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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.
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