By Louis Tharp

There was a team in the pool yesterday afternoon. It was us. And once again the three of us were participating in the energy transfer that produces fast swimmers from smart people who respect nuance and ignore perceived limits.

Energy transfer among swimmers, the third dimension of swimming, is not the most important but it is the most palpable, can be emotionally the most rewarding, and is the dimension that provides the most physical surprises such as magically lower times. (The first is curiosity, and the second is continuous learning which can be done alone, but energy transfer requires human or animal interaction.)

It is what swimmers are looking for when they decide not to practice alone. Many swimmers don’t know how to ask for it, don’t know how to nurture it, and don’t know how to preserve it when they stumble on it. We do.

When a group of Doctors Without Borders comes together to provide emergency surgery to injured people, they come with a desire to do good, with relevant competencies, and most of all, to give their energy freely to something bigger than themselves. Without much discussion, the members of a surgical team come together and work efficiently.

The ingredients for a successful team — positive energy, acknowledged competency, and experience and knowledge transfer — in this case saves lives.

The same attributes are as important in the pool as it is in the operating tent, and its results are the same — healthy people, and physicial and intellectual stimulation.

You could say, with sufficient derision, "except, we’re not surgeons and we’re not saving lives when we do a ladder set," but I would say that, first, the energy is no less important, is just as relevant, and does save lives. Energy is not defined by location or status. Its presence and intensity is personally defined.

We swim to live. We swim to live longer, and we swim to live better. It is the only sport which provides mental and physical stimulation and improvement without the concurrent physical degradation which guarantees an expiration date in other sports.

There is no other reason to swim except to live longer and better, and if a swimmer does not recognize this, there will not be sufficient energy to get into the water. We may swim competitively to win a medal and test our limits, those are short-term goals. Swimming preserves life, and saves lives using the same constructs as Doctors Without Borders:

When swimmers come together with a desire to do well, with relevant competencies, and, most of all to give their energy freely to something bigger than themselves, the result is a team which produces results and shared positive energy, and this produces more shared results and more energy. It doesn’t matter whether you are in the water focusing on connected hips or a doctor in the rain forest replacing them.

The energy transfer among teammates in either case could not be more powerful than if it were the TCP/IP over fiber slamming through your local area network bringing you this blog.

And I have videos to prove it.

Wait a minute. Animal interaction? If you have to ask, you’ll want to swim with a blind person while the guide dog waits patiently on deck, or in Lake Louisa outside of Clermont, Florida, where the sign on shore lets you know the alligators are not wearing your baby blue cap, but they are in your wave, or in a quiet lake in upstate New York on a crisp late summer morning when the fish break the lightly fogged surface looking for breakfast while the birds fly low and look for brunch.

But back to the videos, which aren’t posted yet because I’m part of another team, and he’s sleeping beside me right now. If I post the videos I have to listen to them first and that means waking Jim, so in order to preserve the pre-sunrise positive team energy, I’ll wait until later this morning and post them in another blog.

The videos show progress, and you have to accept that progress does not come without curiosity and continuous learning.

But the videos also show respect for the energy it took to get to this relative level of competency, as well as the energy created getting there. It is this energy created that can be used to store knowledge, to transfer strength and experience to teammates, and to help us live longer.

That’s the only reason we swim and the only reason we form teams — to capture, nurture and preserve that energy.

 

 About:

Louis Tharp is a competitive age-group swimmer and a TI triathlon swim coach who is currently taking a few semesters off from West Point coaching in order to work one-on-one with Nicholas Sterghos, an ’09 West Point graduate and pro triathlete.

Louis Tharp‘s book, "Overachiever’s Diary, How The Army Triathlon Team Became World Contenders" is available from Total Immersion.

Read a sample chapter and reviews from the top triathlon and swimming media at Overachiever’s Diary.

Buy Overachiever’s Diary by Louis Tharp on TI. Read a review of Overachiever’s Diary at active.com

His home pool is Club Fit, Briarcliff in Westchester County, New York.

Want to know what Louis Tharp does when he’s not coaching?