The saxophonist Sonny Rollins, now 86, has not performed in public in four years because of poor health. However, he remains the jazz world’s most respected living performer, recognized for his impressive practice habits– eight or more hours a day, well into middle age–and the sabbaticals he took to improve his technique.

I love reading examples of eminences from different fields, who exemplify the principles of Kaizen, Mastery, and Deliberate Practice. I recently read an account of Rollins’s commitment to those ideals that thrilled and delighted me.

Between 1953 and 1959, Rollins released 21 full-length albums, an output that now seems otherworldly. As the writer put it, “music rushed out of Rollins like an overfed river.” And it wasn’t only the prodigious quantity, the quality was also unsurpassed. At age 28, he was considered the greatest tenor saxophonist of the day.

Yet in 1959, Rollins stopped performing and recording. For the next two-and-a half years, from the summer of 1959 to the end of 1961, he played nearly every day atop the Williamsburg Bridge, which crosses the East River between Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. (I swam under this bridge in 2002 and 2006 during my two Manhattan Island Marathon Swims.) He chose this location—a few blocks from his apartment—so he could play all day long without disturbing his neighbors, and for the quality of the sound in the open air.

Among jazz musicians, taking a sabbatical to obsessively hone one’s craft is sufficiently common that it’s been given a name–woodshedding.  Yet Rollins was already at the top when he took his sabbatical. He used it to break new ground and move jazz in new directions.

Reading an account of this reminded me of a 10-year sabbatical I took from Masters meets and conventional training to refine a new way of swimming freestyle, to which I’d been introduced by, the innovative coach Bill Boomer. Actually, that makes my initial intent sound far too grandiose. At the start, I was focused mainly on enjoying swimming more. The evolution of a new form happened bit by bit, with many unexpected revelations along the way.

Boomer’s innovation was captured in one pithy sentence: “In swimming, the shape of the vessel matters more than the size of the engine.” While his concept was clear, his description of specific techniques for minimizing drag was sparse. In 1993, there was no guidebook for ‘fishlike’ freestyle. TI workshops became a large-scale laboratory for developing and standardizing techniques and a learning method. But, outside the workshops, I needed to develop the skills and drills we’d teach in them.

Prior to this sabbatical, for nearly three decades, like a hamster on a wheel, I had reflexively swum interval repeats each time I got in the pool. Breaking that habit provided a sense of unprecedented freedom to practice for pleasure rather than conditioning. I didn’t even feel constrained to use conventional strokes. I experimented with new ways to move through the water and devised several drills that never made it into our curriculum.

I was in pursuit of two things:

  1. Shaping my body for the lowest drag profile and moving through the water without disturbing it;
  2. To feel better in the water.

A Canadian coach named Howard Firby had coined a term to describe an extreme-low-drag version of butterfly or breaststroke. He called it “slither-slink.” This pretty closely described the movements I was performing and sensations I was experiencing. I developed many ways to slither-slink through the water—enjoying an unprecedented sense of moving through water like an arrow through air.

Yoga-inflected Swimming

Just as I began my intensive period of remaking my swimming and developing the TI techniques, I also began yoga practice, in a style called Iyengar, that emphasizes detail, precision and alignment in the performance of postures or asanas. We’d regularly hold a posture for six or more breaths, making small adjustments. I was struck by how much critical detail could be present in even the simplest poses, such as mountain pose—standing with arms at sides.

After several years of Iyengar, I did my first ‘flow’ or vinyasa class–changing positions on each breath. I was grateful for having done years of Iyengar, to familiarize with each of the asanas I was now moving through so quickly.

R Skate UW

Freestyle Skate

This revealed to me that a freestyle stroke is like a much-more-hurried vinyasa, moving through a series of critical positions in a single breath. That led me to identify the most critical position in each stroke—the moment where drag is lowest—and pause the action to allow small adjustments. This led to development of our Skate drills which, ever since, have been our most important drills for freestyle and backstroke.

A striking thing about this period of deep practice is that, for nearly 10 years, my personal focus remained on vessel-shaping or lowering my drag profile. I gave almost no attention to the pull and kick. Today we recommend that new TI students allow three to six months’ attention to vessel-shaping before turning to propulsion skills.

Yet during this time I never sensed a slackening of my learning curve. This is possibly because vessel-shaping was a new skill and there remained, well, everything to be discovered about it.  Since I did relatively little timed swimming during this period, two other measures came to the fore—stroke count and degree of pleasure I experienced while swimming. My average stroke count per 25 yards—17 in the early ‘90s—dropped to 12 to 13 in the early ‘00s. (Now it’s back up to 15 to 16 strokes—a story for another day.) And the sheer pleasure of moving through the water increased continuously.

If you took a sabbatical from your habitual swimming routine, how would you use it and what might change as a result?