A serious club swimmer may train many hours a week, year round, across two sessions a day in season. That volume changes the shape of every question on this site, and it changes it in a direction that is mostly the opposite of what people assume.
The dominant exposure is indoor and it is not the sun
A high volume swimmer's environmental exposure is overwhelmingly indoor pool hall air and treated water. Hours of it, repeatedly, from an early age. The sun question, for the training weeks, does not arise at all, as covered in indoor pools and ultraviolet.
What does arise:
- Pool hall air. A swimmer doing early morning and evening sessions is breathing that air at a high respiratory rate for many hours a week. This is the environmental exposure that actually matters for this group and it is covered in indoor pool air and ventilation.
- Repeated immersion. Skin and hair in treated water constantly, which is ordinary everyday care and covered in skin after chlorine and hair and swim caps.
- Eyes. Goggles worn for hours daily, in treated water, with fit and seal issues that recreational swimmers never encounter. See eyes, goggles and glare.
- Time indoors generally, which is a sunlight exposure question in the other direction and is discussed in NICE NG34, sunlight exposure: risks and benefits.
The competitive swimmer's environmental problem is not the sun. It is the air, and it lasts for years.
Gala days and outdoor competition, which are the exposure
Then there are the days that invert it entirely: outdoor galas, open water events, warm weather training camps and open air training. These are:
- Full days, sometimes multiple consecutive days.
- Spent almost entirely in swimwear.
- Outdoors, with poolside seating and marshalling areas that are rarely shaded.
- Focused on racing, so nobody is thinking about anything else.
- Structured around waiting: a swimmer at a gala spends most of the day waiting, not swimming.
That combination produces the most significant single exposure days in a competitive swimmer's year, and they arrive without any of the planning that a family beach holiday would get.
The specific place where this goes wrong is the marshalling and waiting area, where swimmers sit in swimwear for long periods between events. Whether it is shaded is a venue decision made by the event organiser and the facility, and asking about it in advance is a reasonable thing for a team manager to do.
The practical constraints competitive swimmers actually have
Advice written for recreational swimmers frequently ignores what racing requires. Worth naming:
| Constraint | Consequence |
|---|---|
| Skin must be as smooth as possible for racing | Swimmers are reluctant to apply anything before an event |
| Racing suits are difficult and time consuming to put on | Product on skin makes it worse, so it is avoided |
| Warm up, marshalling and racing run to a fixed schedule | Reapplication has to fit the schedule, not the other way round |
| Caps and goggles are put on and taken off repeatedly | Face, ears and the parting of the hair are disturbed continually |
| Team areas are wherever the venue put them | The swimmer cannot choose to sit in shade if there is none |
| Focus is on the race | Nobody wants to be told about sunscreen forty minutes before a final |
The workable answer is to put the effort into the parts of the day that are not immediately before an event: the morning before warm up, the long gaps between events, and the end of the session. And to put the effort into shade, clothing and team area position, which require nothing of the swimmer at the wrong moment.
What is the priority for a competitive swimmer?
Air quality and the hours accumulated in it. Skin and hair care as ordinary everyday care. Goggle fit and eye comfort. Getting warm after early sessions. Sun protection is not on the list.
For a club, the indoor question worth raising with the facility is ventilation, particularly for squads training at the times when combined chlorine is highest.
Gala days, open water events and training camps. Full days, swimwear, waiting, no shade, and a focus on racing.
The levers are the team area position, shade, clothing between events, drinking water and scheduling reapplication into the gaps rather than before events. See an outdoor group session plan.
Young athletes
Most competitive swimming is done by children and teenagers, which means the decisions above are mostly made by team managers, coaches and parents rather than by the athletes. A junior swimmer at an outdoor gala will not manage their own sun protection across a nine hour day and should not be expected to. It is a team management task, and it is one that fits naturally into the same structure as feeding and hydrating a squad through a long day.
Swimmers get ear problems, eye irritation and skin complaints, and there is a great deal of informal advice circulating in swimming communities about all three. We are not adding to it. Anything painful, persistent, discharging or affecting hearing or vision needs a pharmacist, a GP or, for anything urgent, NHS 111. Coaches should not be dispensing remedies and clubs should not have a house treatment.
Sun protection across a gala day
An adult athlete owns their own, within the schedule. A junior athlete owns very little and should not be expected to manage a nine hour day alone.
The team manager and coach own the day: where the team sits, whether that is shaded, drinking water, scheduled reapplication in the gaps between events, a clothing expectation between races, and asking the event organiser about shade in advance. Own their own exposure, which is longer than any swimmer's.
The venue and event organiser own whether the marshalling area, team areas and spectator areas are shaded, and whether drinking water is available. On a hot day at an outdoor gala that is the single biggest determinant of everybody's exposure.
Where a duty attachesSun protection guidance from the NHS, Cancer Research UK, sun, UV and cancer and NICE NG34, sunlight exposure: risks and benefits. Pool hall air and water sit with the operator under Health and Safety Executive, HSG179 Health and safety in swimming pools. Club duties under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 with guidance from Swim England.
Warm weather training camps
The training camp deserves separate mention because it inverts everything about a competitive swimmer's normal environment in one week. A squad that trains indoors all year, in Britain, arrives somewhere with a substantially higher ultraviolet index, trains in an outdoor pool, spends the gaps between sessions outdoors, and does this for seven consecutive days.
Several features make it the highest risk week in the year:
- Two or three sessions a day, all outdoors, with long gaps spent outside.
- Skin that has had no gradual exposure, arriving straight from a British winter or spring.
- An index higher than anything the group is used to reading.
- Accommodation and social time also outdoors.
- Everybody focused on the training block.
- Staff who are outdoors longer than the athletes, for the whole week.
The planning that helps is the same as any outdoor session plan, applied at the scale of a week: shade at the poolside and at the accommodation, session timing where the pool booking allows, scheduled reapplication, drinking water, a clothing expectation between sessions, and an explicit briefing on the first day rather than an assumption that a group of teenagers will manage it. See an outdoor group session plan.
The shape of a competitive swimmer's year
Set out plainly, the year looks like this: forty odd weeks of indoor training where the environmental question is air and water and there is no sun question at all, and a handful of days and one or two weeks where the sun question is more intense than almost any other group experiences. Planning that reflects that shape works. Planning that treats every week the same does not, in either direction.
Summary
For most of the year a competitive swimmer's environmental question is air, not sun, and it is a question for the facility. For a handful of days a year it inverts completely, and those days are long, exposed, unshaded and entirely focused on something else. Plan the gala day like a day out, because that is what it is, and put the effort into shade, team area position and the gaps between events rather than into instructing a swimmer forty minutes before a final.