Nobody told us when we were slogging through high school chemistry that the periodic table of elements would grow. It was 92 or 93. Today it’s 118.

Whoever said that was a changeable number?

 To Louis Tharp:

I’m frustrated. Everytime I learn something that seems to work well, I have to unlearn it to get better, or that’s what I’m told. Swimming can’t be learning and then unlearning. If it is then swimming is just too frustrating to be enjoyable.

Michael

I thought about this when a proficient swimmer got very grouchy when I asked him to change his stroke. He apparently was theological about his current stroke, but if he is going to swim a consistent 1:05 per 100 for 1650 yards, he’ll need to change his stroke. Right now he’s at 1:12.

Nobody told him swimming well is a process that depends on change. We all recognize negative change: We get older, we swim slower.

But process is process. It doesn’t know whether it’s going forward or backward. We get to determine which way to proceed. And if we listen closely to what lot of people tell us, we’ll proceed to stay the same, or get slower.

Why, when we reach a certain proficiency level, do so many coaches tell us, in order to get to the next level, to just do more of what got us to where we are now? It is an invalid assumption. It is not like laying sod – once you figure out it’s green side up, you’re good for life.

Once we achieve 1:20, or 1:30 or 1:40, depending on who you are, per hundred yards, we have an out-of-body experience. It’s not us, so we have to take time to get used to the new faster us. I think at some point we don’t believe there are anymore transformations, and we’re scared we’re going to lose what we have. So we protect whatever stroke got us to our fastest time. We con ourselves into believing that if we just do more harder, we’ll get faster.

But doing more harder gets us a permanent place on the swimming plateau.

So we look for something else to change – besides technique – in order to go faster. We double up on practices so we can imprint all our bad habits, go to the weight room so we can limit our range of motion with bigger pecs, and swill down whey protein and creatine so we can introduce gas into our workouts and water into our muscles.

But our technique is sacred because, I think, to change it means we have to say we are wrong.

We’re not wrong.

The technique that got us from slow to kind of fast was good for getting us there. Not being perfect, we brought some bad habits with us, but at the slow end of the continuum these negatives didn’t matter. We managed to fix the big stuff and it paid off. Now we’re kind of fast, and in order to get sort of fast, we have to admit that what got us to "kind of" isn’t going to get us to "sort of."

It’s not our fault. It’s learning based on what you knew. "You don’t know what you don’t know," a very boring researcher I worked with used to say to me too often. In swimming, you don’t know about changing your stroke until you’ve maxed out on what you thought was your perfect stroke. Then the imperfections are glaring and if you can’t see them, look at the pace clock.

Plus, it takes a lot of faith to think that you can re-create that out-of-body experience over and over again as you break new speed and endurance barriers.

But you can, and you have to have faith. The only way to nurture this faith is to be willing to throw away the bad stroke stuff and keep the good. And the only way to have faith that you will get better is to know what the bad stuff is so you can throw it away. We should all get in the water wanting to throw away bad technique, not protect it or ignore it.

But, I know what you’re thinking. I can see your lips moving. As much as we like to think swimming is a solitary sport, when it is, you get slow. You need to have trusted advisors who can help you move from sort of fast to fast. It could very well be the lack of trusted advisors that keeps us all slow, not our unwillingness to change stroke.

 We’ve been told to swim like a windmill, do the S curve, look where you’re going, kick like a mule, keep your upper body out of the water, buy a new suit, wave your mouse in the air, hit control-alt-delete. And it was all wrong. I hear you. How much more of this can we take?

A lot more.

Because swimming is for smart people and smart people have to be open-minded enough to try something different, and right-headed enough to throw away what doesn’t work. (Please throw your pull buoys in that pile over there by the kick boards.)

But somewhere in the search for open-mindedness, we don’t always want to change our minds. We’d rather change our shoes or buy Sram Red components or somebody’s slick new floatie wetsuit, or a different color electrolyte drink.

And we just press on regardless with our flawed technique – like some novice in the Dakar Rally, hoping we can muscle our way to a miracle.

The biggest problem with athletes isn’t joint degradation or muscle fatigue or something that can be measured in max V02. It’s fear of changing something we think works because it got us to our personal best.

And, how did we get here? Because we didn’t ask our coach two questions: What did you learn when you got out of the pool after practice yesterday? Yes, there are two questions there: Did you swim yesterday? And what did you learn?

If we can recognize that swimming is a growth process that demands different questions for different proficiency stages

…and if we can recognize that these different questions demand different thought processes to get to the right answers

…and if we are not afraid to think we can go faster

…and if we’re able to engage in thoughtful and critical conversations about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it

…and if we’re not too pig-headed to accept the responsibility of unwinding the hard-wired flawed technique

…and if we can find the intellectual and physical fun doing this

…then we will become in the water what we’ve already reconcilled in our mind.

 

 

 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?