I'm Letting ChatGPT Coach My Swimming This Winter

I've been swimming on and off since I was eight-ish. In my grown-up life, I’ve worked with several coaches starting during my triathlon days. Because of all the knowledge I have gained from coaches and my own research, I've decided to try something different this winter: I'm letting ChatGPT take over my training plan.

I don't have a big race coming up and I like to take a step back in the winter so this seems like a good time to experiment. My goals are relatively simple: maintain my swimming fitness, gain strength, stay healthy, and be ready to build into next year's open-water season.

This isn’t giving Chat a blank slate and saying “Coach me!”; I've spent time uploading information about my swimming, including the past 12+ months of TrainingPeaks data, Garmin metrics, technique issues, and the practical realities of fitting workouts around work and family. In theory, it should have enough information to create a pretty individualized swim training plan, but whether it can actually use that information effectively is what I want to play with.

I'm curious about whether AI can provide the things I need from a coach: purposeful, tailored workouts, thoughtful adjustments based on how I'm feeling, accountability, and the convenience of not having to plan everything myself. I also want to see whether it can recognize patterns in my training that I might otherwise miss. I think Chat might be better able to scrub more data than a human, but I don't trust it to know when its recommendations are wrong. And will that level of quality control required on my end be too much of a time suck?

I'll be documenting the experiment over the next few months, including the workouts, what seems to be working, and what isn't. I'm not trying to prove that AI is better than a human coach (I doubt it is and am in conversations with coaches for next year), but am curious if it might be a useful alternative for an experienced athlete who already has a pretty good understanding of training. We shall see.