REAL Blog
The Ocean Doesn’t Care: Open Water Swimming Lessons From an Adaptive Athlete
- Adina Oneill
Bryan Berman worked hard this year. He swam all winter, kept up with his strength work, and spent the summer on 10-mile mountain bike rides through the hills in his neighborhood. What he didn’t get was as much time in the ocean as he planned. Life at home made the trip to the beach harder. His training never stopped. It adapted. And his six-mile swim at Nantasket Beach is still the goal, now set for late next summer.
In his latest Adaptive Training 365 update, he writes that the ocean doesn’t care what kind of day you had. It gives you the conditions, and it’s up to you to adapt. That goes for life on land, too. When he shared it with me, so much of what he wrote sounded like the kind of things I say every day. The athletes I coach are always pivoting, and as an adaptive athlete, Bryan is a master at it.
Pivoting is a key theme of my next book, Backwards is a Pace. It’s sitting with my publisher as I write this. The work is done, and waiting to share it with you is so hard. (Secret keeping is not my strong suit.)
When I started writing, I thought my world-first Boston Light backwards backstroke swim would be the foundation. Swimming 8 miles through Boston Harbor on my back was a pivot of its own. During the menopause transition, my body changed, and my marathon swimming had to change with it. Swimming backward became my way forward. That’s where the title came from.
As the chapters took shape, the bigger story became clear. You start out doing one thing, life happens, and you end up doing something else. You pivot.
I interviewed Bryan for the book, so watch for more of his story in Backwards is a Pace. If you’re new to his series, start with The Grind Begins: A Year of Adaptive Training and The Architecture of Adaptation: Lessons from a New England Winter.
For now, here’s what the open water has taught him about adapting.
The Athlete’s Perspective: A Guest Post by Bryan Berman
The Ocean Doesn’t Care – Lessons From Open Water
By Bryan Berman – Adaptive Ultra-Endurance Athlete, Team B*Real
There is a point in open water when all the extra noise disappears. The ocean does not care what kind of day you had. It does not care how motivated you feel, what happened to you twenty years ago, what somebody said about your limitations, or what number appeared on your watch yesterday. It does not know your story. It does not judge it either.
The ocean simply gives you the conditions that exist in that moment: wind, temperature, current, tide, chop, distance. And then it asks one question: What are you going to do with what is here?
That may be the most important lesson open-water swimming has taught me. Not how to overpower something. How to adapt to it.
Open Water vs. the Pool: You Do Not Defeat the Ocean
A swimming pool gives you walls, lane lines, a known distance and relatively predictable conditions. The ocean gives you information. Sometimes the information is favorable. Sometimes it is not. A current may push you in the direction you want to go. Twenty minutes later, the same body of water may make you work for every yard.
The wind changes. The temperature changes. Your body changes. Your stroke changes. That means the job is not to force yesterday’s plan onto today’s conditions. The job is to pay attention. That is adaptive training in its most basic form.
I used to think progress meant doing more. More distance. More intensity. More effort. More proof. Open water has taught me something different. Sometimes progress is changing your stroke. Sometimes it is slowing down. Sometimes it is changing direction. Sometimes it is getting out. Knowing the difference is part of becoming an endurance athlete.
Listening to Your Body in Open Water
Water is honest. If I become tense, I feel it in my stroke. If my breathing gets rushed, I know it immediately. If I fight the water instead of working with it, I waste energy. If I stop paying attention to temperature, fatigue, wind or current, the consequences become obvious very quickly.
That is one of the reasons swimming has always made sense to me. In the water, there is nowhere useful to hide from the information your body is giving you. You either listen or you do not. For someone who has spent years learning how to live and train in a body that does not always behave predictably, that relationship has become incredibly important.
Adaptive training is not pretending limitations do not exist. It is learning the conditions well enough to continue moving within them. That applies to injury. It applies to pain. It applies to fatigue. And it applies to the ocean.
Pushing vs. Listening: Why Recovery Is Part of Training
This has probably been one of the biggest changes in the way I train. For a long time, movement itself became evidence that I had not gone backward. If I could do more, I felt safer. If I stopped, rested or reduced the workload, some part of me could interpret that as losing ground.
Working with my coach, Adina O’Neill, began changing that equation. Recovery became part of training. Calibration became part of training. The question stopped being: How much can I make myself do today? It became: What allows me to continue tomorrow?
Open water reinforces that lesson every single time I enter it. The strongest swimmer in the water is not necessarily the person fighting hardest. Sometimes it is the person who notices what is happening first.
Training for a 6-Mile Swim at Nantasket Beach
That is one reason the six-mile Nantasket swim means so much to me. The distance matters, but the distance is not really the point. I know this beach. I know its landmarks. I know the bathhouses, the carousel, the causeways, the hotel, Kenberma, the houses at the northern end.
The swim turns geography into a sequence. Get to the next landmark. Read the water. Check the body. Adjust. Continue. That is how I approach endurance now. Not as one enormous heroic act. As a series of decisions.
There may be a direction where the current helps. There may be another direction where every stroke feels expensive. There may be cold. There may be chop. There may be conditions I cannot predict from shore.
My responsibility is not to demand that the Atlantic cooperate with my plan. My responsibility is to arrive prepared enough to make intelligent decisions inside whatever plan the Atlantic gives me. That is a completely different definition of strength.
Training Is the Event
One of the ideas at the center of Adaptive Training 365 is simple: Training is the event. That changes everything.
If training exists only to reach one finish line, then every workout becomes a test of whether I am getting closer to some future version of myself. But if training is the event, then today matters on its own. The swim matters. The recovery matters. The walk afterward matters. The food matters. The sleep matters. The decision to stop when something is wrong matters. The decision to continue when everything is right matters.
There is no single moment when I become the athlete. I am the athlete while I am making those decisions. That is what open water keeps teaching me.
What You Can (and Can’t) Control in Open Water
The ocean has also changed the way I think about control. There are things I can control:
- Preparation.
- Breathing.
- Effort.
- Nutrition.
- Safety.
- How carefully I observe conditions.
- How honestly I respond to my body.
But I cannot control the tide. I cannot control the wind. I cannot flatten the waves. And I cannot negotiate with cold water. That is not powerlessness. It is reality. And accepting reality gives me more useful power than pretending I control everything.
That lesson comes back onto land with me. Life constantly presents conditions we did not choose. Bodies change. Plans change. People change. Circumstances change. Adaptive training asks the same question the ocean asks: What can you do with what is here? Not what you wish were here. Not what used to be here. What is here now.
The Ocean Does Not Care – And That Is Why I Love It
When I say the ocean does not care, I do not mean that it is cruel. Cruelty requires intention. The ocean has none. It is simply itself. That is what makes it such a clean teacher.
It does not flatter me when I am strong. It does not insult me when I am struggling. It does not know whether I am disabled, injured, anxious, confident, frightened or having the best day of my life. It gives me water. I bring the rest.
And every time I swim in open water, I am reminded that endurance is not the ability to dominate changing conditions. It is the ability to remain present inside them. To read. To adjust. To breathe. To continue when continuing makes sense. To stop when stopping is the intelligent choice. And then to return another day.
That is the athlete I am becoming. Not unbreakable because nothing can affect me. Adaptive because when conditions change, I can change with them.
The ocean does not care. And strangely enough, that is exactly why I trust it.
Bryan Berman
Adaptive Ultra-Endurance Athlete
Team B*Real / Adaptive Training 365
Your Turn: What Can You Do With What Is Here?
Bryan’s question is one every athlete faces. Maybe it’s an injury, a new season of life, or a plan that just stopped working. Pivoting isn’t quitting. It’s how you keep moving forward.
Backwards is a Pace is full of stories like Bryan’s, and mine. Want to be the first to know when it’s out? Join my mailing list for book news, training tips, and REAL stories from athletes like you.
Be Proud. Be REAL. Keep Moving Forward.
Related Posts
If You Can’t Be Fast, Be Fun: Rethinking What Goals Are Really For
Goals are funny. We build them up in our minds as these crazy outlandish ideas to chase after. Sometimes they’re our own ideas, often we see what others are doing and say “maybe I could do that!” We put pressure on ourselves to get to that end point and celebrate the finish line.
From Injury Cycle to PRs: How Swimming Made Me a Better Runner
Liz came to me to save her joints. She left with four PRs and the confidence to chase a new dream.
We all know that running takes a toll on our bodies, but when it’s what you love, you find a way to keep going. That’s why Liz decided to add swimming as low-impact cross-training.