Respect the sea

An article in The Straits Times today.

CEO dies in triathlon

This has nothing to do with the actual cause of death or anything, since investigations are still going on and nothing is certain yet. Just that this article triggered a thought in me. So the rest of this post is not a speculation but rather just a generic thought.

Having swam in the open sea before, my only thought on this is that we need to respect the sea. While it may look relatively calm when you are on shore or in a boat, when you are in the water, things look very different. Surface currents (which affect boats on the surface, and are a result of both current/tidal streams and wind) may be different from undersea currents (which will affect the swimmer more). To someone standing on a boat, a 30cm wave would look very small (may not even reach your knee level), but when you are in the water, a 30cm wave will be taller than your head.

Swimming in the pool is not a good way to train. Nothing beats going out to sea and training in the sea, since besides training your swimming ability (muscular strength and endurance), you need to overcome your fear of the sea, which comes into play once you start seeing wave after wave that is taller than your head (even though they may just be small, 30cm waves...)

Eg. A person is training for a 2km swim in the sea by swimming 2km each time in a pool. He knows how tired he becomes after completing a 2km swim in the pool. Out at sea, after swimming 2km through water (but actually moving geographically only 1km because the current was against him, I can talk more about this but it will need to lengthen the blog post considerably as I talk about navigation, speed through water and speed over ground), he gets the same feeling of tired as he has when he completed 2km at the pool. But he looks around him and see that he is only halfway there. The psychological factor may then kick into play, causing panic ("can I complete the swim?") or helplessness ("oh no, I am so tired, I can't swim anymore").

Maybe something we can all draw from this is that we need to train in the correct environment.