When?

“If you don’t have the time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”

~John Wooden

Ken found this quote the other day and it dovetails nicely into a current thread of conversation with our team. Most swimmers have goals and many even have a time frame of when they want to accomplish the goal(s).

Often the missing component is the plan of action. With some help from your coach and honest introspection (painful as that may be) you can determine where you are today visa vie the trajectory toward successful completion of your goal. Once you adopt your plan of action – doing what you are currently not doing to get what you want – the critical final component is “the when”.

Keeping it simple here…let’s say your freestyle tempo is 1.7+ when you swim a 200. When you swim a great 100 free it is 1.25…how can you swim a great 200 with a 1.7 tempo? The answer for 99.9% of the swimmers on the planet is you cannot. You will need to drop that tempo to 1.3 or even perhaps 1.4.

How do you do that? There are several ways that come to mind…let go of the water…increase your kick speed making sure your kicks are smaller thus quicker…and toughen up a bunch. 1.7 tempo doesn’t hurt as much as 1.3 so if you want to avoid the pain stay at 1.7 and quit complaining about your 200 speed. We coaches don’t want to hear about your frustrations.

We’d rather hear you declare “the when” as in WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO DO IT? Then quit your belly aching and just do it…or as Bob Bowman says, “It’s ok with you if I change your goal card, right?”