News For
SWIM PARENTS
Published by The American Swimming Coaches Association
5101 NW 21 Ave., Suite 200
Fort Lauderdale FL 33309
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Learning To Prepare For The Best
John Leonard
As I write this in early
January in Fort Lauderdale, the air temperature is a “balmy” 42 degrees….well,
balmy if you’re from Green Bay, Wisconsin, maybe. Here in South Florida,
that’s a cold wave. We swim outside, and the water temperature is 75
degrees…..the heaters can’t keep up when the air is this cold. The wind
chill factor, according to Channel 7, is…well, we don’t want to know the wind
chill with a nice brisk 20 mile an hour wind coming off the Everglades.
My phone rings at 5 AM
and a small voice on the other end asks plaintively, “Do we really have swim
practice, Coach John?” Yes, we really do.
WHY? Is the next question,
which I wrestle with myself on the 15 minute drive to the pool….why put
teenagers in the water on this cold and nasty morning when both they and I
would prefer to stay snuggled in at home for another hour or hour and a half.
Now, I KNOW why, but can I
express it to my swimmers? Yes, I’ll try. Everyone, on the day after
the high school state meet, vows that “next year” they will A) make a final, B)
Make the meet C) win an event or D) write in your own goal here.
It’s easy to vow to do
something the day after, when you are excited, full of the promise of life and
get up and go. It’s a lot harder to REMEMBER what you wanted to do in early
January when it’s 5 AM and cold outside. Then it’s a lot harder and a lot
easier to rationalize, “it’s just one workout”.
The problem is, when teenagers
begin to learn to rationalize, they get really good at it really fast, and
pretty soon, the ACTION required to fulfill the commitments to those
goals/dreams, falls prey to the rationalization. And after you rationalize
the decision you want to make the first time, it’s so much easier to do it the
next time, and the time after that, and pretty soon, the goal is just a dream,
because you’re rationalizing yourself into thinking, “I’d like to do that if
everything could be perfect for me, and it would never be cold in the morning,
or no social events would ever conflict with practice, and time with my
friends always went the way I want it to.“
But things never go perfectly.
The ONLY thing you can successfully predict is that obstacles to your goal WILL
come up, and little or nothing will go smoothly. And that consistency in
preparation is the only way to raise the percentages of the chance you will
reach your goal.
Read that again….”raise the
percentages of the chance…” Not a guarantee. If it’s a good goal,
there are no guarantees, EXCEPT that if you don’t prepare correctly, according
to the plan, you won’t raise your chance of success, you’ll lower it.
So why go to practice at 5 AM
in the cold? Because it’s part of the plan, and it raises your chance of
success. But most of all, because you have told yourself that you will
commit to doing it. And if you let yourself down, who won’t you let down?
Prepare for a chance for success. And feel really good about doing that.
Because not very many people
do.