Common Problems and Solutions | Mediterra Swim & Run

How Do You Know You’ve Made An Improvement?

by Coach Mat | 4 Jun, 2023

How do you know you’ve made an improvement from one practice session to another? By measuring failure, or rather, by measuring its reduction from one session to the next. If you repeat a challenging practice set and have measured what, when, where, and how and...

How Well Are You Benefiting From Your Training Failures?

by Coach Mat | 28 May, 2023

In many settings in our culture, ‘failure’ is a personally-negative word, with unpleasant psychological or social implications. But in engineering, and in particular, in research and design, failure is an important, impersonal, and even positive output of...

What keeps you going, day after day, year after year?

by Coach Mat | 13 May, 2023

There are some questions I sometimes ask myself or others to reflect on what supports one’s longevity in athletic activity, or I could use them to explore what might be standing in the way of doing it more if they haven’t found that consistency yet. How...

How Do You Know When You Are Ready For Your Event?

by Coach Mat | 30 Apr, 2023

For the last two years, as a service to our local swimmer community, I have conducted private lessons as well as lake and river swimming clinics to help athletes in our area prepare for the swim leg of our local Ironman 70.3 Oregon race. In the Willamette River that...

When You Go Harder But You Can’t Go Any Faster…

by Coach Mat | 11 Mar, 2023

The traditional approach to swimming faster is to just go harder and keep at it until something breaks through. For some, that simple instruction might work. But for far too many it hasn’t. Regardless of what approach you take to developing technique or...

If You Are Not Getting Stronger or Faster…

by admin.mediterra | 18 Feb, 2023

You’ve been training faithfully, doing the best you know how to do. But you are not making progress anymore. What might be going on? Training involves these three variables… What kind of work you do = the kind of activity and what aspects of the...