Ten years ago, several months before my 55th birthday, I set a group of BHAGs or Big Hairy Audacious Goals. The term comes from the book Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, who studied businesses that …
Two days ago I brought two students, Dmitry and Sergey, to Bard College to guide them through a practice that was 100% focused on increasing efficiency via improving technique. They had just completed two days of instruction–four 90-minute sessions in …
Ten days ago, I received an email notification to moderate a new comment on my recent blog “Guaranteed” Speed: Swim Faster the Smart Way While I receive such notifications every day, something about this one caught my attention: The commenter …
On October 19 I swam from Corsica to Sardinia–covering 15.5K (9.6 miles) in 4 hours 31 minutes–with Tommi Patilla and Lennart Larsson. This is the story of that swim.
Some swim for exercise, others for a sense of accomplishment or …
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 …
In a few weeks, I’ll mark the 50th anniversary of when I first got serious about swimming—i.e. training with an explicit goal of swimming fast. In November of 1965, I joined the newly-launched swim team at my high school, St. …
In this post I use a ‘real life’ example to show how one swimmer can improve her speed–and achieve a dream–by using the TI Principles-based approach I’ve described in several recent posts. In a few weeks, I’ll spend a ‘fortnight’ …
On Sept 19, TI Master Coach Suzanne Atkinson posted on Facebook that one of her athletes had just won a triathlon world championship. That would be exciting news in any case, but what made this feat particularly special was that …
This is the third post in a series describing how to swim faster with a principles-based approach. In this post I share the thought process that guides my own training. Speed isn’t my highest priority, but I frequently use it …
Conventional wisdom tells us that faster freestyle turnover equals faster speed. If only it were that easy! This might be true for our terrestrial counterparts, runners, but water is about 800 times denser than air. That added resistance means the …