HAPPY 2019

Hope you all are enjoying the holidays, and getting ready to usher in the New Year.  It has been good to see a lot of you make it in to workout over the last week and we hope to see more of you this week before you head back to school.  One of the big things we have been working on over the last week is that crossover turn from back to breast for your IM.  I’ve been ask if you have to use it and the answer to that is YOU need to figure out the turn first  and then decide if it is something that would help YOU.  Our job is to bring these things to you and from that point we can work out a plan

The other day as I walked through the men’s room I ease dropped on a conversation where one of our 12 year old made the comment that workout was not that hard.  One of our seniors was explaining that he was exhausted 💤 and you would be if you did it correctly.  The whole goal of the workout was to get in a lot of fast racing and that meant all out.  Sometimes we listen to the messenger really well, but we fail to listen to the MESSAGE.  Any thoughts let me know!

I just finished reading an article that I would like to share with you that seems appropriate 50 years later. In 1968 Apollo 8 was just finishing an orbit around the 🌙 during this week.   Upon coming out out of the dark side and seeing the “earth rise”, author Robert Kurson gave this account of the astronauts view.

“

To Anders, 🌏 Earth appears as a Christmas tree ornament, hung radiant blue and swirling white in an endless black night. From here, it was no longer to pick our countries or even continents, all a person could see was earth, and it occurred to Anders, in this last week of 1968, this terrible year for America and the world, that once you couldn’t see boundaries, you started to see something different.  You saw how small the planet is, how close all of us are to one another, how the only thing any one of us really has, in an empty universe, is each other.  As Apollo 8  and around the limb of the moon🌙  and readied to reconnect with home, it seemed to Anders so strange—the astronauts had come all this way to discover the moon, and yet here they had discovered earth🌏 .”

APOLLO 8  December 21,1968 to December 27, 1968

Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, William Anders 

Happy 2019

CHRISTMAS MESSAGE

Thank you for all there generosity that you all showed with the gift certificates, cookies, candy and yes the LARGE music box.  The warm cards from some of the kids meant a lot. 
My version of the song

Twelve swimmers kicking
Eleven empty water bottles
Ten bathroom breaks
Nine lane line bruises
Eight sets with Tempo Trainers
Seven Loads of laundry
Six best times
Five HARD SETS.
Four pairs of goggles 
Three sets of kicking
Two hand paddles
One coach on deck




HAVE A GREAT HOLIDAY!  See you Wednesday

SENIOR PREP GROUP AND THEIR TREE

THE CHRISTMAS TREE SET

Today the senior prep group began their holiday training today by building and decorating a tree.  This was meant to be both a physical and mental challenge as we start off the next phase of our season.  All of you responded to this set with great enthusiasm and got through it.  Thank you for all your 😓, your sacrifices, and yes your sweat and 😭 tears.  All of you have and will grow to be great young adults.   Keep up the good work and remember we are setting are standards high and we know each of you have so much more in yourselves.  You just don’t realize it yet, but we will get you there!

THE WALL

What were we trying to accomplish today?  A lot of work with the legs and a lot of fast kicking off the wall.  You all have improved your walls so much over the last three months but we know and believe that you all have so much more to give, you just don’t know it.  We are here to get that out of you!  That little exercise at the end of practice worked on jumping off the wall with some explosive power, getting into that tight streamline, hitting the bottom and using those fast dolphin 🐬 kicks to drive you back to the surface and getting as high as you could before falling back into the pool.

All of this is to try and help you use those walls as an advantage and not an obstacle.  I leave you with this in a short course pool your going to hit the wall just maybe your be lucky 🍀 and make that right turn and surprise yourself

THE TRUTH

I wanted to share with you all something that I read the other day.  The clock is the toughest critic that any swimmer 🏊‍♀️ will ever encounter throughout their career.  Some people read it as simply one ☝️ winner and seven losers.  I pose this question; Why can we not read it as eight winners.  There are more ways one can be a winner besides getting their fingers on the pad first.  So as you read this keep that in mind!

The clock.  Doesn’t lie to me.  It doesn’t tell me I’m first when I’m not, doesn’t say “ Nice Swim” if it wasn’t.  It doesn’t care if I’m shaved.  Or tapered.  Or if I’m in an outside lane.  It is a worthy opponent day in, and day out.  It never lets me win, won’t go easy on me.  The clock doesn’t let me off the hook.  But I will beat it. I haven’t yet.  But I will. See yo tomorrow clock! 

Just a thought!

SPORT FAIR MEET WRAP UP

With this past weekends Sport Fair Meet now ion our rear view mirror, the first part of our journey comes to a conclusion.  This week we will and have been putting in some different sets which have included games and relays.  It is important to understand that we do need to take this time to re-charge both physically and mentally as we enter into the second part of our journey which will take us through the championship meets in March and April.

 

This past weekend we arrived at the pool Thursday afternoon with a lot of energy.  The meet started that evening with our distance swimmers who swam some outstanding swims all posting best times to set the tone for the rest of the team entering Fridays events.  First off let us say that everyone did an outstanding job during warmups, arriving on time, getting our lanes, and going through your meet warmups with no help from your coaches.  This went a long ways in preparing you all to swim as fast as you did.  It kept you relaxed as you went through our plan without us getting on you and (which helps no one) allowing you to take OWNERSHIP of your swimming.

  

Although we had a few DQ’s we ended up protesting a couple, but non the whole I think we had one or two.  A funny story is that I found out a swimmer was DQ from another team which affected one of our swimmers results during final.  I asked that coach this week what happened and I was told it was a false start.  Apparently he tried to protest it by stating another swimmer moved or as in football made an encroachment causing his swimmer to flinch.  Not football! And there is no replay.  That would be a disaster !

 

Your individual races were tremendous, and it was exciting to watch how far you have come since September.  We had a lot of Mako swimmers, returning to finals for that all exciting 2nd race of the day.  A big SHOUT OUT goes out to our 12 and under swimmers who had a very quick turn around before finals.  They were a very tired group, but what we were so proud of was that not once did they complain and they were on their feet supporting all their teammates all through finals

 

Sunday we saw that you were tired but we had that little talk about finding that energy from wherever, not feeling sorry for yourself and to finish the meet with a lot of energy. The result was that all of you responded and found that energy and had some great races.  Throughout the weekend it seemed like a JO or Nasa cut was made overtime we turned around.  Our relays did an excellent job and I believe that all our lead off swimmers who were given the privilege of lead off for an official time responded to the challenge with one even getting a NASA cut.

“Ke Nako”

This past weekend we saw a lot of outstanding races from our Senior prep, Junior Gold and Junior Blue groups.  Some qualifying times were made for the Junior Olympic meet in March.   Medals 🥇 and ribbons 🎀 were won by many swimmers 🏊‍♀️ in the groups, but more importantly a lot of improvements were seen not only in that “ all important time” for that instantaneous feedback but for myself I saw some great turns with improving underwater work off those walls.  We saw a lot of you try some new events which is a very important part of this process “always leave a door open” and we saw a great mental approach to the way you raced.  Overall you all were awesome👏  and now we have one more weekend to get through for the rest of you before the first stage of our season ends.

“Ke Nako”. 

This is the title of a song from the 2010 World Cup 🏟 and the translation to English is simply, “IT’s TIME”. You might want to look it up and maybe listen to it before this weekend.  Time for what; I guess if you need to ask we may be in a little trouble right now.  On September 10 you all began by jumping in the pool and starting your journey down what at times seems like an endless journey down a black line on the bottom of the pool, with the never ending smell of chlorine everywhere, body, hair,  clothes, towels just about anything you touch and through it all you have persevered and made great strides.

It’s time for the fun part about this sport, and simply put “it’s time to race”.  Pretty simple!  You have put in a lot of hard over the last 14 weeks, awesome test sets, some great walls and underwater work, a lot of improvements in our stroke work and racing techniques.  All of this in preparation if you may for our mid term exam to see where we are at as we march towards championship season in March.

As you enter this weekends meet understand this little thing that we your coaches know as fact; You are tougher and stronger, both physically and mentally than YOU think you are.  Believe in all the hard work that you have put into this and don’t let that little thing between your ears 👂 get in the way.  Instead of 🤔 thinking about all the negatives and about things that might go wrong, focus on the positives.  Picture that perfect race that is just sitting there waiting to be grabby, be the one who takes it.  Think thoughts that will put you in a position to be successful.  Let’s not do things that will make us slower and that includes thinking about your competition because chances are they are not wasting energy on you.  There may be things that happen over the weekend that will try and derail you, it happens to everyone not just you, but it’s about how you react at that moment that will dictate your overall success, and remember you are tougher mentally than you think.  One piece of advice if you find yourself a little anxious 😟 or stress, take a breather.  Get up and take a walk around the facility, get some fresh air and clear your mind.

Above all enjoy the moment, have fun and do what you do best, RACE!!!