MEET CHECK LIST

So our first meet of our journey this season has arrived, AKUMA MATATA.   No problems, no worries this weekend.  We understand that all swimmers are looking for a best time, a lofty goal indeed.  Let’ s look at that a little closer.  Depending on your age and the level you are at, the last Big meet you were in, we may need to manage our expectations a bit.  

For a lot of our 12 and under’s those fast swim seem like they will never end, like the energizer  bunny🐰 they just keep coming. For the  Senior Prep group we know what’s around the corner just waiting for us.  All I am saying is that remember the “process” that is the 🔐 key to unlocking those goals and dreams.

The things I will be watching for at this meet are 

1. How you approach and handle warmup and warm down
2. How you handle that second warmup
3. How well you keep warm waiting for your race
4. Do you know your events, or do you have to ask
5. Can you find your name, heat and lane on meet sheet, do you know your name (you’d be surprised kids who can’t find their name
6. How are your underwater dolphins off the walls
7. How is your breathing in and off your turns
8. Are you aggressive into your turns

These are the things that we have worked on for the first few weeks, and are the areas that will help you get to your goal when crunch time is staring you in the face.  Here are some reactions that you may face this weekend or for that matter at any swim meet or just everyday events.

Let’s start with the 🐘 elephant in the room, the one reaction no one likes to talk about and that is DISAPPOINTMENT.  Your fingers hit that touch pad and you look up and realize that all your effort was wasted and immediately you may feel that you failed and let everyone down.  I would say to you that the only way you fail is if you don’t get back up and get right back to it. Period

Along that thought is the ANNOYED  😑 reaction and I see this a lot.  This is where you may have won the race or heat but did not get that goal or best time.  Or maybe you get that goal time but don’ t win the race or heat.  In this situation I would say to you take the victory no matter how small it is and move on.  The one constant in this sport is the longer you get to do it the less victories you will experience, and again enjoy the process of the sport.  

Staying in the same mindset the next reaction is being ANGRY😡. This is the one that bothers me the most as a coach.  It’s the one is that you move past being disappointed and annoyed and become visibly angry and may say something or throw your goggles, your cap or maybe even slap the water and get the timers all wet. As a coach my first thought is great how am i going to deal with this and get them to understand that they were wrong and that’s unacceptable.  Those poor goggles and cap or even the officials had nothing to do with your swim.  The only person in that lane between those lane lines was YOU.   Take ownership accept the results, grow as a person and move on.  

The next reaction is the swimmer who may be EMOTIONLESS.  That stone cold 🥶 swimmer look. This is a hard one and can be both funny 😄 and frustrating at the same time.  It’s hard to know we’re this swimmer is mentally, do they just don’t care 🤷🏻‍♂️ or are they ready to explode and are just holding it in.  Again let’s talk and let me know either way and we can deal with it together, learn and move on.

The next reaction that you may encounter is that of EXHAUSTION.  Regardless of your performance and the outcome, you know you left it all in the  pool.  Your tank is empty.  This should be a good feeling regardless of the result.

As you see we are progress through a wide range of emotions that can occur and the next one is that of SHOCK.  You know the one where you have that race that came out of nowhere.  The one that you didn’t think you had in you.  I remember a few years ago when we were in Lancaster and at finals this 12 year old had a breaststroke race that was crazy and she looked back and you could see she was thinking, What just happened?  They use different sayings for this such as being in a zone, or more appropriately for you all being the GOAT for that one race at that moment..

The next emotion that you may experience is just being SATISFIED.   All of us have experienced that feeling of hitting simple little goals and the little  wink 😉 of the eye standing tall with our shoulders up and our chest pumped out a little.  We’re making progress and we know it.  This is an emotion we need to have more often understanding  that even in failure there are victories and we need to look for them and grow with them into better athletes and people.

The last emotion that you may encounter and one of the sweetest is of PURE JOY.  You know that one where you get that cut to the big meet, you qualify for finals, you break that final barrier and get to the  awards 🥇 🥈🥉 podiums and everything has paid off

As an athlete you are going to come face to face with this wide spectrum of emotions and not only in the pool but in your every day lives and I put it to you, the most important thing you can do it keep getting up and move forward both in the pool and your daily lives.  There is always another challenge to be faced and another door  🚪 to be opened.  

WILL YOU BE BRAVE ENOUGH TO OPEN IT AN GO THROUGH,  That’s the challenge in life

LANGUAGE

This past week as we were working through our workouts in the pool in both the Gold and the Prep group I heard this language come out of some of you, WHAT IF I CAN’T?  Think about that for a second.  I read and article recently by Oliver Leroy and so what I will attempt to do here is paraphrase what he was trying to get across for our purposes.  Think about this You are asked by a group of friends to go hang out but immediately you respond by saying, I can’t I have to go to practice.  Instead of looking at this situation in the concept of “I Have To” and understanding  that you don’t have to go to practice and work hard and that this is something that “You Get To Do”, your training will not only get better but you will also have more fun doing it.

 

  Whatever you’re doing daily the language that you use can have a direct impact on your mindset in all your activities.  When you use the phrase I have to it, it has the connotation that a bit of effort will be involved that is going to cause a bit of unpleasantness .“I have to do my homework. I have to go to bed early tonight.  I have to walk the dog.  I have to eat dinner. I have to go to practice. I have to work harder.  I have to swim faster today.  I have to win the race.  I have to be more motivated.  When you have to do something, it’s clear you don’t want to do it.”  Wait before you respond, think about it You like that dog, you love swimming and hanging out with your buddies and listening to me, okay maybe not that last part so much.  The language that you use and I hear often tells a whole different story.  The language that I hear causes unpleasantness and stress that has a direct relationship on your effort and motivation.  It makes things harder then they have to be.  When you have to the "context is clear, you don’t want to do it."

 

Listen we know that swimming and for that matter any sport that you participate in can be hard and get’s harder at every level. There are always things in any sport that athletes  do not want to do day to day. Going to morning practice, giving up a weekend for a long meet, attending finals to support your teammates/friends even though your not swimming.  But oh, how you do love it and always have since you first jumped in as a little girl/boy and had that glorious first swim and smell of chlorine.  Sometimes the way we talk to ourselves we unintentionally make the situation harder than it has to be.

          

 

This language becomes so normal in your every day thought process that it starts to “pepper down into how you talk to yourself in swimming.”   Using the words “I have to” is is being forced to do the thing you love working hard and swimming fast. We've talked before about mental toughness and taking control of the language you use and the way you talk to yourself.  We talked about word replacements when talking to ourselves and I want you to stop and think about the possibilities if instead of saying I have to, you change one simple word and say “I get to.”  That one little word change not only takes away unnecessary stress but also opens doors and creates a lot of opportunities and makes things a little more interesting.  

 

Not everybody is given the opportunity to do something that they love to do, and what I would like to do is challenge you to change your mindset.

• “I get to do this sport"
• “I get to challenge myself daily"
• “I get to see what I am made of"
• “I get to swim fast today"
• I get to bond with my teammates 

 

I get to will remind you that you could be " somewhere else doing something else, but no you Choose to be here in this moment taking things to the limits.”  Saying I get to reminds you how lucky you are to be able to have a pool you can use and participate in a sport you love that allows you to step up and race.  No one is making you do this.  Don’t fight the  voices between your ears, remember who you are, and how strong you are. Take everything you have and do something with it.  It starts with believing in yourself and changing your mindset with the language you use.  

STREAMLINES AND THE 5 SECOND RULE

Now that we have gotten a few workouts in, we hope you have gotten rid of those late summer cobwebs settled into a regular routine that hopefully will take you to the place you envision yourself being in when March and April roll around.  

 The first week was spent on perfecting our techniques in the sport and this will be our focus for a couple of more weeks for all three groups.  The senior prep and junior gold groups will see increasingly harder sets that will focus on building that aerobic base towards the end of this week.  The junior blue group will be working on a lot of technical aspects of their strokes that will help them as they grow in the sport.

  The major areas that we have been working on in our swimming is how to properly leave the wall.  Tight streamlines and what I refer to as our  "5 second rule”.  Let’s look at these two areas a little closer.  The Streamline, I have seen all of you working on this aspect really hard during the first few practices and that is Great. You hear all your coaches emphasize streamlines, but do you really know why it is so important? The streamline off the start and the turn will help propel you through the water with the least amount resistance.  The better the streamline the less resistance and the less resistance means the less energy used during this part of your race.  Let’s focus on not only having our hands on top of each other but wrapping that thumb and squeezing our elbows together with our chins tucked to our chest.  Do not lift that head too soon, we have to work on timing it with our breakout stroke.

 

The “5 second rule” involves our underwater dolphin kick off the starts and turns.  Yes I know that a lot of you can probably go the whole 25 on a good day and if you do that your day will go from good to bad with a disqualification maybe even by mom or dad who may be that stroke and turn.  The rule is you have to be up at the 15 meter mark (those different colored buoys in the lane lines.  Oh and by the way the 15 meter mark are the ones furthest from the wall you are leaving from.). For our purposes we are going to use 5 seconds as a bench mark.  The reasons are that I have timed swimmers in actual races and the average time spent underwater is 2.5 to 4.0 seconds.  But wait you say, that’s not very long at all but ladies and gents that is actually pretty good in race conditions for your ages.  Yes we want to increase our distance underwater but not if we have to sacrifice speed. If you lose all your speed off the start and the turns before that first stroke, What happens?  You have to use a lot more energy to get back up to race speed.  All of this involves muscle memory and that’s why it is important to do it off every wall in your workouts and not only when you feel like doing it.

 

Instead of focusing on how far you can go, let’s look at it from a different angle, How fast and how far can I go in 5 seconds.  Do this and you are on your way to seeing some amazing results.

A LETTER TO MYSELF

Now that we have the first part of your year off to a GREAT start ( school) it’s time to get started in the pool

  All our groups will start off their journeys in the pool on Monday, and unfortunately due to prior commitments I will be absent but we will have guest coaches on hand with the workout plans to help guide you through that first day in the pool.

What I would like to ask from each of you  this weekend is to think about the upcoming season and after giving it some thought, sit down and write a letter (no computer ) to yourself.  Yes that’s right you are actually going to use pen/pencil and paper.  Date it up top and address it to Dear Ben/Mackenzie (use your name). In this letter be yourself and include how you would like this year to go.

Let me go over a few things that you may want to include in this letter.  

GOALS:  Dream big.  Have some realistic goals especially for early in the season to keep your confidence high, and write these goal on an index card and post it on your mirrors so you see them through the year.  Include a plan for how you will reach these goal.  Be specific with details.  Don’t just write “ go to practice and work hard”. Showing up in just the first step, there is so much more involved for the swimmer as well as the coach.  Be specific!

PRACTICE:  What are you going to do during practice to help you reach these goals, and make no mistake about it “ the way you practice is the way you are going to race”.  Think about the things that you do during practice that help you, but also the things that you do ( and we all do them) that sabotage your progress.   Be aware of those speed bumps and how they detour your journey.

MEETS:  Yes let’s not forget the racing part of our journey and be ready to dust off the cobwebs from those “tech” suits when you come calling.  Have an action plan or simply put an action plan for the meet.  Things you may want to include are;  breakfast, meet warmup positive word affirmations, visualization techniques, race strategies for particular events.  Lastly learn to deal with the stresses and anxieties you will face.  Do not try to run away from them as this will create more problems.  They are part of the process and understanding them will go a long way in making you a better athlete/swimmer.  Don’t forget winning races is fun but don’t get so wrapped up with others that you neglect to focus on yourself and the success you have such as a best time.

TIME AWAY FROM THE POOL:  Don’t forget to include things away from the pool that will help you. Also include things that you would like to read that make you a better all around person in society.

After you write this letter to yourself fold it neatly and put it in a envelope and address it to yourself ( do not seal it) and bring it in to me at practice.