As holiday training prepares to ramp up, Swimming World is running this piece from the archive that emphasizes the connection between an athlete and the grueling nature of holiday work in the water and the weight room. The piece stresses the importance of this time of year, so get yourself ready to give your all.
Dear Holiday Training,
You and I have spent some quality time together over the last four weeks. You were hard. Really hard. You brought day after day of doubles, sometimes with weights in between workouts. The workouts were tough and did not always end well. Injuries flared up from overuse during the exhausting practices.
But our time together wasn’t all bad; there were a lot of good things too. Here are a couple things that I learned while we shared life for a couple weeks:
Consistency in practice is just as important as swimming fast.
Even when I was really sore and exhausted, I worked on being consistent. Doing the same things over and over mean they become habit. This could be something simple like four dolphin kicks off of every wall or only breathing twice in a 50 free. This can be challenging because consistency requires a sense of commitment to the small things and the big things. But in this holiday training and swimmer relationship, I had already committed to giving my best effort every time I hit the water. Race preparation is important for when the big event comes around. Consistency in this area is helpful to racing at any stage of a training cycle.
Attitude plays a big role in performance as well as relationships.
We can choose our attitude everyday: self-encouragement and self-motivation or self-defeat and self-pity. The power belongs to each one of us. We have all experienced physical and emotional pain and hard times, but the choice of response is ours and ours alone. This is something easier said than done, but changing my attitude towards a particular workout helped me get through the workout. I have often struggled with having a bad attitude towards a practice when I am tired or sore and don’t really want to swim. This year I learned that attitude can change the outcome of any practice. The attitudes of the people around me can also affect my practices.
Focusing on little things is easy.
I could focus on streamlining off the wall each turn and perfecting my dolphin kicks into my breakouts. I could focus on tempo in backstroke or work on my crossover turns. There are so many little things in swimming that I could focus on every practice. For a threshold practice, I focused on the rhythm of my freestyle and the placement on my breathing during each stroke cycle. IM practices allow for focus on the transition turns between each stroke. And I did. I did it all at some point during your time with me.
Holiday training, I’m thankful for all that I learned from you during the last couple weeks, and I am really glad that you are over. You brought more pain and exhaustion than I would have liked, but you made me better in more ways than one. Thank you for showing up and doing life with me for a while. Now I say goodbye to you as you return to your home until next December.
Sincerely,
A worn-out swimmer
aka Meaghan Raab, Swimming World Intern
