Last November, I took on a new challenge: leading a dedicated Envol training squad through a full annual swimrun cycle.

Very quickly, one thing became obvious. Many training plans for our sport are still built like Frankenstein programs: take a triathlon plan, remove the bike, add a few open-water swims, and hope the athlete becomes a swimrunner.

But swimrun does not work like that.

This is one of the things that makes Envol different. Swimrun is not something we have added to a library of generic endurance plans. It sits at the core of what we do.

Over the last several months, within my Envol squad, we have been building and refining one expression of that philosophy: the Swimrunner’s Blueprint. Not a swim plan plus a run plan, but a way of training the sport as one integrated discipline.

This is what this particular squad has learned so far.

The spark for this approach came last September, on the ferry back to Stockholm after the ÖTILLÖ World Championships.

I spent time talking with the winners, the Kebab League, and several of the leading French teams. We discussed the rapidly growing French swimrun scene, where the sport is increasingly embedded in the triathlon club system.

Their message was clear: the fastest triathletes are rarely the best swimrunners.

That might sound strange at first. Many of these athletes have huge aerobic engines, excellent swim speed, and strong run speed. But when the modalities begin to blur, something changes. Pure swim fitness and pure run fitness are not enough.

To compete well in swimrun, you cannot simply be a fast swimmer and a fast runner. You have to train swimrun as its own sport.

Most of us are not trying to win ÖTILLÖ. But the lesson still matters. If very strong triathletes can struggle when the transitions, terrain, equipment, and repeated interruptions are added, then the rest of us should pay attention too.

The biggest mistake is treating the swim and the run as separate events.

In a race, you are not a swimmer, then a runner, then a swimmer again. You are one athlete dealing with repeated disruption: cold water, changing posture, altered breathing, blood flow shifts, equipment, terrain, and constant changes in rhythm.

The cost is not only in the swimming or the running. It is in the interruption between them.

That is where many races begin to unravel. You exit the water horizontal, cold, and upper-body loaded. Then, within seconds, you need to stand up, find your legs, manage your breathing, deal with shoes, rocks, roots, wetsuit restriction, and maybe a partner on a tether.

If you never train that interruption, you are leaving one of the defining demands of the sport to chance.

That realization shaped the way I have built this squad’s annual plan. We stopped treating swimming and running as two separate boxes and started treating them as a relationship. The goal is not simply to make athletes faster in two sports. It is to make them better at the thing that actually happens on race day.

Through the programming and execution of this particular annual plan, five lessons have stood out.

We have stopped viewing swimming as a separate discipline that simply prepares you for the swim sections.

In swimrun, the swim is not isolated from the run, and the run is not isolated from the swim. They shape each other.

A strong swim block gives you more than speed in the water. It builds upper body durability, breathing control, postural strength, and the ability to keep moving well when the legs are heavy.

That matters. Late in a race, when fatigue starts to close the body down, athletes who can keep the chest open, the rhythm calm, and the upper body connected often run better too. Not because swimming magically fixes running technique, but because it helps build a more resilient athlete.

Swimrun rewards the whole system.

In pool swimming, pull buoys and paddles are often treated as occasional tools. Sometimes they are used for strength. Sometimes they are treated almost as cheating.

In swimrun, they are part of the sport.

Swimming with a pull buoy and paddles changes your position, stroke rhythm, loading, and fatigue profile. It is not the same as pool swimming with toys added. It is a different technical demand.

That is why we have spent time developing specific shoulder durability, paddle control, and what I think of as heavy-gear swimming. The aim is not simply to pull harder. It is to hold the water well, keep the stroke connected, and use the equipment efficiently for long periods.

If you cannot control the paddles, or manage the body position created by a high-float pull buoy, the equipment stops being an advantage and becomes a tax.

This extends beyond the swim itself. Swimrun equipment is not just equipment; it is part of the movement problem. Paddles, pull buoy, shoes, wetsuit, tether, goggles, nutrition, and transitions all add small layers of physical and cognitive load. The better you manage them, the less they interrupt the race.

One of the most important shifts in the program has been moving away from too much steady-state work and toward a more variable model.

I have been influenced here by Steve Magness and his writing on flux training: the ability to move between intensities without falling apart. Swimrun is full of this. The first 60 to 90 seconds after a transition can feel chaotic. Heart rate spikes. Breathing changes. The legs feel wrong. Rhythm disappears.

The natural response is to panic, slow too much, or spend several minutes trying to recover.

We have worked instead on a surge-and-settle approach.

The surge gets you through the transition. The settle is the important part. It is not a full recovery and it is not a collapse back to easy running. It is the ability to return to a strong, sustainable aerobic rhythm while still moving quickly.

That sounds simple, but it is a skill.

Athletes who learn to settle well can keep racing after the disruption. Athletes who cannot settle well often burn too many matches early, then wonder why the middle of the race feels so hard.

The interval nature of swimrun also changes how we express fitness across the total distance. A 30 km swimrun is not the same as a continuous 30 km run with some swimming added. The run legs are broken into repeated segments, each shaped by the swim before it and the transition into it.

In that sense, swimrun running is closer to a series of long tempo intervals than one continuous run. The swims do not make the race easy, but they do change the rhythm of how the run fitness is expressed. An athlete may be able to access a higher run speed at times than they could in a continuous race of the same total distance, but only if they can control the disruption, settle quickly, and avoid turning every exit into a spike they cannot recover from.

Road running is about rhythm. Trail running is about reaction.

One of our key focuses has been moving away from “just running” and toward technical trail proficiency. Swimrun courses are rarely smooth. They ask you to climb, descend, turn, brake, accelerate, step over rocks, change surface, and make decisions under fatigue.

Trail skill is not a separate energy system, but it can feel like one. Poor footwork, hesitation, over-braking, and tension all carry a metabolic cost.

The better you move over technical terrain, the less you pay for it.

That is why we train it specifically. Good trail runners can sometimes use technical sections almost as metabolic recovery. They stay relaxed, light, and reactive. Less skilled runners fight the terrain, lose rhythm, and spend energy they do not need to spend.

In swimrun, technical running is not decoration. It is part of the performance model.

This has been the loudest mantra since November.

The athletes who have improved most are not necessarily those who have done the most training. They are the ones who have hit the rhythm of the program most consistently.

They show up. They absorb the work. They keep the quality high. They avoid turning every week into a heroic rescue mission.

That matters because swimrun training can become messy very quickly. Swimming, running, strength, transitions, technical skills, equipment practice, partner work, and racing all compete for space. Without a clear structure, it is easy to add more and more until the athlete is tired but not necessarily better.

Unstructured volume is often just noise.

If more volume threatens consistency, it is not better training. It is just a more elaborate way to break the rhythm.

The goal is not to train as much as possible. The goal is to repeat the right work often enough that the body adapts.

The plan has been structured as a 12-month journey through five phases.

The sequence matters: habit before intensity, intensity before durability, durability before integration, integration before racing.

The Habit, November to January
We establish the routine and build structural durability, especially in the feet, ankles, calves, shoulders, and trunk. The aim is to make the athlete ready to train, not just motivated to train.

The Ceiling, January to March
We move into the lab phase, using Critical Speed and Critical Swim Speed to understand current capacity and set training anchors. This gives us a clearer picture of the athlete’s ceiling.

The Floor, March to May
We then pave the floor. The goal is to make the new speed more sustainable, repeatable, and useful over longer sessions. Fitness that cannot be repeated is not yet race fitness.

The Integration, May to July
This is where the modalities are welded together. Transition-heavy bricks, surge-and-settle work, equipment practice, and technical running become more central. For paired races, this is also where the team becomes part of the training: pacing, communication, drafting, tether use, and decision-making under fatigue cannot be left until race day.

There may already be early-season races in this period, and the athlete should be ready for them. But the main emphasis is still integration: making the pieces work together under more race-like conditions.

The Expression, July to October
By July, we are in the meat of the race season. The goal is not to keep building forever. It is to express the work, maintain the qualities that matter, and manage the calendar intelligently.

This is the advantage of an annual plan. You do not have to solve every problem at once. Each phase has a job.

The point is not simply to add more training as the year goes on. It is to layer skills. First the routine, then the engine, then durability, then transitions, equipment, terrain, and partner execution. We are not just stacking hours. We are stacking the abilities that let fitness survive contact with the race.

As we move toward the race season, the squad is proving something important: a coherent annual strategy beats a reactionary one.

We are no longer just doing some swimming and some running. We are training for swimrun.

That is the wider Envol philosophy too. Swimrun is not a side category for us. It is part of the center of gravity.

If this way of thinking resonates, Envol has several ways to train with us. My group is one option, alongside Envol’s Startline Ready race programs and Basic Membership for athletes who want structure and community even if they do not yet have a specific race on the horizon.

The common thread is structure, consistency, and community. Not more training for the sake of more training, but better training for the sport as it actually happens.

The blueprint is the map. Consistency is the compass.