is right. And if we get paddles on or fins on, where when they drive themselves into that streamlined position, they can actually feel themselves kind of cutting through the water. One aspect we do like to play with is actually where that strike, that strike position enters too. So when your hand comes over and enters into the water, that we're not aimless in that, that our hand just doesn't kind of enter high or too low. And so even something as simple as fins on, rotated position, snorkel on, as we kick through, you raise and lower your arm on the front end. So you can feel the resistance on the top of your arm. You can feel it coming through a streamlined position and then how your shoulder hinges at the top end. And they try and find that spot in the middle. And once they have that position, that's their strike point. Now we add in the arm, where it might just be to put on a paddle so that we over-exaggerate the catch and propulsive phase. And once they drive through, stay streamlined on the opposite side, they can feel the spike in pace. And then as it starts to drop off and there's a rotation where the catch and drive on the opposite side. So it's really supposed to kind of focusing on a gear assisted catch-up that focuses as much on the streamlined rotation as it does on the propulsion. And because it's so segmented, people tend to be able to find that position relatively quickly. And can you go into a bit more detail about how you get people to explore the, finding that sweet spot where they're not gliding too long and they're not gliding at all. Because that's one of the things that, I find a lot of people, it takes a lot of practice to get it. If someone is either say doing too much catch-up, okay, just getting them to back off that catch-up so that they keep their momentum in the stroke. And then obviously on the other side of that is someone who's just spinning the wheels and they've got no reach and rotation and there's no patience in front. But particularly those that are doing catch-up, I find for them, it's like trying to get that, trying to get that continuity in the stroke. So would you have an approach for that to someone who's say doing full catch-up stroke and we want them to ease off that catch-up? Yeah, so we, the way that we approach our swimming, again, dealing with the group that we're dealing with, rather than go kind of drill specific, we like to work on progressions. We're working on a single aspect of the stroke. For the sake of this, we'll talk about streamlining. And we go through five or six steps that carries through a series of progressions that bring us back up to our full stroke. The first movement could just be as simple as, again, find that streamline position on the front end, lead arm, making sure that we have our shoulder rotated. The rotation of the side point, I always think is a funny one because it's that differentiation between a twist of the body as opposed to a rotation that happens as a result of your extension through the stroke, that naturally allows the shoulder to come back. So once we have that position found, when we have people moving through their stroke and we generally do swim in that catch-up position, I think people find that quite robotic. So what we tend to try and do is when we have that robotic position, but we can see the glide, we can see the propulsive phase, we then just ask people to focus on a slightly more natural cadence where it feels a little bit smoother in terms of how it fits in with their movement and what they feel is being normal. And then something as simple as just their timing, so trying to count in their heads. So we might say, look, we're looking for you to try and maybe achieve 12, 14 strokes per length. That's what your aim is. So we're looking to pull it back from catch-up, slot in your natural rhythm, your natural cadence, and allow that to carry you with a balance between propulsion and streamlining. So when you say it like that, it still sounds like a very complicated process, but when we go through those four or five points, it tends to bring people along. Having said that, we always have those people who either stay in catch-up too long or are dropping too quickly. And in my experience, it's not something that's fixed in one session. It tends to be kind of over two, three, four sessions where they might start finding patches in their stroke across maybe five, six, seven meters where they find that glide, they find that rhythm, and then maybe they lose it because old habits kick in and it's just then trying to string those together. And so we have a lot of back and forth, a lot of dialogue with swimmers to make sure that they're finding the right positions and then focusing on the correct ones to benefit off the hard work that they're putting in. Yeah, I find exactly the same thing. It takes quite a while to find the right rhythm for those swimmers. Like it's several sessions. They'll get glimpses of it here and there, but it's certainly not fixed in one session. No, and we have, with our clinic, like we do small group clinics, so it's only six people across two lanes. But before we ever get in the water, you kind of highlight, look, this isn't a case where we're looking for you to produce 100 meters of flawless swimming at the end of the clinic. If you're swimming and you're finding that you have patches, if anywhere between five and 10 meters where things click, golden. That's exactly where we want to be because you know the feeling that you're striving for. So the next time you're in the pool, you know what you're looking for. You've seen the drills that we've been using to get you there. And then it's just like stringing those patches together and trying to make it as consistent as possible. And the key thing you mentioned there is that's the feeling we're going for. Is we're always in our head, especially as we're going through these drills and these key points, but it's the feeling. If you can just go get more of that feeling within your lap, then that's where the magic happens is when you're in that flow state. Like I think that's a good name for a business. It's like you just feel like things are flowing well when you're swimming well and you're out of your head. So yeah, that's what it's all about. I think though, unfortunately, like it's kind of like a double-edged sword. We've never had so much access to information. You can train as close to a professional as you want to as a stand with all the information that you have access to through your watch or through coaching systems. Watch has caused such a huge issue then because if you're trying to get people to work on their rhythm and flow, but every time they leave the wall, the press will start. Every time they come back into the wall, the press will stop. And once the watch is there, there's a fixation on pace. And people think there's kind of like a minimum time they have to be hitting regardless of what they're doing. And so all of a sudden, what should be a progression or a drill set, people start losing sight of it. They're saying, oh, my time is slipping. I need to kind of speed things up here. So the watch is, again, fantastic if you're kind of doing distance and you're trying to track pace, but very problematic if you're looking for people to just swim consistently and steady with no distractions where they're literally just focusing on tiles and the bottom of the pool and that feel for the water. If I forget to ask people at a clinic that we run to take their watch off, quite often I'll see them doing, like we might do our first drill progression and then we'll do like some 50s of swim. Just trying to implement those things. And I see them check it every 50. It's like, oh, that wasn't faster than what I normally do. Oh, that wasn't faster than what I normally do. We go through the next one. Maybe they get a 50 where it's like, oh, it wasn't too bad, but then it's like the next one it's the same or slower. And so it's like, don't worry about your pace. Like don't worry about what time you're doing right now. We're going for a certain feeling. We're not looking at pace. Like it may improve if you improve these things. Like it may improve straight away, but there's a really good chance that it's not going to because you haven't quite got that timing and that rhythm. So yeah, get, yeah, then get rid of the watch, especially in anything technique related, you will, like you'll just be so much more present in the water. And I find the same thing. If I ever wear my garment when I'm training, like there's that fixation on it. So if I do wear it, I try and just not look at it whatsoever because then I end up trying to force the speed a bit much. And I find that my effort level goes up, but the times don't really change with it. Whereas when I'm just, I've got rid of it, I can generally go faster for the less effort than if I'm trying to force it. Yeah. Yeah. And I'd see that as well, that people don't necessarily understand that correlation between pace through technique driven swimming, as opposed to pace through panic time chasing swimming. So like that, we'd go through sets where you might have people do swim kind of steady states and then you ask them to ramp up the pace. And they find that all of a sudden, the difference in time between their steady state and their higher effort is quite minimal. You're now ignoring technique. You're focusing on turning because you're equating your pace to turnover as opposed to form. We want the proportion. We want the streamlining. Yeah. I think exactly what, like you said, there's that distraction from your form and your feel for the water when the watch is there because you just feel like you're chasing time. I think the art of being able to read a pace clock and just count your legs is very, very undervalued, particularly when you're just trying to hold form. I like to refer to something, to swim literacy, where people understand they're swimming. Like I know if I was swimming well, I knew once I left the wall, if you're swimming hundreds, I knew what a 130, a 125, a 120 effort felt like. I may be plus or minus a second, but by the time I came in, I knew how it felt. So that that transferred to the open water really well. You knew where your efforts sit. Whereas when we get people to remove the watch and maybe do efforts without the watch, the understanding of pace is quite limited and because they're so reliant on what's on their wrist to dictate how they should be moving. I think it's very difficult for people to gauge effort. And if you want to swim hard, the last thing you're going to be doing is checking your wrist to see what pace you're going. You're just going to be watching who's around you to see how hard you can go and whose toes you need to chase. At Effortless Swimming, our mission is simple. Make swimming more enjoyable. Whether you're training for your next race, swimming for fitness, or just love being in the water, we're here to help you swim faster, smoother, and with more confidence. And one thing that can make or break a swim is your goggles. If you've ever struggled with foggy lenses mid-session, you know how frustrating it can be. That's why we created the Effortless Swimming HydroClear Anti-Fog Goggles for long-lasting crystal clear vision. I've been using them myself and the difference is night and day. And I'm not the only one. Deborah swam 36 kilometers down the Derwent River and the entire time her vision stayed crystal clear. 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That's 15% off your first pair of goggles with the code podcast at shop.effortlessswimming.com. We also have a 30 day money back guarantee. So if you're not happy with the goggles for any reason, you can simply return them for a refund. Don't let foggy goggles ruin another swim. Try HydroClear today and experience clear vision from start to finish. Yeah, and let's talk about some sets and maybe like the recent hell set that you did that I saw you posted on Instagram. I think that's a really good way to get people to get off the watch and to kind of see the results of their effort that they're putting in. So could you explain the hell set that you did? Yeah, so the hell set is what it sounds like. It's an hour 45 minutes of pretty much suffering. But what we have to do is you're toggling to make sure that people have the ability to swim at a sustainable pace, but then spend significant amounts of time in the red zone. I personally find that the people who can swim really hard and really well are the ones who actually know how to suffer in the water and are comfortable doing it. I'm sure you've seen people when you say, we want you to swim in a top end effort and they come back in, faces aren't red, there's no real heavy breathing, but they're saying, oh, that was really hard. You're saying, no, that's not hard swimming. You have more in you. And they say, oh, actually, yeah, I could go again. So the idea with the hell set is again, referring back to that swim literacy, to put people in a position to suffer in a similar way to how they would when they go racing so that they know how it feels, they know how and when they can push and what they're capable of delivering on. So the set starts out relatively tame and it's a little bit deceiving because we would have to go through a warmup, go through some progressions, make sure people are kind of targeting the water right and they're getting a good feel for the water. And then we go through just 10 by 100 and it's all a very achievable pace, like off 145, maybe off 130 for the bigger group. So it doesn't feel in any way strenuous, it's just attritional because we're going through a kilometer. Then we do 500 meters on paddles and fins just to build up a little bit of fatigue in the shoulders. And then they get hit with a five by 100 best effort and they only have 10, 15 seconds between each one. And this is where now you start seeing whether or not people have the capacity to suffer and hold that pace. And you get people start having realizations during the session as well where we have some guys who are well able to swim but maybe only doing one, max two sessions a week. And they come to something like this, they might only be covering less than 5K but because of the intensity of swimming, they go from maybe hitting like a one, say like a 110, 111 per 100 on that max effort. And then it slides right back to like 117, 118, 119. Not having that fitness is a bit of a sore spot for them. So like, okay, that's the weak spot at the moment. But we move on from them with one thing in particular that I like doing, I call them cat and mouse 150s where we match you up with a similar pace swimmer. So say if me and you were swimming, we know that over the course of two, 300 meters that you probably have 10, 15 meters on me by the time we get to that 150, 200 meter distance mark. And so we say, okay, you're gonna give me 15 to 20 meters on the first length. And I have six lengths to stay away from you, you have six lengths to catch me and you'll never see people swim as hard as they do and not because it's just full gas chasing them. The effort was monstrous, but it's good fun as well because you don't, yes, you are being chased but there's a bit more purpose behind it in terms of what you're trying to achieve as part of the overall set. And then when we move on from that kind of really real red zone heavy work and seeing people hit max paces, we get to what I think is probably the most interesting part of the set where we did, and there's a series of sets in between this in terms of volume and kind of sets with equipment on where we do three by five minutes unassisted efforts, so no watches. The people have no idea what pace they're doing as they go purely off field. And what we're looking for is they go fast, faster, fastest. And so in the first one, they kind of set their benchmark. If they've gone out too hot, they're gonna suffer pretty badly in the next two. If they go too low, you'll call them out because they should be covering a bigger distance. And when we had a big mix, we had one lane that pretty much just hit 12 lengths for all three and it came back to that thing of people just not understanding their pace, maybe thinking that they're going hard, but they're just swinging their arms quicker as opposed to cutting themselves faster. And we had two other guys in particular whose increments were spot on. Like we went from, I think it might've been, say 13 and a half lengths, prepped up to 14 lengths and 14 and a half. So they were gaining those increments as they went across those five minutes markers. But yeah, really interesting set. Fortunately, a lot of the same people are looking to do it again. So they haven't been completely put off, but a great way to learn how to suffer, which I think is probably something that a lot of people don't spend time doing. Yeah, totally agree. It's a skill that you'd need to practice to really get to be able to suffer. And obviously some of that comes down to your experience and how long you've swum for. Like someone who's swum for a year probably doesn't have the ability to suffer for long periods in the water. But if you get in a couple of years under your belt, then yeah, we'd want to be seeing something like that. It's not a similar set, but it's a set where we have people suffer. When we go to Thailand for our Hal Week camp, it's become a bit more like Heaven Week. It's not like hard training for seven days, but we have some harder sessions in there. But one of the sessions is, it's 950s dive walk back on about five minutes. So it's just max effort. Well, essentially max effort 50s. And we do it as, so first one's not a warmup, but first one we just kind of do, second one we get the time, and then it's whoever is furthest away from that second time gets out of the competition. But they still have to do it, but they're out of competition for the big prize at the end. So I think we lose about three people per 50. And so a lot of people haven't done all out 50s from a dive and backing that up with lots of rest. Like they might've done 50s on the minute, 50s on 115, but when you have a lot of recovery time, that lactic acid builds up, it hurts. It hurts a lot. And so I really enjoy seeing people push themselves and suffer through that set. And we've had a few surprises, like people who I thought wouldn't do really well at that set actually came out on top and did really well. But something like that is very, very challenging. And it's like, it just sort of pushes you into that next level with your swimming. So yeah, sets like that, I think are great. It gives people the confidence that whether they get there or not, but it gives them the confidence and the ability to go, yeah, okay, I'm actually, like I can suffer here. I can actually push a lot harder. And I now see myself as this next level of swimmer. And if you keep doing that over years, then you find yourself doing some pretty incredible things. Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. I think there's a tendency, particularly I think with the open water work, because for the most part races, you're looking at a minimum of 750 meters that people tend to target the longer distance sets. And they don't really spend a whole lot of time in that anaerobic zone where they're really putting themselves into the red zone where they're struggling to breathe by the end of it. Like you're saying, lactic acid is building up and they're feeling an absolute jocker by the time they come around to doing the next one. But having the confidence then at the end of it where they realize, oh, I felt brutal, but I've actually managed to turn out some relatively decent times after maybe peaking on the first or second one. I think, like you said, people start having that confidence and realizing that that kind of strong swimming, seeing the benefit and how that actually transfers into the open water work so that if you do have to chase a set of toes, if you're accelerating onto the buoy or off the buoy, that you have that capacity strength-wise to put in those big digs, but then come back down to that kind of race pace effort and just kind of hold that. So I would find there's huge benefits in that anaerobic work that, again, a lot of the kind of distance or open water swimmers I think tend to veer away from. Yeah, yeah, totally. It's, the other part of that too, the other thing that I like to do a lot of in training is an example we did this week was 150, what was it, 150 strong, like front-end race pace, so what would be about a 2K swim, five or 10 seconds rest, and then we go into 250 recovery. That recovery is just like moderate effort, but like as quick as you can, get that heart rate under control, keep good form, and then the next one is 150 strong and then 150 recovery, and then 150 strong and then 50 recovery, and then we do that twice through. So like just being able to go hard, get the heart rate up, quickly recover, but keep your form, that gives you the ability to shift gears when needed as you're racing there. Like it's, that's an important skill for a lot of people to have. Yeah, and I think it's something, again, that's probably underestimated. We would do something similar in that we're trying to get people to spend a lot of time in that red zone, but then bringing it back down to that sustainable, maintainable race pace, so that even though they might be fatigued, they can still find form. Inevitably, when people race, I think they let fatigue get the better of them, and the first thing that they do is that lead arm starts to drop, and so we try and bring things back to a really simple point that when they get tired, like just think about your fingertips, because your fingertips can't be engaged if your wrist isn't strong, if your elbows aren't engaged, your shoulders aren't in the right position. So once you maintain that length through for streamlining, at least whatever propulsion you're putting into the water, you're gonna benefit from it. But if our lead arm drops and you're trying to propel yourself, now you're missing out on both aspects of the stroke. So going back to what you were saying with those sorts of sets, where you have people who are fatiguing over the course of being in that upper end of their pace, but then coming back to swimming that kind of distance, that race pace, and just learning how to follow that form, develop that strength and capacity for maintaining that position and holding the technique to the water is hugely beneficial. I'd love to jump into any story or example of someone you've worked with recently who you've seen make good progression, because I find that sometimes, and I know this personally for myself, is like, if you hear a story of someone who's gone from, say, 220 down to two minutes or something like that, it's like, all right, yeah, it's possible. And just kind of having that belief that it is possible, because I find sometimes people get stuck in their own head and they become their own worst enemy where they're like, ah, I've just tried so many different things and nothing's happening, and I'm just stuck at this one pace and I just don't know if I can actually get any faster. But we see it all the time. Yeah, people do improve, often quite, to pretty incredible speeds over the course of several years. So is there any examples that come to mind of people you've worked with recently? Yeah, we're quite lucky. We have a very broad demographic in terms of people that we're dealing with, and we have a very broad mix of backgrounds that people are coming from. So some people who have been very high performers in other sports that are coming across, they tend to do quite well because they're so aware of their biomechanics that it's easy, they can take so much more information on in one go that they tend to adapt to it much easier. The point you were making about times, that thing of people being in that kind of north of 210, 220, though they're making those big strides and bringing it down to that two-minute mark is very achievable with a few small adjustments. It's when you get kind of to the narrow end. So I always find that kind of sub-145 pace is really where people start struggling to make some big inroads. We do have, there's a couple of good examples. One of the guys, Rob, who is currently training for the Ironman World Championships in Nice. He wishes it was Kona, but he's got to go to Nice. We ran like an athlete development program last year. And the idea was that we wanted to just try and engage a couple of athletes who are maybe performing quite well in certain aspects of what they're doing, but the swimming isn't where they needed to be. And Rob was one of the guys that we took on. And the swimming was probably up, he was probably doing well to be sub-two minutes, kind of around like maybe north, between 155, two-minute mark. And we were working with Rob kind of remotely and things were moving along relatively well. He kind of got down south of like low 150s, high 140s. But over the last, since Christmas now, we've actually had him in our lane training. And the lane training, we're very lucky because the group that are in that kind of buy-in to our ethos, and the ethos being like swim hard, push, push each other, be aggressive when you need to be, he's slotted in there. And over the course of a couple of weeks, we've kind of seen those times drop to where he's posting like kind of sub-130s effort and kind of swimming consistently. We kind of have him down, but should be sustainably at sub-140s, high 130s, low 140s. So where previously his target across the course of his Ironman swim would have been like if he could get sub-two minutes, whereas now we're saying we reckon like 140 pace, he should be able to hold. But if he gets to, if he has a decent wedding on him, if he gets onto a good set of toes, and if he navigates the course well, there's definitely two more seconds there for taking. So it's been great seeing that progression, especially with people who are hungry first. Like it's one thing to have someone who just wants to swim better because they want to swim better. That's absolutely fine. But I think then when you have somebody else who is training for a specific goal and they have specific targets in mind and you can see their confidence building in their swimming and they're getting more comfortable in the water, pace-wise, they're starting to tease out a bit better. That's always really interesting to watch. Another cool one that we're working on, working with a paratrooper athlete, and Dunica is fully blind. Dunica lost his sight at 10. He never saw anybody swimming properly. And so like this guy is competing on the international stage. He has a guide and is swimming. It's actually incredible to get into a 50-meter pool with someone with absolutely no vision whatsoever and watch them swim up one side, come back down the other. He's cut all over his hands because he kind of navigates using the rope. But your coaching approach in that scenario has to be entirely different because his reference points are so different to what you're used to dealing with. And so when we got into that scenario, we were saying, okay, how do you actually teach someone who's never seen someone swimming before and you have to rely on your explanation to them as to what they're doing in the water so that they understand it? Because video analysis is obviously out the window, which is such a huge crutch. It works so well for people. But with Dunica now, we've been working over the last couple of months. And I think even the last day, there was one session in particular where I crossed, I think, a set of hundreds. All I was looking for was for him to kind of hit consistent times at a steady pace. And I think we got him down to like a 138 and he repeated that about four times in a row. And by the end of it again, the comment was that he was able to produce that and it didn't feel overly taxing. It felt much easier than he had been swimming before. So those sorts of gains are huge. It's fantastic to see that, particularly when the coaching environment is so entirely different to what you're used to. Can you give me an example of how you had to perhaps rephrase something that you would normally say to someone who sort of knows what they need to do based on what they've seen to work with that athlete? So one of the big things that Dunica would have been kind of slightly struggling with was his catch. So engaging the water on the front end, like super early, as you've seen, but there's loads of people that catch the water really late, like you're almost under their chest, but it's trying to find that extreme position on the front end where we like shoulder to cheek and we're getting fingertips pointed towards the bottom as early as possible. And a lot of that I find comes down to people actually getting the feel for the water and understanding the creation of that leverage and really holding that water in the arm as they drive through. So I was looking and saying, okay, how do we actually explain the catch position properly? And a lot of it actually, I find, comes down to more tactile work. So I find that I get him to kind of put his fingertips down into my elbow and my fingers to then open his elbow and I get him to start leveraging back and forth, putting pressure through that. We then transfer that maybe to just fingertips on the wall and you're looking to just kind of leverage through the fingertips and get the elbow nice and tight and then transfer that straight into the water. You use paddles then and stuff to accentuate the feeling and make sure that it's a little bit more exaggerated, but simple things like that where you maybe have to kind of move them into position a bit more and be a little bit more hands-on, but it definitely works. The flip side of that is it's incredible to see someone's ability with no vision to take on these pointers and put them into practice. Try swim a length of a 50 meter pool with your eyes closed. It's just, it's an incredible drive and determination and incredible focus that you can see someone fatiguing over time when they're having to concentrate that hard on particular movements and aspects of technique. Yeah, well, that's a great story. It's good to be challenged in those ways to have to figure out different ways to coach and get your point across and yeah, that's really exciting. Well, Damien, I really appreciate you being on the podcast and sharing your expertise. For those that are listening, what's the best way to follow you, get in touch with you and yeah, and hear more, especially if they're in Ireland, near Dublin, so. Yeah, so best place to get in touch is probably Instagram at Low State Swimming and otherwise website, LowStateSwimming.ie. All the contact details are through there. I mean, look, we're just stoked to try and work with people who are looking to push themselves in the open water. We're very fortunate in Ireland that we have some fantastic distance routes like the North Channel, the Bassinet, Galway Bay, but there's also the aspect where people want to race and we wanna help people race and pursue time, push themselves and get into a position where they feel comfortable to be aggressive and push hard in the water. If that's you, whether you're an athlete or an open water swimmer, please feel free to get in touch. We've got a whole load of different types of sessions there that people can get involved with. Yeah, great to meet new swimmers. Thank you very much for having me on. It's been great to chat through these bits and pieces and get your perspective on what we're doing. Yeah, likewise. Thanks, Daniel. Great to chat. All right, Brandon. Thank you very much.