Inspiration

The goswim folks put together a few of their favorite commercials here. Check it out if you want to and watch one of my favorites below.

Trinity and Wesleyan tomorrow and I can't wait.

Coach

Coach's Corner

It's been a while since I updated the blog, but with the season starting expect some regular updates on the team. Honesty, this Fall semester has flown by, and it's amazing that we are only a few days from our first home meet. The to-do list is longer than ever, but I'm watching the team train hard every day - and that makes a coach happy.

How'd we stay busy? Well, some highlights were nearly 50 visits this Fall from prospective swimmers... over 70 kids taking swim lessons... and over 40 goal meetings. All the while though the team embarked on a preseason conditioning program that was better than ever - and it has definitely paid off. These last two weeks have been all about training and making physiological changes... not getting reacquainted with the water and adjusting to workouts. The sets have been more demanding, the dryland has been more intense, and the weight room has led to noticeable strength gains. The best part of all of this is that the team has a figured out a way to do it while maintaining their focus on school, and feeling like they can handle it. The lessons learned in prioritizing, time management, and risk taking have been, and will continue to be, very valuable.

Things look to be heading in a direction that could lead to many fast swims and lifetime bests this season. It is exciting to think about how much better each person is compared to last year at this time. This weekend will be a good gauge for us, and we look forward to seeing what times pop up on the board. Meet results and a recap will be up Saturday night, so stay tuned!

Below are a few pictures from the Ted Mullin "Hour of Power," a fundraising event we did for sarcoma cancer research... very cool stuff. For more info on this event please click here.

Coach

New National Record! - Charlotte Green '11

Ok, so it's a Scottish National Medley Relay Record, but nonetheless, very cool. Charlotte is studying abroad right now, and still swimming... fast! Her team headed to England for a meet and she competed very well. Read below for details.... and, by the way, how cool is that!!??

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Hey Coach!

Just wanted to send a quick update. This weekend we had the BUCS (British Universities and College Sport) swim meet in Sheffield, England. I swam the 50, the 100, and 200 free. It was in short course meters, but here are my times anyway:

50 Free: 28.1

Free Relay Split - 27 something

Medley Split (with a LZR) - 26.7
100 free: 1:00.6
200 free: 2:14

Other than the medley relay with the LZR I was just wearing a normal suit. I looked up the converted times too:

50 free: 25.18, and 23.92 with the lzr
100 free: 54.3
200 free: 2:00.06

Not too bad for the second week of season... i dont think... And faster than my times from November last year. I ended up 12th in the 100 free and 14th in the 200, which is cool - but it didn't make it into finals (they take the top 10). But our 200 free relay got 3rd, and our 200 medley relay got 2nd, and broke the Scottish National Record! I'm attaching pictures of our team. Anyway, overall a relatively succesful weekend. I hope everything is going well back at Bates!

See you in a little over a month, and tell the team i say hi!

Charlotte

Margaret Hoelzer - "Enjoying Swimming"

I just received an email link to this video.. what a great recommendation on very valuable insight! Enjoy.

Miracle

From the Blog... "The Talent Code"

"Here’s Josh Sacco, a four-year-old who’s memorized the inspiring pre-game speech from the USA hockey movie “Miracle.” It’s great stuff, not only because Josh is ridiculously cute (especially when he yells “SCREW ‘EM!”), but also because he illustrates a powerful point: the neurological power of passionate repetition.

Josh has seen the movie 150 times. But it’s not just seeing. It’s the caring–the connection of his identity to this story. As this story explains, the 1980 U.S. hockey team is an emotional touchstone for the Sacco family: the game was a crucial event in his father’s life; they’ve even visited the Lake Placid arena where the win took place. Combine that kind of passion with 150 viewings, and you build quite a fluent (not to mention entertaining) circuit."

GMM - Brendan Hansen

Brendan Hansen is smart and funny.

DeSantis Blog...

Interesting Perspective from a Colby Grad and huge of fan of DIII and NESCAC Swimming.

After I posted my blog earlier this week, reader Bob G. from Illinois reached out with this response, which I have condensed:

"Saw your blog on dogfighting/overtraining. Having lived through the 70's and 80's when many of our bright young stars were buried by coaches who adopted the more is better method of training I can say the coaching profession is doing a much better job of protecting our young athletes. That is not to say that it doesn't happen.

More than often the cause of "overtraining" especially at the college level is caused by athletes not taking care of themselves. You fill in the blanks, late nights, bad eating habits. drinking and drugs. Also, you see athletes that have had success in high volume programs who try to train the same way they did in High School with less sleep and poor nutrition"

And you know what? Bob makes a great point that I didn't cover at all.

What is the athlete's responsibility?

I know that athletes can absolutely betray the trust of their coach because when I was in college, I did it myself. I ended up apologizing to my coach two years after I graduated, moved into coaching and realized something that should have been smacking me in the face the entire time I was at school. Nothing ruins a training plan like busting your butt Monday through Saturday, then spending the 48 hours you have to recover in a drunken stupor. I focus on alcohol here because it was how I sabotaged my own training and probably the most common betrayal that college athletes commit.

Coaches can't factor alcohol abuse into their season plan. And it is likely that a coach will only get any concrete information about swimmers "extra-curricular" activity when something bad happens, and the police/hospitals are involved. Any other information they get is purely hearsay and generally I've found swimmers try to band together and even protect their teammates' drinking problems from their coach.

Alcohol abuse is such a serious betrayal of trust from athlete to coach, or even teammates for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it is actually a performance reducer. You are taking purposeful action to reduce your body's ability to rest, recover and grow stronger. As I said, I realized this all too late when a couple years out of school I had gone almost abstinent. All of a sudden, I could recover great workout to workout, my weight that I had battled for years fell off. I felt like a more talented version of myself. But the fact that alcohol abuse hinders your performance alone does not fully encompass what a betrayal it is. The fact that some athletes seem to take great pleasure in it, see it as a undeniable part of their existence as a college student, and fight tooth and nail to preserve it, makes it so weighty.

To sum it up, the true and most common betrayal of trust between coach and athlete is the belief that the pursuit of excellence stops at the end of a two-hour practice, that choices you make about what you do socially, what you eat and how much you sleep don't matter. An athlete can look at their effort in practice and really believe that they are doing everything in their power to become better. In truth, they may be working against themself in more ways than one.