Thinking About Pain – Part 3
Continued from Part 2… Emotional Resilience There is a level of grit – technically known as ’emotional resilience’ – that is good for each of us to develop, when the pain can’t be reduced further. It is really tough to train for...
One Stroke Technique For Everyone? Part 1
Let me give you a short answer to the question in the title of this post: Yes, there is a technical ideal we are aiming for, for every standard-equipped human swimmer. And, yet we recognize that there is so much variety in bodies that some compromise is often...
Distance Swimming in Kaş
As I write this I am sitting on our ‘command boat’ in the sea next to the peninsula in Kaş, Turkey. 30 minutes ago our swimmers begin the first strokes of their challenge swim on this final training day of our open water distance camp. The weather is...
Thinking About Pain – Part 2
This discussion is continued from Part 1… The Aging Dilemma For those chasing medals and records and recognition – a reward now – it is acceptable, even required it seems, to take some risks with injury. The risks are much higher when there is a...
Thinking About Pain – Part 1
What is pain? We all know what it is, but yet it’s a hard word to define both precisely and broadly enough to cover all the ways we experience it. There is good pain and bad pain. There is physical pain and mental pain and emotional pain. There is tiny annoying...
Concerned About Sinking Legs In Drills?
We have a student working through our Pool Comfort lesson series. In this series we guide people through a gentle process of removing the anxiety and stress they’ve felt in the water, which has previously hindered them from making progress in swim lessons, or...
What You Can Learn About Speed From Butterfly
Even if you do not practice the butterfly stroke, you may appreciate this approach to solving the not-getting-any-faster problem… Coach Jamee and I have been working with a mother and three kids (10, 12 and 16) on a swim team who came to us to work on freestyle...
How To Eat More Vegetables – Part 2
Continued from Part 1… Why Bother Emphasizing Vegetables So Much? In this post I am not urging you to become a vegan or a vegetarian. I am simply advocating that you eat A LOT MORE vegetables than you are. If you are anywhere close to average, you are not coming...