The Suit

When it comes to swimming fast in a meet – also known as racing – there seems to us to be 4 factors: rest (taper), tech suit, shave and mindset.

We would rank them in this order of importance: mindset, rest, and techsuit/shave.

We went to an early season conference meet last weekend that had trials and finals with most swimmers having a solid shot at a second swim (3heats, 10 lanes). One of our guys, a junior in high school named Max opened our eyes a bit and his even wider we think…to be determined.

His career best 400IM is 4:14. In prelims he went a 4:30 and put a suit on for finals and went 4:20. We asked him if the suit was really worth 10 seconds. In his 200 back with a career best of 1:56 he went 2:06 prelims and suited 1:59 in finals. Again we asked, was the suit really worth 7 seconds.

Both times he answered probably not, with a rueful smile. So the coaching question is this: how do we get the swimmers to have a “suited” mindset without the suit?

And when we figure that one out we will have a waiting list for our team!