Swim Fast

By Michael Pisani

The typical goal for every competitive swimmer is to swim fast.

Most swimmers want to simply beat the last time they raced, that is, obtain a new personal record or PR. 

Achieving the goal of swimming fast for me, like many athletes, can be boiled down to my mental game. Along with having the discipline and working hard, having the right mental state can play a big part in swimming fast.

There are no shortcuts in swimming. 

There is no secret to getting fast.

The formula to speed has probably existed since the start of the sport. That formula being, practicing consistently, going hard on the hard parts, and easy on the easy parts.

Swimming takes trust in yourself and your coach.

Trust in yourself to push yourself to your coach’s expectations in practice and trust in your coach that he’s or she’s coaching is working.

Putting trust in yourself comes down to your own self-confidence and your own desire to improve. 

I think I can speak for every swimmer when I say trusting in yourself is the hardest part of swimming. The reality of it is that you will never always go fast. 

Swimmers will have those bad meets or practices where they are just not performing to their own and coach’s liking. 

Their own self-confidence will then begin to diminish and those swimmers will probably think degrading, useless thoughts about themselves.

As in a lot of sports, that way of thinking is often indirectly embraced.

Comparing yourself to others and other’s experiences… it is really easy to lose confidence. I find, and the best swimmers do, that taking the nerves and degrading thoughts and turning them into motivation to do better is the right plan. 

This type of plan allows you to set more goals and put targets on the competition to make new PR’s.

Now for when things don’t go well, I think the key to improving after a bad meet or race is to do something about it! 

What you decide to do as a swimmer after your underperformance is what defines you as what type of swimmer you are.

Do you want to be the swimmer that pouts and gives up? 

That guy or gal that lets doubt control their present and future…? 

Or, take the positive approach, and become the swimmer that decides to do something about it and learn. 

For me at least, it is easy to conclude that I’m just a bad swimmer and pout when things go wrong.

But, what separates the truly good from the bad swimmers is their attitude to their failure.

It’s tough to learn from your mistakes.

It is miles easier to give up and move on. But what many fail to realize is their distorted and negative perspective of failure hides the fact that failure is our greatest teacher!

When I look at a bad race and try to find where things went wrong, I simply learn from my mistakes. 

If I go into the next practice wanting to improve from a mistake in a race, I make that bad race no longer a failure but use it as a mold for future race successes. 

Wanting to improve upon your mistakes is how you ultimately overcome goal times and take over others in the sport and in life. 

But finding where you went wrong in a race can be difficult sometimes.

A race is made up of lots of parts from the technique of the stroke to the reaction of the dive.

For me though, if I have a bad race, I try to find where I lost it.

I look at the splits, film, and micro times of each lap. We live in a very analytical world, able to dissect almost every moment. 

It’s important to do just that when we fail.

I continue then to recap the pace I was doing and try to think about how much faster I could have gone. 

I compare my bad race to a good race. I try to find the differences. I try to find my mistakes.

Finding your mistakes is one part of wanting to improve though.

The second part of wanting to improve is the action taken.

Just identifying what you did wrong in a meet or practice is the first step towards improvement. The second step, and more importantly, is acting upon your mistakes and physically practicing to improve upon them.

For me, I find my main problem with practices or races is my stamina.

I can sprint just as fast as everyone else, but I have identified my weaknesses as not being able to hold my speed. My physical action towards improvement in building my stamina is to try and do more activities outside of practice to build that extra stamina and muscle I need to compete well.

I already trust in my coach’s design of practices and don’t think that my problem of lack of stamina comes from those so I hyperfocus on dry land work. 

I, like every other swimmer, want to swim fast.

It is up to me and my mindset to find my mistakes and take confidence in myself and training so that I can improve on physical strength and ultimately swim fast. 

For anyone who wants to swim fast or do whatever tasks burden them, I leave you with this.

At least from what I have learned from swimming if you know yourself and your struggles you need not worry about the results of the race. 

At the end of the day all the dissecting and starring in the mirror I do to become a better swimmer creates hope in myself that I can do better. I certainly can’t be fast with the anchor of doubt on my back.

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