By Louis Tharp

Swimming is not intuitive. It rewards its practitioner with bursts of speed and infusions of satisfaction when it is studied carefully and its components are respected.

No sport is intuitive. Some people have natural talents which contribute to proficiency, like hand-eye coordination does for baseball or tennis, and this natural talent squirts enthusiasm into the learning and enjoying process.

If swimming asks for a natural talent in order to produce excellence, it is the talent to bring order to chaos through relaxation.

Nobody gets in the water, at any age, and understands technique. Fish do that.

The best swimmers get in the water with a kinship to it the way a certain grade school student opens a chemistry set on Christmas – there is excitement, respect and awareness that a unique experience will be forthcoming, despite little knowledge of the discipline.

We have thoughts or places we go that are in sync with our intrinsic selves. These places and thoughts produce intellectual, emotional and physical pleasure that converts into energy. When water and self are in sync we go to one of these places, and a great swimmer results, regardless of speed.

When water and self are in sync they broaden the definition of a great swimmer which has been too narrowly confined to those who are the fastest.

Restricting the definition of great swimmers to the fastest is like confining the definition of a great chef to someone who masters the art of barbeque.

Great swimmers, like great chefs, are the subset of people who allow themselves to be open to the possibility of achieving intermittent excellence while enjoying the trip there and back.

A great swimmer is a person who allows the lane lines, the pace clock, the water bottle, the tiles to be the catalyst in the process that produces the opportunity to create positive energy that fuels the swim as well as life. Great swimmers enjoy swimming’s energy. Whether they are in the water or not, this energy keeps them in the moment of aquatic kinship.

Kinship is when chaos becomes order. When stress becomes relaxation. When speed and efficiency is accepted, not chased. When confidence allows curiosity. When physical exertion follows emotional commitment as well as logical mental process. When the elegance of learning meets the satisfaction of accomplishment. This is kinship and it is the center of contentment.

Kinship is the only way to free the mind and body from restrictions that create plateaus – that state swimmers define as the place where we can’t get any faster.

Kinship keeps us from negotiating against ourselves and instead allows us to integrate ideas that float by into steps we climb to recreate ourselves into the swimmers we aren’t yet but know we can be.

Getting in the water to become a better swimmer means not letting the water we knew yesterday get in the way of the water we can know today. We may look at swimming as an old friend in a comfortable environment, but swimming is not a dog. It doesn’t love unconditionally. It quietly and continuously asks for change from those who feel a kinship with it, and returns frustration and boredom to those who don’t.

As coaches we offer tactics – high elbows, aligned heads, two-beat kicks – but we want fusion without understanding how the fusion of kinship and tactics works. We don’t even understand why someone has a 15 stroke count on Monday and a 19 count on Wednesday.

If we let this selfish need to understand the pathway between tactics and proficiency – the fusion necessary to produce a great swimmer – we’ll hector our swimmers onto the couch where they will explore the special relationship between food and HDTV, bending that high elbow as their hand brings potato chips to their open mouth and crumbs fall on the TI T-shirt we gave them when they signed up.

All we can do is nurture the kinship and wait while muscles and nervous system run a million possibilities and finally align with their environment to produce a moment of excellence and a memory of accomplishment that will be used to build more moments and more memories that will become the speed they don’t chase and the efficiency they don’t dissect.

It’s all we can do. That and wait for the smile that says it is worth it, and the energy that says continue.

 

 

 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.

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