Buying Speed

You can buy a faster bike. Deep section wheels, a tri bar, a helmet shaped like an egg, and you will go quicker on the same legs. You can buy carbon plated shoes and take minutes off a run. Even fitness is something you can buy, in a sense. Put in the hours, train hard, do the sessions, and the bike and the run give it back to you.

Triathlon is full of this stuff, and to be fair most of it works. The bike is the obvious one. A set of wheels or a more aero position does part of the job for you, so the same effort gets you down the road quicker, and people spend a fortune chasing it. I'm not against any of it, buying nice kit is fun.

Unfortunately, none of it works in the water. It's the only part of a triathlon where you can't 'buy speed'. You can buy a nicer wetsuit, better goggles and a watch that counts your lengths, and none of it will make a bad stroke a good one. Water is far thicker than air, so how you move through it matters much more than how hard you can push, and there is nothing in a shop that changes how you move.

You can 'buy fitness' in the pool the same as anywhere else, but the water is a great equaliser, and if you have crap technique it all falls apart. All that fitness just gets spent fighting the water. It's why very fit runners and cyclists get beaten out of the swim by people who learnt to do it properly as kids, and my own swim is slow for exactly that reason.

The only thing that works is learning to do it better, which takes time in the water and a lot of being bad at it. You can pay someone to teach you, but you still have to go and do the lengths yourself. I have said before that spending money doesn't make you good at something, and that gear only matters to a point. The swim is the one part of a triathlon where your wallet can't help at all.