WINNING THE RACE

Why do we go to meets and race?  Not a new question and although the reason might be clear to all of you they actually may go deeper than you think.  The first think that should come to mind is the fact that racing is and always should be fun, one of the best part of this sport.

Exploring this issue further it becomes clearer that meets are a vital part of the process in reaching your final goals whatever they may be.   Although you should always be testing yourself during your workouts the swim meets bring along a higher level of accountability in a little more pressured environment.  There are officials involved with a meet, there is more time involved along with a lot more mental energy.  You may start paying more attention to nutrition, hydration and sleep habits.  While all of these are important daily during your training there's a special emphasis put in during competition periods.  

You should be using competition events as a training event to improve.  When you approach your competition with this in mind it becomes a rehearsal for your bigger competitions down the road.  This is part of your training process, because you're literally teaching your body to perform at a higher level.

These meets provide you the opportunity to evaluate what you are doing well and what you need to work on during future workouts.  This is the area that seems to get lost on a lot of swimmers in the process.  Swimmers should be talking to a coach after your race while it is still fresh in everyones mind and talk about things that worked or didn't work and something to really take back to practice and work on.  Unfortunately swimmers miss this huge opportunity because they don't seek the feedback or they don't take the feedback back to practice and make the honest effort of improving in the areas that were discussed.

Another area that meets provide is mental training before your race.  Sometimes the race is won before

you even start and what I mean here is sometimes you’ve swam your race before you start.  We have discussed visualization before and how important it is in your overall success in the pool.  I have talked to many swimmers who are always putting negative thoughts into their heads.  It always amazes me as a coach how an athlete thinks of everything that can go wrong in competition when they know they have worked hard in practice.  Will things go wrong, of course they will but through your hard work you have put yourself in the best possible position to be successful.  All you need is a positive attitude going into the race. 

stop going to the dark side before your races and start practicing visualizing your success.  It has to become a habit.

 

We win the race by controlling the pool. Space and time.