Open water strips away the one thing pool swimmers never have to think about: the black line. There is no lane rope to follow and no wall coming up to square you off. I spent most of my sixteen years in high performance swimming racing between five lines painted on a pool floor, and the first time an athlete asks me about open water, the question is almost always the same. How do you keep swimming straight and fast when you cannot see where you are going without stopping to check.
What is sighting and why does open water need it?
Sighting is lifting your eyes just above the surface to spot a buoy, a landmark, or the swimmer ahead of you, then getting your head back down before your stroke loses shape. Without it you drift. Even a small, unconscious pull imbalance between your left and right arm will curve your path over a few hundred meters, and in a river, lake, or ocean there is no lane rope to correct you. A pool swimmer with an uneven stroke swims a slightly wavy line inside a two meter lane and never notices. The same swimmer in open water can add real distance to a race just by drifting off line, on top of whatever chop or current is already pushing them around.
How do you sight without lifting your whole head?
You lift only your eyes, not your chin, and you do it on the front of the stroke, not the side. The common mistake is treating sighting like a breath: lifting the head up and back the way you would to breathe. That pitches your hips and legs down, kills your body line, and forces you to muscle your way back into position on the next stroke. Instead, time the sight to the moment your leading hand enters the water and starts to press down for the catch, the same motion I break down in the freestyle catch. As that hand presses, let your eyes come up just enough to break the surface, glance at your target, and drop your head straight back down into a normal head down position before your arm finishes the pull. Done well it costs you almost nothing. Done like a breath, it costs you your whole rhythm.
How often should you sight during a race or a long swim?
For most amateur swimmers, once every six to ten strokes is enough to hold a reasonably straight line without paying too high a price in speed and rhythm. Choppier water or a longer gap between buoys calls for more frequent sighting, calm water with close, visible landmarks calls for less. The goal is not to sight constantly, it is to sight just often enough that a small drift never becomes a big one. I would rather see an athlete sight briefly and often than lift their head high every twenty strokes trying to fully reorient, because that big correction is exactly what wrecks the rotation and reach that body roll is supposed to give you.
Does a wetsuit actually make you faster in open water?
Yes, for most triathletes, and the effect is well documented. A study comparing competitive swimmers and triathletes found that triathletes swam a 400 meter time trial about 19 seconds faster in a wetsuit than without one, while the effect was much smaller for highly trained pool swimmers with naturally efficient technique and good buoyancy (Chatard et al., 1995). The wetsuit lifts your hips and legs, which cuts frontal drag, and the benefit is largest for swimmers who sit lower in the water without one. That is why governing bodies regulate wetsuit use by water temperature rather than leaving it optional at every race. Under World Triathlon rules, wetsuits are mandatory below 16 degrees Celsius, allowed up to 20 degrees for elite athletes, and banned above roughly 24.6 degrees for elites, with slightly different thresholds for age group athletes (World Triathlon Competition Rules). If your race allows a wetsuit and the water is cool enough to be comfortable in one, wear it. It is not cheating, it is the rules working as designed.
Is it worth swimming close behind another swimmer?
Yes, drafting in open water meaningfully lowers the effort of holding a given pace. Research on drafting distance found that swimming directly behind another swimmer at zero to fifty centimeters reduced passive drag by roughly 20 to 21 percent compared to swimming alone, with lower oxygen uptake, heart rate, and perceived effort at the same speed (Chatard & Wilson, 2003). Practically, that means tucking in just behind and slightly to the side of another swimmer's hips, close enough to sit in their wake without clipping their feet. In a crowded race start this happens by accident. In a training swim or a smaller field, it is worth doing on purpose, both to save energy and because someone else is doing part of your sighting for you, as long as you trust their line.
How do you practice sighting before race day?
You practice it the same way you practice anything you want to hold under fatigue and stress, in a pool, until it is automatic. A few things I would put into a normal training week if open water racing is on your calendar:
- Add a sight every 6 to 8 strokes during one aerobic set a week, picking a fixed point on the pool deck or ceiling as your target.
- Practice sighting on your worse breathing side too, since race day will not always let you choose.
- Do a short set eyes closed for two or three strokes at a time to feel how far a small pull imbalance actually drifts you.
- If you have access to open water before race day, do at least one session there so the first time you sight around a real buoy is not on race morning.
None of this fixes a stroke that is already breaking down under fatigue, which is the harder problem and the one I care about most. Sighting technique buys you a straight line, but if your catch collapses or your rotation flattens out in the last third of a swim, no amount of sighting saves your time. That is the exact blind spot SwimLytic is built for. Film a lap, and the on-device analysis scores your entry, catch, pull, recovery, rotation, kick, head position, and breathing frame by frame, so you can see whether your technique is actually holding up before you take it into open water. Join the beta and find out what your stroke is really doing under load.