Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving, with a little break from the pool. It was good 😊to see a lot of you make the effort to attend practice on Saturday afternoon. We had a great 2 hours, tremendous effort by everyone.
WEEK AHEAD
This will be a busy meet for us with all practices at the normal time, and the Mako Winter Invitational this weekend.
WARM UP TIMES FOR BOTH DAYS:
11-12 year olds 7:30
10 and Under's 11:00
13 and over's 2:40
Remember your warm ups and warm down's. We may have to adjust our meet warm up for senior prep and junior gold if it is crowded. Don't forget that 2nd warm up about 20 minutes before you swim. Very Short 3x50's (1smooth, 2 easy fast, 3 fast easy) and 4-6 25's all out. This should all be free, we are just trying to get the heart rate up. When you get out, wrap up stay warm, little drink and let's go!
HIGH SCHOOL SWIMMERS
Good luck to the High School swimmers in Our Senior Prep group, as they start their season this Friday Night. Katelyn Schafer Robinson, Madeline Ice Marshall, Allyson Lerke Centreville, Elizabeth Williams Oakton, Alexandra Martschenko South Lakes, Cara Patrick Centreville
Have a great time as all of you enter your first dual meet of the season. There is a lot of stuff that revolves around High School Swimming and sometimes swimmers let that get in the way of their training that they have been doing since September. Sometimes swimmers will allow all of these distractions to sabotage the good work that they have been doing. We all would love to have best times every time we go into the pool, but that is not reality. These are dual meets (like little quizzes) and your only job is to race and BEAT people. Your goal should be to have that best ⏱ at Your District Championships, and if you make it to Regions and on to states. Don't get wrapped up in the times early in the season, instead focus on the places for the points.
One of the big ways to sabotage your swimming is skipping that Saturday training session because of a late meet and a team dinner afterwards. Due yourself a favor and get to the pool, and if your honest with yourself you will probably feel a lot better after practice and you may not be as sore and tight all weekend. The other big mistake is missing practice Friday morning because your going to rest for a DUAL MEET (REALLY that's just an excuse not to get up)later that night. It's easy to find and excuse not to do something, instead focus on something that may help you swim better, GET TO PRACTICE. Swim tired so that when you are rested at Districts, and you are on edge and hungry to do something, you may have that great race your looking for. The one last area is the Thursday Night Dinner and I can tell you from experience that my daughters never missed a Thursday afternoon practice and always got to the dinner (maybe a little late). They understood the bigger picture. BE SMART WITH YOUR CHOICES that you make the next few months.
THIS WEEK PRACTICE
This week we will be doing a lot of IM work early in the week and a lot of our focus will be our dolphin kicks off our walls. Our goal is always first get to the flags, from there we move to the 10 m mark so let's stay focus on our work around the walls this week. I want to see a big difference at the meets the next two weeks. Friday the afternoon groups will not need their fins as the pool will be set up for the meet.
"The Tool Box"
What is in your tool box? You may be thinking🤔 He's lost it now, he is talking about tools. But no you all have not made me crazy Yet, but what I want you to think about is, how you show up at practice and with what? Yes suits, goggles, caps and all that is fine and pretty easy, but what I am talking about are turns, streamlines, starts, finishes, underwater dolphins and good techniques. You need to acquire all of these and put them into your tool bag so that you can pull them out when you need them. Just showing up at practice and jumping in the pool does not accomplish this, and I was reminded of this working with the Seniors this past weekend. We were going through the sets of fast 25's of swim and kick. At the start I informed them that I would keep track of where they were in the set and that there whole focus was to maintain ALL OUT speed. On two occasions a couple of them looked up and asked; How many more? They were not paying attention to the goal of the set, and sarcastically my only response was, that is why you can't finish a race. Mean maybe, honest absolutely and sometimes that may be what you need to hear like it or not.
What I am trying to get at is that it is just important to pay attention to the focus of the set and add that tool to your bag. It doesn't get into the bag unless you work at it constantly not just when you want to or its uncomfortable. At some point you will be uncomfortable in your race and you better have that good turn with fast dolphins, because I promise you your competition will.
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