On December 15, 1965, the first space rendezvous occurred when Walter Schirra and Thomas Stafford brought their Gemini 6 spacecraft within 30 centimeters of the Gemini 7 spacecraft, piloted by Frank Borman and Jim Lovell.  But this was not the first attempt at space rendezvous.  On June 3rd of that same year, Jim McDivitt and Ed White had tried to rendezvous their Gemini 4 spacecraft with the second stage of the Titan II booster that had carried them into orbit.  But that attempt was unsuccessful because the astronauts tried to follow their Earth-based instincts which told them to fire their thrusters so as to push their spacecraft in the direction of the booster.  The trouble is that, in space, things don’t always work the way your Earth-based instincts tell you they should.  If you’re behind your target, firing your thrusters toward it sends you into a higher orbit, which makes you fall farther behind.  If you’re ahead of it, firing your thrusters toward it sends you into a lower orbit, which makes you move farther ahead of it. 

A similar problem exists in swimming.  Because water is 880 times denser than air, minimizing drag has far more effect on swimming speed than can ever be achieved by maximizing propulsion.  And because water isn’t a solid medium, improving your grip on the water can have more effect on propulsion than can be achieved by increasing your stroke rate.  Just as pilots who were used to flying in Earth’s atmosphere had developed instincts that didn’t work in space, so, athletes who are used to moving on land have developed instincts that don’t work in the water.

A company I used to work for went through some difficult times financially and had to do a couple of layoffs.  Someone in the company’s top management sent out a company-wide "belt-tightening" memo which stated, among other things, that everyone needed to adhere strictly to the company’s official work day of 8:30 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., and to the company’s official lunch break of 12:00 noon to 12:30 P.M.  While his intentions were good, he was apparently unaware of the fact that employees were sharing computer resources, and that having everyone work exactly the same hours would overload those resources during the company’s official work hours while wasting them the rest of the time, thereby reducing productivity just when the company needed to be increasing it.

Our land-based instincts can cause us to do something similar to this when we’re in the water.  Even if we’ve been practicing new, more efficient swimming habits at slow speeds, our minds can still retain their old concepts of what we need to do to swim fast.  Consequently, we may achieve disappointing times in competitions precisely because we are focusing on trying to swim fast, and our minds translate that into old, inefficient swimming habits.

I was rather startled several years ago when I began practicing the stroke eliminator drill (in which you try, on each successive pool length you swim, to reduce your stroke count by one), and found by using my SportCount lap timer that my time often went down when I reduced my stroke count.  In order to reduce my stroke count, I was focusing on increasing my efficiency in the water, and the increased efficiency more than made up for the reduction in stroke count, thereby increasing my speed.  This forced me to recognize that I moved faster when I was focusing on increasing my stroke length than I did when I was trying to swim fast!

I began using this new knowledge at meets by focusing on getting as much distance as possible out of each stroke rather than by focusing on swimming as fast as I could, and I did see improvements in my times.  But I subsequently realized that something more was needed.  My goal, after all, was not to take long strokes, but to swim as fast as I could.  My problem was not that I had been focusing on swimming fast, but that my brain had a distorted concept of how to do it.  So I began working on retraining my brain’s concept of what it meant to swim fast.

One of the most useful sequences I found for this retraining is what I call the Eliminator/Accelerator drill.  Here is how the drill works:

- Pick a distance (25, 50, or perhaps more) and swim it, counting your strokes and timing yourself.

- Swim the same distance again, trying to reduce your stroke count by one and timing yourself.  Did you succeed in reducing your stroke count?  Did your time go up or down?

- Keep repeating the previous step, trying to see how low you can get your stroke count while still feeling that you are smooth in the water.  If you don’t succeed in getting a lower stroke count, think about what you can do differently to make your stroke more efficient and then try it again.  I sometimes find that my time initially goes up when I reduce my stroke count (because I am reducing my stroke count by stroking more slowly), but then, when I try to reduce it further, something seems to "click" and my time drops (because further reductions in stroke count are forcing me to find a more efficient way to swim).  If you start to feel like you have to distort your stroke to bring your count any lower, don’t go any further.

- Swim the same distance again, trying to keep the same feeling you had the previous time, but gradually increase your stroke rate.  Keep counting your strokes, but don’t try for any particular stroke count.  See how much you can increase your stroke rate without losing the efficient feeling you had when you started.  How many strokes did you take?  How much faster did you swim?

You can repeat this process as many times as you like.  When you start each set, see how much your brain has retained from the previous set.  The first time you swim the distance in the new set, how do your stroke count and time compare to the first time you swam it in the previous set?  Can you bring your stroke count any lower before you start to distort your stroke?  The last time you swim the distance, can you build your stroke rate any more than you did on the previous set, or can you build your stroke rate any faster?  If you start to lose your feeling of efficiency during the acceleration portion of the Eliminator/Accelerator drill, try backing your stroke rate off a bit and see if you can find that feeling of efficiency again.

Timing yourself as you do this is the constant reality check.  The more your brain learns about how it feels when you are swimming fast, the more you will be able, during a competition, to simply focus on swimming fast, letting your new instincts do the work of translating that into the appropriate movements in the water!