The secret to success in the 400m IM — and what makes Summer ...

The 400m individual medley is one of the toughest events in swimming.

The event takes about four and a half minutes for the fastest women and a little over four minutes for the speediest men. Athletes need to master all four of swimming’s strokes — and the tricky transitions required to move between them.

It’s a fascinating event to watch as competitors have different strengths, which can result in frequent lead changes (unless, of course, you’re watching Summer McIntosh who can lead the race from the buzzer).

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Few have perfected the art of the 400m IM like McIntosh, who has twice lowered the world record in the event and, on Monday, raced to Olympic gold at the Paris La Défense Arena.

So how exactly does the IM work and what makes McIntosh so successful?

What is the IM?

The Individual Medley combines swimming’s four styles within a single race in a specific order: athletes start with butterfly, then progress to backstroke and breaststroke before finishing with freestyle. Each distance makes up a quarter of the race and swimmers transition between strokes when they touch the wall — there’s no switching partway across the pool.

At the Olympics, where swimmers compete in a 50m pool, the IM is contested in the 200m and 400m distances. There are also medals up for grabs in the men’s, women’s and mixed 4x100m medley.

“It’s kind of a unique one,” McIntosh’s coach, Brent Arckey, says of the IM. “It runs all the disciplines — from speed to endurance to all four strokes and then being able to transition to them. And (McIntosh) is just excellent at all of that stuff. It’s right in her wheelhouse. It’s not too often that people get to do what they’re great at and what they enjoy and I feel like this is an event that she gets to do that.”

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In swimming circles, the IM is known as a particularly brutal event.

“That race is very taxing, emotionally and physically, because after the race is just like, ‘Oh my gosh, everything hurts,’ ” American Katie Grimes told USA Today ahead of racing in Paris, where she finished where she finished second, more than five seconds behind McIntosh.

“You don’t want to move. You don’t want to talk. It’s just terrible.”

McIntosh will also compete in the 200m IM and 4x100m medley relay later this week (confusingly, the order of the swim styles is different for the relay; the first leg is backstroke followed by breaststroke, butterfly and freestyle. This is done to allow for each relay changeover to be a dive).

How do transitions work?

Swimmers have to finish the leg of each stroke as if the race were ending before kicking off for the next stroke. That means touching the wall with both hands simultaneously at, above, or below the water surface to conclude the butterfly and breaststroke legs. To finish backstroke, swimmers must touch the wall while on their backs. In elite competition, judges on the pool deck watch to ensure swimmers touch the wall appropriately.

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There are a variety of different techniques for transitioning between strokes and what works for one swimmer may not work for another. Like all other aspects of swimming, the technique is practiced repeatedly.

Canada’s Summer McIntosh touches the wall to in the final of the women’s 400m individual medley swimming event during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at the Paris La Defense Arena in Nanterre, west of Paris, on July 29, 2024. Photo by OLI SCARFF /AFPHow do you pace it?

Whatever you do, don’t start too fast. That’s the key piece of advice former 400m IM world record holder Gary Hall Sr. gives to athletes. In a video shared through his YouTube video The Race Club in 2022, Hall recounts a difficult 400m IM he swam at the 1972 Olympics in Munich when he went into the race feeling like he had something to prove and swam the first 200m “like a scared rabbit.” By the time he started breaststroke, his legs felt like rubber and, despite his early lead, he faded to fifth.

“You really have to learn how to control the 400m IM,” Hall said. “It doesn’t take much. It takes you just a little bit of surge, a little bit of excitement, a little bit too much aggression at the wrong time and all of a sudden you pay a big price for that.”

In better paced races, Hall said he would typically do the first 50m of backstroke slower than his second to give himself a chance to breathe and recover after the butterfly leg. In both of her world records and in her gold-medal swim, McIntosh similarly logged slower times in the first 50m of her backstroke than the second.

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Wait, you have to swim it twice?

In major events such as the Olympics it is common for 400m IM preliminaries to be held in the morning followed by finals in the evening. Such was the case in Paris Monday.

McIntosh is no stranger to racing one or more times in a day and has strategies to maximize her recovery including eating well, getting a post-race massage and taking an afternoon nap.

“Mental (recovery) almost tops physical in some ways. It’s super, super important because the body does what the mind believes for sure,” she told Postmedia at the beginning of these Games.

Summer McIntosh celebrates after winning the women’s 400-meter individual medley final at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Monday, July 29, 2024. Photo by Martin Meissner /THE ASSOCIATED PRESSWhat are McIntosh’s strengths?

Like most elite multi-stroke swimmers, freestyle is a strength for McIntosh and she has world champion medals in freestyle, butterfly and IM.

She’s terrific at the middle distances, an excellence that was on display when she captured Olympic silver in the 400m free.

Earlier in the year, McIntosh shocked many swimming observers when she became the first swimmer in 13 years to beat American superstar Katie Ledecky in the 800m freestyle, which is the second-longest of the pool events that tap out at 1,500m. But you won’t see McIntosh and Ledecky going head-to-head in the 800 in Paris; McIntosh passed on the longer event because of conflicts with her middle-distance races.

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What about her weaknesses?

Even though it hasn’t been a liability for her, the perfectionist side of McIntosh is such that she’s fixated on identifying flaws — then attacking them. Following the Canadian Olympic Trials in May after she lowered the 400 IM world record for a second time, she said she was still focused on fine-tuning her form in the breaststroke.

“I’m still working on it. I don’t think my work on my breaststroke will ever be over because It’s definitely my weakest stroke by far,” McIntosh told Postmedia at the time. “It’s always good to see the work come into fruition. I’ve worked on it since (I was) 12, but especially I’ve worked on my breaststroke the past few months.”

Speaking with swimming news organization SwimSwam, McIntosh said she had specifically been working on maintaining breaststroke technique under fatigue. “It’s something you can’t really simulate unless you’re super tired, because 100 breaststroke in the 400 IM is one of the hardest parts of it,” she said. “So learning how to manage that and not breaking down my stroke is something that definitely has been a focus.”

The world record of four minutes, 24.38 seconds that McIntosh set at May’s trials was 1.49 seconds faster than the record she set a year earlier. That gain came from lowering her breaststroke leg by 1.79 seconds without losing too much time on the other legs.

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