The York Y Rambler
By Coach Michael
21 May 2007
A FEW BRIEF REMINDERS
Regarding the “new” first session schedule from Mondays to Thursdays, where the Silver and Gold swimmers will start at 4:15 instead of the old 4:30 pm: I realize that this earlier time is more difficult for a few of our families with school bus schedules, etc., to work around. If that is the case with you or your carpool, get to practice as soon as you can (and let me know about it if you will be late routinely).
Regarding the upcoming York Revolution baseball game/team outing: if you are planning on attending (and I hope all of you are), please get your money in TO ME as soon as you can. We need to do our final accounting with the Revolution folks.
Regarding the upcoming stroke mini-camps: a number of you had mentioned to me your interest in attending some or all of the camps. If you will be attending, please get your money and registration forms in TO ME as soon as you can. I need to plan for assistants.
Final entries for the Trident meet will be posted in the next few days.
Tentative entries for the NRG mini meet will be posted asap.
Tentative entries for the dual meet against State College Area Y will be posted in the next few days.
A SIMPLE RECIPE FOR SUCCESS
1. Have a dream.
The first step is the easy one. Anyone can dream. Who hasn’t watched a playoff or championship game on tv, or read an article about a great champion in Swimming World, without having thought, “I want to be there someday”? I want to sink that last second game-winning shot, or hit the walk-off home run, or win the seven gold medals at the Olympics like Mark Spitz? Anyone with any desire to achieve has dreams all the time. So find an achievement that grabs you and sets your gut on fire. It need not be something as lofty (and seemingly unreal or unachievable) as an Olympic gold medal; making the Far Western team, or qualifying for your first JO’s, or getting a AAA time, or whatever is out there calling for you, will do just fine. Find something you haven’t done and really want to do.
2. Set a goal.
The second step is more difficult and not nearly as common: making the dream real. How do I get from where I am now to where my dream will take me? It is a long way from the playground to the World Series, or from the neighborhood pool to the Olympics. I cannot count the number of times a swimmer has told me his goal, say a 1:54 in the 200 IM, then had no idea what that goal actually meant in real terms: what I do need to split to swim that 1:54? What do I need to do in practice and how fast do I need to train to reach my goal?
A goal without concreteness – what does this goal mean every day in practice – is vague and meaningless. Setting a goal means figuring out the route one will take to the destination; it means taking that dream out of the clouds and pulling it down to earth.
3. Get to work.
The third step is the most difficult and the most rare. Many more folks talk a good game than play one. If the second step is making a goal real, the third is making it happen. This is rare because it requires a true commitment to yourself and to your swimming to achieve it, and because the word ‘commitment’ has gotten a bad reputation, conflicting with several popular attitudes: commitment conflicts with the ‘if it’s not fun, don’t do it’ attitude that I hear from teenagers (mostly slow ones) all the time; it conflicts with the idea that one can do it all, that one never has to make choices that limit one’s behavior or activities; it conflicts with the correlative idea that kids must participate in a myriad of activities and really commit to none; it conflicts, because its goal is excellence, with the attitude that redefines excellence and striving for excellence as ‘elitism’, and few folks have the strength of character to stand up under the ‘elitist’ charge in our very democratic America; it conflicts with our society’s reverence for convenience, since commitment, and the excellence that it leads to, are not convenient. Commitment isn’t popular, but goals – especially lofty ones – cannot be reached without it.
I often see a huge gap between a swimmer’s goals and what that swimmer is willing to do to reach that goal. A senior swimmer making a B-level commitment and only finding it possible to train three days a week will tell me he wants to make Nationals or be a high school All-American. Or a swimmer with a goal of breaking 5:00 for the 500 free will never train hard enough to see a one-minute pace per 100 in practice. Those goals aren’t honest and they aren’t going to happen.
There is often a disconnect between how important a goal is when a swimmer talks about it, and how important swimming and her goal is when it is time to act: when it’s time to get up at 5 a.m. for morning practice, or time to get to practice rather than to the fifteen other activities she could be doing every afternoon, or time to push harder when a set has gotten exhausting, or time to work on one’s skills and improve technically instead of float through unthinkingly. It is much easier and more convenient to say, “I’ll bag it today and work extra hard tomorrow.” But tomorrow never comes. And another goal bites the dust.
Again, it’s interesting how for many swimmers, when they are at a meet, swimming fast is their number one priority; but in the month between meets, swimming fast is their forty-seventh priority. These swimmers are never happy at meets, and they never can figure out what the problem is. In order for a goal to be honest, you must make a commitment to doing what it takes to reach it; your goal and your commitment must be on a level.