Keep Your Eye on Micha Burden

Micha Burden made it to the FINA World Open-Water Swimming Championships in Seville, Spain this May, although she fell short of qualifying for the U.S. Olympic team. With both her and competitor Kirsten Groome finishing after the top 10 in Spain, there remained one spot open for an American woman in this first-ever Olympic marathon swim event. Chloe Sutton claimed that spot after a 10K test event, winning it with a time of 2:00:48.5. She'll be competing in Beijing against 24 other women for the gold. The full interview with Micha can be found at www.competitorradio.com. Bob Babbitt: Micha, you've been a pool swimmer for a long time, and I know you raced at Cal… tell us a little bit about the difference between racing in the open water and racing in the pool.

Micha Burden: I think the biggest thing about open-water swimming is how strategic it is; in a pool race you can really concentrate on your own race, and you can use the competitors in the next lane if you want to, but you can also sort of put your blinders up and pay no attention to them. Some people in the pool will go out really fast and try to hold that pace, while other people will go out slow and try to negative split on the mile or the 800. In open water you have to be very aware of the competitors around you – it's kind of like in cycling when all the cyclists are in the peloton and they're drafting off of each other and they're using each other to save their own energy. In open water you have a lot of factors, especially if it is in the ocean and you have currents or a little bit of chop, you always have to be aware of what's going on.

Paul Huddle: How hard is swimming in a group? Because when you're head-high in the water and you're in a group however big it is, even as few as three, if you're towards the back you don't necessarily know what's going on in front, right?

MB: Yeah it can get really difficult to gauge where you're at, and something I've learned doing this sport is that you have to stick to your own race plan. You really have to be patient and be aware what's going on; things change really fast. You can be at the back of the pack but then all of a sudden you find yourself in the middle, and you can see the lead swimmers so you know you're still in the race. When I first started doing open water there were a lot of times where I'd be in the back of the pack but wouldn't see the lead people take off so I'd think I was in a great position… but then I'd look up and find that I was no longer in the pack and the race would be kind of over at that point. You have to learn from the races and get as much experience as you can, and that helps when you get into a pressure situation like that to keep a calm head.

BB: A lot of folks in the past, before this became an Olympic sport, when athletes finished college in swimming it's not like there was a professional tour, so it's like "where do I go now"… we're talking hundredths of seconds that separate people from making an Olympic team or not making an Olympic team in the pool… when you finished college, did you know that you could get into the Olympics, or was there a gap there?

MB: There was a definite gap. When I graduated from college I retired from swimming, I traveled through Southeast Asia for four months, I had no plans to get back in the water. I've always wanted to be a professional athlete but I wasn't quite good enough to keep swimming after college, so I just didn't see that as a feasible goal. I went back to school and I was taking prerequisites to go to nursing school, and I was swimming once or twice a week with a master's team; and one of the guys I swam with told me about open water. I'm actually from Anchorage, Alaska so in high school I had no open-water experience at all.

BB: Did you do much open water when you got to California?

MB: I did, I actually became a lifeguard my first summer in California with the city of Huntington Beach… I was terrified of the ocean to be quite honest, but all my friends were lifeguards and I was down here to swim, so every day I played in the ocean. Going through the training was obviously a big learning experience for me and I just loved it from the beginning – I got really involved in doing lifeguard competitions, I did all the local ocean swims: the Huntington Beach Pier Swim, the Newport Pier-to-Pier, Gatorman, Seal Beach Roughwater… and I just loved it. When I started swimming again I was a little naïve about what open water really was, I thought it'd be more ocean swimming and dealing with the surf, running in and out of the water. I really liked that aspect of the ocean races that I did previously, but in the 10K you start in the water, and now that it's an Olympic event they're trying to push it more towards rowing basins and lakes, so you don't really have as many elements as you would have in the ocean.

PH: So when you first got to Huntington you were terrified of swimming in the ocean! But you wouldn't think a collegiate swimmer would be afraid of anything having to do with the water. Talk a little bit about the difference between good pool swimming and being a good swimmer in open water.

MB: When I first started swimming in the ocean I was scared of the surf. You're not as in control in the ocean as you are in a pool, you can't stand on the bottom or get to the wall really fast if you need to, so there's a lot of uncertainty swimming in the ocean. I don't really know what makes a good ocean swimmer compared to a pool swimmer; I think it's confidence and being comfortable in the water. A good stroke has a lot to do with it, and if somebody has really perfect technique in the pool it might not necessarily translate into the ocean – if their technique gets a little messed up and tweaked and they can't adjust with the changing conditions, it can affect their speed.

PH: How long did it take before you felt confident?

MB: (laughing) It didn't take that long… okay obviously I shouldn't have said I was terrified because I'm a lifeguard and I'm supposed to be very confident. I mean, I was already very confident with my swimming abilities, it was just a matter of getting comfortable in the ocean. I did a lot of lifeguard competitions and I loved them, I got to travel to Australia and Italy for those competitions. With every race you do in the ocean – it's similar to in the pool, you really have to learn from your mistakes and learn what works best for you. With the 10K, I took two years off before I started swimming again, and not only did I have to get back into shape but I wasn't a distance swimmer in college so I had to become one. I had to learn how to race a completely new event, so I had a lot to learn in a really short period of time. I had to be very open and try not to make the same mistakes twice.

BB: These are mass-start deep water swims. So do they seed you? How do they set the starts? And how many people?

MB: It depends on the race. For the open-water trials I think there were 24 girls, and they had one rope tied to a dock and the other end tied to a buoy. Everybody has one hand on the rope, and you basically swim out there and try to get to what you think is a good position. Sometimes there's obviously a better position, and everybody crowds to one side or the middle and it can get kind of rough at the start to try to maintain your position.

BB: You mean hand-to-hand combat basically?

MB: Yeah… it can definitely get a little rough out there, that's not something I was necessarily prepared for but I guess, as with anything, you just have to learn to deal with it.

PH: Everybody's like, "open water swimming, that's no big deal, and 10K? That's 27 minutes at the Olympics for the guys who run that!" How long does it really take for the best swimmers in the world to swim 10K in open water?

MB: Well it depends where you are, but it usually takes about two hours.

PH: Wow, so do you have aid stations? What do you do for nutrition? Do they just throw it at your mouth, like at Seaworld?

MB: Actually they have feed-boats, usually one or two, on a pontoon boat.

BB: You don't want to stop though, how do you do that?

MB: Everybody stops, because you do need to get some calories and some liquid in your body. It's really hard to maintain that pace for two hours! A lot of people will put gel packs in their swimsuits, and they actually make these little contraptions with a stick and a cup – basically they lower it down to you and you just swim by and grab the cup, and they usually mix a gel pack with a little bit of Gatorade in it and you just take the shot really fast and keep swimming. I think in America, since we don't have that much experience, the first couple of races people wouldn't stop at the feeding stations so it was a risk if you stopped because you might lose the pack. But in the international races everybody knows they need to stop so everybody stops, and if you don't stop and try to break away you're probably going to run out of gas and the pack is going to eat you up.

PH: Do you guys have specific feed zones at specific places, or is it based on time or based on distance as to where those feed zones are?

MB: Most of the races are a 2.5K loop that you swim around four times, so they'll have one or two boats stationed and before the race even starts you know where they are. They just stay there, they're anchored, and you swim by them. So you know in advance where you're going to stop, when you're going to stop – and it's up to your own strategy whether you're going to take a gel pack in between.

PH: Is there a team dynamic here? In cycling you talk about drafting and teams working together, is there any of that going on in your sport or do you pretty much fend for yourselves?

MB: From my experience so far we haven't really done that, and I don't know if that's something we can talk about and work towards; it gets a little confusing because you never really know what's going to happen in open water, and it's really challenging. If you can just imagine 100 people starting an open-water race at the same time, and all trying to get around one buoy… it's very aggressive.

BB: If I was designing it, I'd put that first buoy like 50 feet out, so everybody piles around and kills each other. It'd be great for TV. Do they have any standards; do they usually put that first buoy 100 yards, 200 yards out?

MB: I don't even know if there are rules for that! It depends on the course, I do know that in Spain we dive off a platform, and I'd think they usually set it up so you go straight down the course and don't have a buoy for 1,000 meters… but I could be wrong.

BB: Well that's got to be a real fight for that, with 100 women of that level, you guys are going to be going after it!

MB: It's definitely one of the most aggressive races. I was in Brazil in January, and I think in the lead pack there was maybe 16 or 20 girls, and it was very rough. I actually got a broken rib, so I can only imagine what it's going to be like in the Olympics. My coach always makes fun of me that I'm not a very aggressive person, and I couldn't hurt anybody. And actually before Brazil I said that I was going to go in there and throw some elbows, but ironically somebody threw an elbow at me and took me out.

BB: So Micha, give us an idea – per 100 meters or per 100 yards, what are you guys averaging for 10K?

MB: Well one of the things about the 10K is that it's really all determined by the lead pack. If nobody takes it out strong then everybody's just going to go really slow for pretty much nine thousand meters – and then everybody sprints for the last bit.

BB: Are you training as much now as you were when you were a pool swimmer?

MB: I'm definitely training more. I swam at Berkeley with Teri McKeever, and I was a mid-distance so I didn't really do hardcore distance training. Now I'm swimming with the Matadors, which has a history of being a very intense distance program, so that took me a long time to get used to because I'd never swum yardage like that. Right now we average about 8,600 meters of practice – sometimes more, sometimes less. I can't really tell you exactly what I hold, I'm somewhat inconsistent. Some days I'll hold 1:05 and other days I can't even hold 1:15 for 100 meters.

PH: What you qualified with, that's 12 minutes for 1,000… so anybody who wants to do that, knock it out and then go ahead and repeat that another ten times and you're good. But you don't have a wall every 25 or 50 to push off, just do it in open water. Now, evidently from the race where you qualified, you had a little bit of a collision. I guess you had a final turn into the home stretch and you and Chloe Sutton were going at it, and you kind of delivered the shiver and took her down.

MB: That's completely blown out of proportion! If you watch any international race, people are clobbering each other the whole time. On the final stretch we turned a buoy, and Chloe and I were right next to each other and she cut the buoy – but I had my head down so I went too far in, and I ran into her on accident. We kind of got tangled up, so there was a little confusion, but it lasted maybe three seconds! It wasn't that big of a deal, but I think because it was the only thing that happened the entire race I think it was the excitement, just to make it more dramatic.

PH: What's the biggest fish you've ever seen while swimming and where?

MB: (laughing) I close my eyes sometimes if there's something swimming underneath me!
I'm such a weenie, when I'm swimming by myself in the ocean I get scared so easily, and it's all imaginary. I imagine sharks swimming under me or giant whales… and it's pretty ridiculous.