On Tuesday of this week I returned home from a trip to Italy and England. On the first leg of that trip, (Oct 19) I swam Corsica to Sardinia. I’ll recount that in next week’s blog.

That evening,  I read the New Yorker magazine article, WHAT WE THINK ABOUT WHEN WE RUN, a review of “Poverty Creek Journal” a collection of reflections from a year of running. It also summarized a study published  in the International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology. Sports psychologists gave clip-on microphones to 10 distance runners and asked them to narrate their thought process during a run.

What did these runners think about?

  • How hard it was to move at their desired speed: “Come on, keep the stride going, bro.”
  • How soon they could stop: “Come on, you have enough energy for a mile and a half.”
  • How miserable they felt while running. In the words of the researchers: “Pain and discomfort were never far from their thoughts.”

I’d previously given little thought to what runners think about–other than pondering that if more runners were exposed to the sensuous pleasures of moving like water, they’d become swimmers instead. Reading this made me wonder, why do people carry on with such a masochistic exercise. The contrast with my practice from just a day earlier could not be more stark.

As it always is, my practice was guided by principles of TI Fast Forward training methodology . . . which come, in turn, from the principles of Deliberate Practice and Mastery:
1. Always focus on improving your swimming.
2. Create feedback loops. These can be subjective (Focal Points) or objective (SPL, Tempo, Time).
3. Design practice tasks as problem-solving exercises. E.G. Holding Stroke Length, while increasing Stroke Rate–the ‘Algorithm of Swimming Success.’

Monday morning, six hours before flying back to NY, I joined Sean Haywood (he swims for TI UK Coach Tracey Baumann in Windsor) for a swim at the Hampton Lido, an outdoor 36-meter pool. Having never swum in a 36m pool–have you?–I went in with no idea what stroke count or pace I should aim for.

But that’s never a problem. I can ‘create meaning’ in any pool, simply by counting strokes during my Tuneup. So that’s what I did.

Swimming with a feather-light catch and barely-there kick, I took 24 strokes the first length, then added a stroke on each of the next three laps–reaching 27 SPL on the 4th. (I later did a calculation and found that the Green Zone for my 6-foot height in a 36-meter pool should be 24 to 28 strokes.) As my sensitivity to the water increased, I shaved a stroke bringing me to 26SPL then held that consistently for another 10 to 12 minutes. This gave me my first data point.

Moving into the ‘fast’ lane, I turned on my Tempo Trainer. It was set to 1.17 sec/stroke from a previous practice. I figured that was as good a place as any to start so I tucked it under my cap and swam 4 lengths (144m), counting strokes. I averaged 27 SPL. That gave me a second data point. I could comfortably hold 27 strokes in a 36m pool at 1.17 tempo.

That suggested two possible problem-solving exercises:

  1. Could I swim farther at that Tempo and SPL ? I could test this with a series of repeats-each one length farther than the previous (swim 5 lengths, then 6, then 7, etc ). This would be an endurance and steady pacing exercise.
  2. Could I swim faster, by maintaining an efficient stroke, while incrementally increasing tempo?  This would be a Smart (and Easy) Speed exercise.

I chose the latter and decided to swim a Tempo Pyramid. I would swim a series of 4-length (144m) repeats, slowing tempo by .02 on each  until my SPL returned to 26–or 104 strokes for a 144m swim. I reached that at 1.23 tempo–25 strokes on the 1st length, 26 strokes on the 2nd and 3rd and 27 strokes on the 4th.

Then I reversed tempo, increasing by .01 sec after each 144m rep. My objective was to avoid adding a stroke for as many repeats–and .01 tempo increases–as possible.  I held 26SPL for 11 reps–reaching a tempo of 1.13 sec/stroke–before my stroke count went up.

The ‘Math of Speed’

By maintaining 104 total strokes while tempo increased by a tenth of a second, I improved my pace for each 144m repeat by 10.4 seconds.  Yet I’d never tried to swim faster. In fact my thought process was just the opposite: To stay very relaxed–and even maintain a sense of lightness and leisure in my stroke–as tempo steadily increased. The fact that my tempo changes were quite minute–just a hundredth of a second–made it easier to adapt.

When I finally exceeded my target SPL at 1.12 tempo, I modified the set to 3-length (98m) reps and held my 26SPL average (25-26-27 strokes) until I reached 1.09.

At 1.08 my SPL rose again, so I cut another length from my repeats, carrying on with 72m repeats, holding 26 SPL to 1.06. At 1.05, in order to hold 26 SPL, I  cut another length and finished my practice by holding 26 strokes for four 36 meters taking me to 1.02 sec/stroke. Allowing 3 seconds for pushoff, at 1.02 and 26 strokes, I crossed the 36-meter pool in 29.5 sec. At 1.23 tempo and the same number of strokes, each 36-meter lap had taken 35.7 seconds.

Better than Ever . . .

If a researcher had given me a waterproof mic and asked me to record my thoughts between repeats, I’d have reported feeling a nearly-blissful Flow State the entire time–a product of a problem-solving exercise that required unblinking focus on every single stroke. In other words, I was Totally Immersed in the process of swimming at high efficiency.

And how did I feel physically? Fabulous!  As my 36-meter pace improved by 6 seconds, my movement through the water felt better and better–more integrated, more fluent. During the closing lengths I literally felt the best I ever have in 50 years of swimming.

Can it get any better than that?