Anyone who knows me knows I’m an amateur triathlete. For those less familiar with the sport: a triathlon is swim, bike, run — and the swim leg usually happens in open water, whether that’s a lake, the ocean, or a river.
As an amateur, results are secondary; what actually matters is the healthy lifestyle the sport builds around it. I joke with friends that racing a triathlon is basically a spring outing with snacks and water handed to you along the way — go fast when you can, enjoy it when you can’t, eat and drink, and finish safe and happy. That’s what counts.
Of the three disciplines, though, swimming is the one that carries the most uncertainty, and the one most likely to trigger fear in me.
First, the conditions themselves are unpredictable. The same body of water and the same course can feel completely different depending on weather and hydrology — waves, water temperature, current. You can train in similar conditions beforehand, but the sky doesn’t always cooperate, and there’s never a guarantee.
Second, it’s hard to control your breathing rhythm in the water. Unlike running or cycling, breathing while swimming is itself a skill — it takes technique, rhythm, and a baseline level of fitness to sustain. On the bike or on foot, if you go out too hot and get overexcited, you can just slow down or even stop to bring your heart rate back down. Swimming doesn’t give you that option. Once your breathing rhythm falls apart and your heart rate spikes, you end up breathing more frequently just to get air, which only tires you out faster — a vicious cycle.
Last is the psychological factor. During the swim you can’t hear anyone cheering from the shore — just yourself and the sound of water in your ears. Any anxious thought or imagined scenario, left unchecked, can spiral and multiply in an instant, and that state of mind feeds right back into your breathing and heart rate. Water that’s too cold, waves that are too big, water you can’t see the bottom of — any of these can become a trigger for fear.
So how do you overcome it? The most important and most basic answer is practice. As I said above, open water throws a lot of surprises at you, and fear is what fills the gap when you’re not confident or don’t know what you’re dealing with. Only when you’re confident enough in your own ability — and have seen and handled enough of those surprises — can you stay composed. How to pull through chop, how to time your breathing, how to sight a buoy — all of that takes practice and familiarity, and it’s very different from swimming in a pool. On top of that, swimming has real physical requirements. If your fitness doesn’t meet them, your survival instinct kicks in — and once survival instinct takes over, you’re done.
Beyond building open-water skills, the other piece is learning to manage your own mindset. When everything ahead of you is black and you can’t see the bottom, fear naturally starts to creep in. One trick is to put your attention on your stroke and your breathing, so your mind has no room left to spiral. But that only works in the ideal case — once your brain has already switched into survival mode and started spinning stories, it stops working. There have been plenty of times I genuinely thought: if I drown, I can die, and probably will. That thought isn’t even something my mind made up — it’s just true. What I actually need to practice is acceptance: be okay with it. Accepting that death is a real possibility, and letting go, is what lets me stay calm and bring both body and mind back to a normal state.
So, to sum up what open water swimming has taught me about overcoming fear: build real competence, stay present, and make peace with the worst that could happen.