A COMMON DENOMINATOR

 

No matter who you are, what you do, or how good we are which includes you the swimmer we all have to wake up in. the morning and face the new day.  If your lucky enough as a swimmer you may also have the opportunity to witness one or two incredible 🌅 sunrises in your journey.  

It doesn't matter if you happen to be a night owl because eventually the sun will still rise and you get to begin a new day with endless opportunities.  You must decide how to take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves to you.

The morning sunrise brings with it new beginnings where you can put to bed that bad race or meet that you have just come off of, or maybe yesterday's workout left a little to be desired.  What ever the issue's were the morning brings with it the endless possibilities and the chance to do a little better.  

Maybe your the swimmer who has never experienced a bad day (lucky for you) and what I will say to you is this, Why should you expect today to be any different?

Have a good Memorial Day weekend.  Remember our Veterans Past and Present.

HOW YOU DOING

 

How's your swimming doing.  After the long course meet I sat down and struggled to nail down a topic for you all that just might strike a cord with some of you.  You see I left that meet somewhat frustrated in the fact that so many of you felt disappointed in your races and I could not understand why.  Was it the fact that expectations were too high?  Maybe you were not clear on how to set expectations or goals.  Was it me and the way I set you up for expectations?  I didn’t know the answer but what I did understand was that more than a few of you needed help if we were going to move forward with any confidence.

Some things that we knew going into the meet included the following;

• First long course meet since 2019
• Times in meet sheet were at least 2 year old
• Many new events were going to be swam, thus an abundance of N.T.
• Many mako swimmers making their first appearance in a long course meet

And now the big questions.  What were your expectations?  What were your coaches expectations?  Probably not the same but a good bet would be that your expectations involved a time and ours were probably a little more complicated to be sure.

Okay down to the nuts and bolts of this.  After many of our mako swimmers races they would come back, we talked and this was the look I got from some of you (not all) but was clear that a lot of expectations were set high and and results fell short.  The majority of our races over the weekend produced many best swims and times yet I often heard, I.m not happy with that' or I could go a lot faster" and than it was "that time is so old".  We were all winning in the pool but mentally a lot of us were using the race.  It's okay to demand perfection from yourself as long as you recognize that your human and perfection 100% of the time rarely happens in life.  Life is hard and sports especially swimming where we are relying on a clock is no different.

Let's take football and look at the running back who picks up a couple of yards and the result is a first down.  It's like they just scored a touchdown and won the game but it's just a first down and they let everyone know.  Sure every time they touched the ball they have goals of going all the way and scoring a touchdown but they are willing to take that small win and build on it for that next opportunity.  The point is to accept the win no matter how BIG or small and build on that, move forward towards the next race.

Setting goals and expectations are important and a necessity if you are going to achieve anything.  When setting goals try to remember these sayings;

1. A person who aims at nothing is sure to hit nothing
2. It's okay to aim high and fall short.
3. Big problem is to aim low and hit

If you continuously are unhappy with your results because they don't meet your expectations you continually feel like your letting yourself down, you start to become disheartened and eventually lose trust in yourself as a swimmer.  When the trust in yourself breaks down there is a cascading effect which are, you stop setting high expectations, you avoid events you're afraid of and finally you stop being aggressive in your swims.  It your mind when you approach your swimming like this it becomes easy to fall short.  You can better accept the results and at the same time justify them to yourselves.  

In closing remember that when you step up onto the blocks and it's GO time take your results along with the wins no matter howBIG or small and move on to your next challenge.  This is the way you begin to build trust in yourself, your training, and your preparation.  Take ownership in the races, after all they are not your parents races, not your coaches races, they are YOURS and YOURS alone.  Your easy race or practice was always your last one.

PRACTICE

 

 Over this past season we have touched on a variety of topics, meets, attitudes, positive self talk, and how we look at results.  After reading a message from Oliver Leroy about getting better, I went back to our book on conquering the pool to gather some thoughts and if your wondering, yes we will be talking about practice and how you approach it as an athlete.

When you think of getting better most of your focus is geared to your races at meets and that end result, the final time, but what about getting better at practice.

 How do you approach practice each day has a lot to do with your success at meets.   There is a thing called mindless swimming where your mind is swirling around like a tornado just wrecking havoc on everything you are trying to accomplish.

Look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself this 🙋‍♀️ question, do I fit one of the following swimmer modes.

🏊‍♀️ “The swimmer who has huge goals for their season, but struggles to put big chunks of high-grade effort in practice.”

🏊🏻‍♂️ “ The swimmer who who backs down when things get rough in practice.”

🏊 “ The swimmer who knows what they need to get better, but finds themselves coming up against mental blocks that they can’t conquer.

The conversations that you have with yourself may look similar to some of the following ones;

• Why am I not closer to my goals?
• Why can’t I swim as fast as my teammates?
• What if I work hard all season but my goals aren’t met?

These are normal conversations that swimmers have from time to time and as we have discussed before it’s human nature, and they are all fear based.  "You can side-step a lot of this fear-based, movement-stopping, improvement-blocking stuff when you start asking the right questions."

Try this, treat practice like a meet, and what I am talking about is winning just like you are trying to accomplish in your races.  "Here is an example, let's say you want to crank up your underwater dolphin kick this season."  The problem is that you fear failing so you don't work at it and the reasons are many, it's hard, it's uncomfortable being under water, I can't hold my air (it's not about hiding it but a case exhaling slowly). The problem lies within and the simple truth is that you don't put in any meaningful effort into improving it, and this can also be applied to breathing, stroke corrections, turns and streamlines.    This can also apply to areas away from the pool such as your eating habits, hydration, sleep habits among some.  All of this is directly tied to being successful on race day.

How do I WIN at practice? Sometimes it only take a few minutes each day for example, performing a tighter streamline with 1 extra dolphin off each wall during let's say 10x100's takes only a few minutes.  The result is that now you have worked on it 40 times during the set. The next day add another kick or make them faster, the point is you start winning during practice and it builds your confidence and reduces your fear.

It's like making your bed every morning, regardless of how the day goes it started by accomplishing one small task and if you can do that you can change how your story is written.

No matter how small it seems, Go out and WIN the day.