Now that we have been in the water for four weeks it’s time to take a step back and see if we are on the same road for this journey. We spent the first four weeks working on drills and techniques in all aspects of our swimming and as we move into the next part of our season, the training will increase for our Senior Prep group, and will increase slightly for the Gold and Blue groups. The drills and technique work will continue but will be included more into the training sets. Our performance at the first meet last weekend was outstanding, and I believe that we accomplished a lot of good things that we can build on throughout this journey. As we talked about prior to the meet I wanted our focus to be not on our times but on the things that we had been working on in practice such as streamlines, our dolphin kicks off the walls, breathing patterns, and the way we executed our races especially in our longer events. As we talked about in the weeks leading up to the meet our focus was to be on execution and not times, a hard thing to do in this sport for sure but still a very important part of the sport that YOU have to learn. Don’t forget about our talk on the stopwatch and the fact that as you improve and your times get closer to the 00.00.00 the less improvement you will see and this is the hardest part of any athlete’s journey especially those who’s results rely on the watch! The times will be there during our championship run during this journey.
As we continue on this journey there will be bumps in the road as there are in the course of ones life, but how you respond to those bumps often determine your success in life. In swimming the journey is littered with all kinds of speed bumps such as, but not limited to missing a workout, skipping a set, not drinking plenty of water, not eating properly, poor time management, falling behind in school, and one of the big ones which is not approaching practice in the right frame of mind.
Let’s take that last one and look further. Are you the swimmer who shows up with a purpose, or the one who shows up with a lot of outside distractions? We are going to pick on the Saturday Morning group for a little bit here. Instead of arriving and throwing your bags on the ground and laying down with your phones (a material thing that will be there at the conclusion of practice), maybe a better use of time would be to get ready and do some light stretching on the mats. The next thing any athlete needs to ask is “Am I doing things CORRECTLY, or just doing them?” As a swimmer think about it, during a set are you being aggressive on all your walls or just doing a turn. Are you breathing in and off the walls because to do it correctly takes more effort and is harder? Are you swimming breast stroke without shooting forward with your head and upper body because it’s just takes to much effort and just too hard (Jamie)? A lot of times athletes will make excuses or blame anyone for a poor performance when all the time THE ANSWER IS RIGHT THERE STARING AT THEM IN THE MIRROR! Not a sermon, just a thought.
As for time management, as we discussed I often hear that swimming takes up too much of my time, but it really doesn’t and as I pointed out on DAY 1, the week has 168 hours in it and (using the Senior Prep as the test case, Gold and /Blue groups are less) you spend a TOTAL OF 7.5 HOURS at the pool during a normal week of training. That leaves 160.5 hours of a week, which includes about 45 hours for all school work, and 63 hours for sleep (average 9). For you math wizards that a total of 115.5 hours that are accounted for leaving a whopping 52.5 (more than a work week) of free time for you to manage in a productive way. Learn to do it now as it will set you up perfectly later in life, and remember this fact ALL ATHLETES make sacrifices early in life but all the sacrifices and the lessons learned as an athlete help later in life. ENJOY THE JOURNEY!
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