My three favorite physical activities are sculling, skate-skiing, and swimming. What all have in common, is that they’re rhythmic, aerobic, and place a really exacting emphasis on balance. I find this provides the perfect combination for achieving flow states, and for ecstatic moments when you’ve been struggling with some aspect of balance or coordination and have a breakthrough. I hope to get a single shell when I have more free time to use it. I find it difficult to get excited about activities that fall short of that threshold.

Also, you’ll be interested to know that I read “The Inner Game of Tennis” within a month or two of beginning my coaching journey in the fall of 72. Though my reason for reading it was because I’d decided to dabble in tennis as a potential replacement for the exercise I’d gotten by swim training for the previous 5 years, until my ‘retirement’ from competitive swimming in Aug 72, I immediately recognized that the concepts he expressed would be exceptionally valuable to my swim coaching. My interest in playing tennis only lasted a few weeks. My embrace of Inner Game ideas has continued for nearly 4 decades.

I believe it’s important to ask these questions – rhetorical though they may be. And that’s why I decided to publish this. If your own experience–participating or observing–has been different, please let us know. Which questions in particular do you feel are unreflective of the prevailing culture of competitive swim coaching?

The U.S. crew teams did not do terribly well that year. If you looked at the bow of the U.S. v. the more successful German boat, you could see that the latter was much smoother. By comparison, the bow of the U.S. boat (many boats have a little ball on the end that help you observe this) was going up and down more. Now, it just makes sense that if a percentage of your energy is making the boat go vertically instead of forward horizontally, you’re going to be at a disadvantage to a boat whose energy is more directed toward the finish line.

My guess is that the German crew, through their training, had a greater sensitivity to “boatness,” how a boat behaves in the water and how to become one with water and boat. Brute strength from practice on land is one thing, however if you misapply that energy, you will lose your advantage in the water.

And so it is with TI swimming that we learn to be more in tune with the water, and in the case of soccer, more in tune with movement.

It’s interesting that the word passion, used in the article to describe American teams, comes from the latin word “pati,” which means to feel or to suffer. Maybe if we had more feeling and less suffering in our passion for sports, we’d do better.