Fitness: How Indian swimmers train for ocean swimming
Three participants from the recently-concluded MSS Ultra ocean swimming competition in Mumbai tell us their training secrets
During a 5km race in Malvan in 2018, Sanket Bhagwatkar had experienced severe discomfort after ingesting excess sea water. At the Mumbai Sea Swimmers Ultra this month, he looked to avoid the same mistakes as he stepped into the Arabian Sea to take on his longest open water swim yet. This time around, there were no hiccups as Bhagwatkar aced the 16km swim by registering the fastest time of 4 hours 3 minutes.
“This was just the second time I was entering the sea. In the run-up to the event, I spent three weeks trekking in Nepal, so I had been out of practice as well. I started slow and took my time to negotiate the tide, before finding my flow,” Bhagwatkar, 30, says.
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The event featured 28 amateur open water swimmers, who took on the stretch between the Gateway of India and the Atal Sethu Bridge in Mumbai on 17 November. It had solo swimmers like Bhagwatkar, besides seven mixed relay teams that included teenagers as well as sexagenarians.
Mumbai-based Zarir Baliwalla, who has been a regular feature on the circuit for close to a decade, decided to join a four-member relay team called AC/DZ that finished in a time of 4 hours 8 minutes.
“You don’t get too many opportunities to be a part of a fully supported open water swim in India. Most times, I have had to travel to Goa for an event, so I just had to do one which was right under my nose,” Baliwalla, 64, says.
Through a six-day weekly training routine, he put in 2-3 swims while targeting a mileage of 40km each month. It included running and cycling as well, especially while gearing up for a triathlon that he also participates in, logging a monthly mileage of 50-60km and 250km, respectively.
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“Because I train 365 days, my training doesn’t differ when an event is coming up. However, the focus is always on swimming since I enjoy it the most of the three disciplines. I’ve qualified for the Oceanman World Final Championship, a 5km swim in Dubai in December, so training for that event was good enough for the relay,” Baliwalla says.
In the weeks leading up to the event, Susrita Sen had her hands full as part of the organising team and while preparing for the event where she was the only solo female swimmer. She decided to sign up after finishing a 10km Oceanman Swimathon in Krabi, Thailand, in May. From June until August, she worked on her speed work and form correction, covering a distance of about 8-10km each week. During the Dusk to Dawn swim in August, she finished 13km in a pool in four hours. Two weeks before the MSS Ultra Swim, she did a practice swim of 10km in a little over four hours; that month, she hit a mileage of close to 30km. Though she missed out on training due to illness in September, she had still managed three 10km swims and multiple 5-7km swims since April.
“I gradually increased my duration, while also training for speed. And it was the one-hour workouts that were really hard since you are essentially doing sprints with a few seconds of rest in between. Since I have been swimming for a while now, I wanted to put in the work that would allow me to finish strong,” says Sen, 38, who clocked 4 hours 33 minutes during her effort.
The hybrid working model allowed Sen to do morning workouts in Bengaluru under coach N.D. Burman, followed by an hour-long strength session at the gym. Baliwalla, who runs his own business, enjoyed the luxury of managing his schedule on certain days in order to train. Bhagwatkar’s day job as a marketing professional involved a considerable amount of travel over the last few months and he would locate hotels with pools to ensure that the training plan handed out by his coach, Deepthi Indukuri, was on track.
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Besides the four swim sessions each week that lasted anywhere between 1.5-2 hours, Bhagwatkar also included two runs of 10km and weight training at the gym. In October, he trekked to Everest Base Camp where he walked 200km in about three weeks. “Since I was swimming after a while, I knew I had to stay calm during the early hours until I found my flow,” Bhagwatkar says.
Two weeks before the event, a team finished a route recce to understand the conditions and apprised the participants on what they could expect. “Initially, there would be no tide assist but once past the two-hour mark, the currents were likely to change and it would offer a push that would allow for a faster second leg of the swim,” Sen says.
At 6.30am, they started out in choppy waters while carefully negotiating the boat traffic closer to the bay. Each member of the relay team swam for a duration of 45 minutes, before letting a teammate take over. For the solo swimmers, it was a patient waiting game to see out the early challenge posed by the tide.
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“You really have to be in the present because it’s easy for the mind to wander. That’s when the strokes and breathing go haywire. So being focussed was the key for me,” Bhagwatkar says.
“During a swim that lasts 4-5 hours, you tend to zone out and it can get challenging mentally. So the accompanying crew on the boat is a great distraction and keeps you in the game. My team ensured that my nutrition was on point and pushed me hard during the last hour when I found it difficult,” Sen says.
The camaraderie was evident at the finish, a little celebration breaking out on the boats that had followed the swimmers. All teams finished within the cutoff time of six hours. “Back in June, I had goosebumps when I contemplated what I had signed up for. It’s all about attempting the things that you never thought you could pull off. The end of this swim simply set me up for other challenges in the future,” Bhagwatkar says.
Shail Desai is a Mumbai-based freelance writer.
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First Published:28 Nov 2024, 03:00 PM IST
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