For most of this summer I’ve done little fast swimming, largely because an autoimmune condition called polymyalgia rheumatica caused muscle inflammation and sapped my energy.  I made peace with that by figuring this was a good time for restorative swimming.  I turn 60 next March and will likely train with intensity and focus in coming months to ‘make a splash’ in my new age group. Using this summer to recharge my batteries felt like a good thing. But once my condition was diagnosed and properly treated, I felt such relief that I decided to swim my first races of the summer, on August 14 at the Betsy Owens Cable Swims in Lake Placid.

Predictably my results reflected lack of training, a fair 25:09 for the 1-mile, followed an hour later by 56:21 for 2 Miles. Ouch — 8 minutes slower than last year, and over 10 minutes back of my best since age 55.  But I felt better the next morning, when I swam up and down Mirror Lake with Neil Brophy, Bruce Gianniny and Kim Skomra. Our 45-minute swim was a relaxed cruise for Neil, who had  set a new USMS 45-49 mile record of 20:03 and Bruce who broke the 55-59 record (which I had set four years ago) with 22:51. For me it was instructive to see their stroke length.  I couldn’t come close to matching Neil’s (consoling myself that he’s 3 inches taller) and needed to focus intently to match Bruce’s.  Doing so felt strikingly salutary. That was fresh in mind when I resumed swimming in Lake Minnewaska later that week.

New 45-49 record holder Neil Brophy

55-59 record-holder Bruce Gianniny

At Minnewaska, I can monitor efficiency by counting strokes along a 200-yd line. Prior to Betsy Owens I’d been taking an average of about 180 strokes per length, as I tried to pack the two weeks during which I felt healthy again with rehearsals of race-like tempo and effort.

But with the race behind me, and encouraged by how good extending myself to match Bruce’s strokes felt, I’m now striving to keep my average at 160,  a habit I’d had several years ago but had since lost. I soon decided that the best way to prepare myself for the fast swimming I hope to do next spring and summer is to strengthen my neural efficiency foundation by continuing this way through the fall.

Smooth  Stroke, Clear Mind

This didn’t just feel good physically. Striving to reach the end of the line in 160 strokes brought a simpler, clearer focus than I’d had in some time.  After enough practice, a lap of 160 strokes or less acquires a recognizable feel—bodyline sleek and stable, catch patient and firm; even the water around me feels calmer. When any of those sensations feels slightly off, even for only a short patch. my count increases by up to 10 strokes.

Thus I start each length of the line, with a clear set of sensations-to-maintain then spend 3-plus minutes trying to hold onto the feeling . . . and striving just as intently to stay locked in mentally. Such powerful focus has made my swimming more meditative than it had been in a while.

While some may picture meditation as sitting on a pillow in a quiet room, anything you do with great awareness is meditation. “Watching your breath” is meditation; listening to chants is meditation. And so is swimming that’s focused on banishing distraction. Meditation describes any state of consciousness that’s free of scattered thoughts. The key is to choose a targeted focus.

Start narrow. Expand gradually.

Those who have only recently begun TI Practice will find more success by keeping that focus very narrow. Visualizing a laser beam projecting from your head-spine line is one example.  Slicing your hand into a “Mail Slot” is another. As your practice hours mount, your focal points can become gradually more  encompassing or consolidated as mine are.

Shinji - Mail Slot (from OTB ebook)

As your powers of focus — and your neural circuits — strengthen, you can test both by swimming faster. After 90 minutes, over two days, of striving only to hold the 160-stroke-sensation, I attempted some Speedplay practice. (Learn more about Speedplay by reading Chapter 11: Develop Speed Gears with Speedplay of the Outside the Box ebook. See it illustrated in the Outside the Box DVD. )

I began by alternating sets of 10 strokes easy, 10 strokes ‘brisk’ (which means “How fast can I swim without losing the sensation?”) I also monitored how many strokes that added to my count.  When I could consistently complete a length of Speedplay in 165 or less, I began taking 20 strokes brisk at a time. Soon I was sustaining stretches of 40 strokes brisk, with only a slight degradation in the sense-of-control I was aiming for.

This deep internal focus kept me in a meditative state, something virtually impossible while training to swim a particular time., the traditional way to train for speed.

Finally, if you race triathlons, strength of focus gains its greatest power by insulating you from the potentially-paralyzing distraction of hundreds of churning bodies.

This is the first year swimming star Michael Phelps blatantly ignored his coach’s training plan. Some days he would show up to practice. Other days he would sneak off and play golf. There would be no phone call, no heads up. Bowman would wait by the side of the pool at the designated workout time. If Phelps’s lane remained empty, Bowman would go on without him.

Phelps’s performance at the Pan Pacific Championships reflected his sporadic attention. He . . . failed to advance to the final of the 400 IM in which he holds a world record and on Saturday morning he dropped out of another event because he was out of gas. He acknowledged repeatedly that he arrived here in poor shape and felt disappointed with some of his times.

This sentence, midway down, illuminates what I see as the main issue: Bowman, Urbanchek and other coaches say they know they can’t force adult swimmers to train like children, yet swimming is not a sport that readily tolerates shortcuts.

Swim coaching and training has always followed an authoritarian model. Allowing swimmers a voice in their training is unheard of. In part that reflects the reality that it was always a youth sport. Partly because promising swimmers are asked to train so hard at ages 12 to 15 that burnout by 22 or earlier is almost inevitable. And partly because swimmers lacked reason or motivation to continue beyond college. Earnings from sponsorships has changed the latter but done nothing to address the former.

Then there’s the fact that anything other than high-volume, high-intensity training is considered a “shortcut.”

Thirty years ago, I developed several world-ranked swimmers, as a USAS club coach in Richmond VA. None approached Phelps’s success, but one was an Olympic medalist in 1992. The 20 years I’ve spent working with improvement-minded adults — and personal experience training for races up to marathon distance in middle-age — have shown that technique-oriented training has far greater potential for maximizing performance than I realized back then.

So long as I remained within the “competitive-swimming bubble” my sense of possibility was mainly within the volume-and-effort paradigm. But if I were to return today to that sort of coaching,  my methods would be radically changed — and I believe could prove far more compatible with the emotional and performance needs of post-collegiate swimmers.

My TI experiences have convinced me the primary reason swimmers seem incapable of performing at a high level on less training are:

1. Human swimmers are, by nature, ‘energy-wasting machines’  and traditional training does little to address that. The USA Swimming protocols for conditioning are exhaustive and meticulously documented. Those for increasing efficiency are ad-hoc and undocumented.
2. A very high percentage of training is non-specific, summed up by the phrase “getting the yards in” which has fortunately replaced the odious “garbage yardage” which was actually an article of faith among many coaches when I was coaching.

I believe a focus on better understanding the neural aspects of training, and approaches that include the mathematical predictability of tools like the Tempo Trainer would make a considerable difference by (1) more efficient use of time and energy; and (2) replacing tedium, which is increasingly difficult for an intellectually-evolved person to tolerate, with engagement and purpose.

Add this to the list : “Build or fix your own stroke and adapt and imprint it for distance or speed . . . and since specialization is for insects, master at least two strokes.”

The other day my wife Alice and soon-to-be-son-in-law Rich were discussing the book Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. I’d read reviews when it was published last year. Crawford, finding his work at a “think tank” unsatisfying, left to work in a motorcycle repair shop. His experiences led to an essay published in 2006, which he later expanded into a book about the dignity and meaningfulness of hands-on work – solving problems, fixing something and having a direct connection with a tangible result. His point was how uncommon this is in the “knowledge economy” —  making conference calls, sending emails, filling out spreadsheets. At the end of the day, you might wonder what you really accomplished.

The essay reminded me of my first car, a ‘59 VW Bug with a canvas sunroof, bought for $75.  Then I spent another 5 bucks on “How to Keep your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot” by John Muir.

Though I’d never shown any mechanical aptitude, sheer economic necessity drove me to open the engine compartment. What a relief to see that the ‘guts’ were naked, simple and hardly larger than a mower engine.  Using the book, I did tune-ups, valve adjustments and brake jobs. It kept my car on the road and me solvent, but the most important outcome was a sense of empowerment and accomplishment equal to anything I’d known.

Today when I open the hood of my 2010  Jetta TDI wagon – a car that’s an absolute dream to drive in comparison to that earlier veedub — about all I’m comfortable doing is adding windshield washer fluid.

Recalling this makes me think a subconscious motivation in creating the Self-Coached Workshop/10-Lesson Series has been my fondness for that book and the sense of accomplishment it brought. I’d like  nothing more than to be  ”John Muir for Adult Swimmers.”

What problems have you identified in your stroke, what errors might you fix? And how satisfying will the tangible result of your improvement be?  Here’s a set of “Step by Step Procedures” for stroke improvement.

From Chapter 5 “Different Strokes: Open Water vs. Pool Technique”

While others at Masters workout focused on pool speed, I used every repeat, no matter how short, as a rehearsal for open water races.  On short repeats, most would swim with aggressive, high-turnover strokes – some taking 21 or more strokes for 25 yards, while I limited myself to 15 SPL, regardless of how brief the swim or how hard the coach urged us to swim.

I probably could have swum those sprints faster by taking more strokes. But since my favored races were long open water swims, rather than pool sprints, I preferred to imprint the optimal way to swim during them. On “sprints,” rather than take more strokes, I focused on getting more out of those I took. I felt this would help program my muscles for the faster parts of open water races-–the start and finish. I was unconcerned that my sprints were slow by pool standards, so long as they developed open water speed.

Beyond the question of stroke count, I’d also begun to refine my sense of technique adjustments that minimized fatigue without sacrificing pace, a years-long process that included an unhurried catch, a higher-elbow-but-lighter-pressure stroke, and a patiently-tuned 2-Beat kick.

My goal was to avoid reliance on fatigue-prone arm and shoulder muscles by drawing ‘free power’ from weight shifts and untiring core muscle. This required the patience to work in a longer time horizon: While my pool-mates were thinking about racing to the next wall, I thought constantly about how I hoped to feel during open-water races months-–or years–in the future.

To swim your best in open water you must make a strategic choice to swim in a way that could slow your pool times, at least on shorter repeats — and, during a period of adjustment, possibly on longer ones as well. However, any swim that lasts over a minute should benefit fairly quickly from the reduced energy cost of Perpetual Motion Freestyle.  But first, you must be willing to defer the immediate gratification of short-term speed for long-term gain.

*  *  *  *

Will myelin improve my  swimming?

At 1:23 of the accompanying video, I play a brief clip from the Outside the Box DVD, showing me swimming in the 2006 World Masters Open Water Championship in San Francisco Bay (clip shot by TI-Japan Head Coach Shinji Takeuchi.) It shows me swimming through a pack of swimmers from waves which started 5 to 10 minutes before mine. The difference between my technique and theirs is striking. I explain their struggles as resulting from “not enough myelin.” This excerpt from the Outside the Box ebook explains the significance of myelin.

From Chapter 10: “Increase Sustainability by Secreting Myelin!”

Muscle memory is a metaphor for a physiological change in your neuromuscular system. Swimming efficiently requires a specific set of muscles to be turned on (and off) in an exacting and non-instinctive pattern. With each stroke, an electrochemical signal travels from your brain to instruct motor units to contract or relax. Each time the signal crosses that circuit, a bit more myelin, a fatty substance that acts like insulation on electrical wires, is secreted, strengthening the signal received by your muscles. A relatively faint signal is good enough to keep the movement consistent while swimming slowly for short distances in a low-distraction environment. It takes a strong signal, i.e., a lot of myelin, to remain efficient as your fatique increases when you swim a mile or more at higher speeds with waves smacking you or avoiding collisions with other swimmers. . . . in the rough water of San Francisco Bay, the main difference between me and those I’m passing is myelin secretion. Thicker insulation, laid down during thousands of focused, purposeful rehearsal repeats allows me to swim with virtually the same stroke as in the pool or a serene lake. Lacking it, most others swim with a “barely coping” stroke.

Here I was able to observe the entire field from the leaders, who finished in just over 4 hours, to the final finishers who came in 4+ hours later.  I was struck by the relative isolation of the leaders in this particular race. The top 10 to 20 finishers, were spread thinly, in some cases several minutes apart  for most of the run. Those in the middle and back of the pack were engaged in a much more communal activity – seeming to race with, not against, each other in large, close groups.

I’ve pondered this a great deal since in 30 years of open water racing I’ve mainly been a front-pack finisher and a keen competitor.  This has meant mastering tactics like sighting quickly — and coaching others who swim in open water to do the same.

Thus a message I received this week from Bob McAdams a TI Coach in New Jersey was mind-expanding: “My first real open water swimming experience was last summer, while working with a student who was preparing for his first triathlon.  After some lessons in a pool, we went to a nearby lake with marker buoys.  It was also my first experience in a wetsuit. The temperature was something like 58 degrees F and I was amazed at how well a sleeveless wetsuit protected me from the cold.  I was also surprised to discover it let me float without kicking.

Although I can do sighting strokes, we both found it easier just to pause now and then and look at the shore.  What impressed me the most was the changing scenery.  I remember being struck by the fact that I could actually use swimming to travel somewhere!”

I relate strongly to the possibility of using swimming to travel somewhere you wish to go, rather than ping-pong between the walls of a man-made box. My first swimming urge, at age 7 or 8, was to be able to swim to a floating raft, 20 yards offshore at Bar Beach in Hempstead Harbor on LI Sound. For all my swimming ability at the time, it might as well have been across the Sound in Connecticut. The desire to reach that raft was as strong as any I recall from childhood.

But what Bob wrote about choosing to pause to look at the shore struck me, as never before, as possibly a very smart strategy even for racing, for open water swimmers and triathletes who are new to open water racing. Previously I’d just assumed that we should encourage everyone to strive for early mastery of the quick-peek sighting stroke that top open water racers use.

But anxiety, not inefficiency or lack of speed, is the most common and daunting challenge faced by novice open water racers. One of the best ways to not just maintain calm, but to actually enjoy the experience, would be to do all you can to avoid feeling rushed.

So why not include in your race plan to intentionally pause along the way to look at the shore, the changing scenery and take in — and feel good about — how far you’ve traveled.  The time you’ll add will be negligible (in fact by staying relaxed and avoiding the common tight-chest sensation you could even save time) while the enjoyment you gain will be considerable. And when you do pause, note and appreciate the company of all those you’re swimming with.

Learn more about how to gain greater enjoyment from open water swimming in my ebook Outside the Box.  Read a free excerpt here.

“Friend’s timing could not be better. Some 16 million Americans now practice yoga, a 5,000-year-old mental, physical and spiritual discipline brought to us by Indian gurus. Nowadays there aren’t just hourly classes in major American cities but also in places like Deephaven, Minn., and Hattiesburg, Miss. . . .  If yoga began as a meditation technique with poses, or asanas, devised to assist in reaching a transcendentally blissful state, it has . . . become much more about doing than being . . .  a weight-loss technique and a stress-management tool . . . an exploding market for workout clothes and equipment. “

“Friend set out to build his brand by straddling yoga’s two poles: he is trying to enhance yoga’s spiritual aspects by training teachers to speak inspirationally as they teach postures. Friend spends a great deal of time on philosophy and writes that the spiritual effects of yoga are more important than the physical ones . . . in language that draws as much from Dale Carnegie and the American idiom of self-improvement as from Hindu philosophy.”

“Friend’s yoga is based on classic hatha-yoga postures — he has refined them using what he calls ‘universal principles of alignment’ — but it can be as challenging as a student wants it to be. His classes are less about toned abs than about self-expression and enjoyment. Adjustments don’t make the poses ‘right,’ for instance, they make them “more beautiful.”

The intention to make an asana more beautiful rather than ‘right’ is one I relate strongly to. From my first day of coaching, in 1972, I had an instinct to coach esthetically more than energetically. My experience as a swimmer suggested that races were decided primarily by how long and hard you worked. My slight exposure to principles of technique left me with a sense one might need an engineering degree to really understand them.

But from literally my first hour on deck observing my team in the pool, I found myself magnetically drawn to visual impressions and to feeling that clean lines and flowing movement would produce faster times. Even as articles and clinic talks continued to describe technique like rocket science I grew steadily more convinced that that any instruction that made a swimmer look taller, sleeker or smoother deserved recall and reuse. Over the years what was initially instinctive and experimental developed into a method.

Striving continuously to make your stroke more beautiful obviously has far greater potential for engagement and uplift than striving to make it technically correct.

According to TI-Japan Head Coach Shinji Takeuchi,  the promise that draws the strongest response there is Learn to swim with more grace.  Though I’ve spent 45 years as a competitive swimmer and coach, nothing moves me more than seeing a truly beautiful stroke. Shinji’s Youtube video is both the most beautiful swimming and the most popular on the web, making it clear over a million others feel as I do.

What I take from this is that a holistic and crystallizing goal for many swimmers and triathletes would be to “Move with grace at the end of the race.”

For both Buddhism and TI, discoveries about neuroplasticity—i.e. observations that the brain is constantly rewiring itself—reveal that our practice methods create changes in brain infrastructure. When the Dalai Lama said that the purpose of life is happiness, and that purpose is achieved through training the mind, he spoke literally, not figuratively. TI has been seeking to replace the traditional belief–that you improve at swimming by training the body–with a new principle that you improve by training the brain. And that this—because it’s a form of moving meditation–is also a proven way to experience Flow, a state of almost unmatched happiness.

In an unprecedented convergence of Western science with Eastern philosophy, Dr. Richard Davidson, a University of Wisconsin professor of psychiatry, brought 32 subjects to his Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience in Madison and wired them for study. Half were Buddhist monks, each of whom had 10,000 to 50,000 lifetime hours of meditation. Half were control subjects with no previous training, who were taught the fundamentals of meditation for two weeks prior to the experiment.

All were placed in an MRI scanner and asked to think compassionately about people close to them, then about mankind in  general. The scientists reading the scans knew that optimistic and constructive thinking activates the left frontal cortex, while stress or depression activate the right frontal cortex.  When the monks meditated on compassion, they showed an average of 100 percent greater activity in the left frontal cortex; two showed increases of 700 to 800 percent. The novice meditators increased activity in that area by just 10 percent.

This study was the first to document that thinking patterns can be learned in the same way as physical skills–by stimulating cell growth in the region of the brain where that kind of neural activity occurs. The scans revealed that thousands of hours of meditation had grown significantly more robust brain circuits and, with it, the ability to generate far more “brain power” in that region. In other words, brain power is no different than muscle power—a result of targeted work that adds ‘functional tissue’ in a particular area of the physical body.

“People are not stuck at certain preset points,” Dr. Davidson says. “We can take advantage of our brain’s plasticity to enhance chosen qualities.” In another study at Massachusetts General Hospital, and MIT, brain scans showed that regular practice of mindfulness increased cortical thickness in an area of the right hemisphere that we use to sustain attention and increase sensory awareness—two essential capacities for improving a stroking pattern!

From Aspiration to Achievement

These were my most exciting and empowering insights in all the time since I began swimming in 1966 or coaching in 1972. They revealed that: (1) The mindsets and behaviors that lead to Mastery are learnable; (2) Literally every perception or action that occurs from the moment you  cross the threshold to the pool deck, or approach the shore of a lake is controlled by the brain; and (3) Any rational objective can be brought to fruition through the application of strategic mindfulness.

• If you expect to improve continuously at swimming, you will.
• If you interpret something in your environment—crowded lanes, rough water, not enough time, too-warm or too-cold water—as an opportunity to “strengthen a circuit”. . . though every other person in the pool finds it annoying or inconvenient . . . you will turn it into an opportunity.
• If you focus on finding and fixing inefficiency in your stroke, it will improve before you leave the water.
• If you decide to complete a 20-mile marathon—no matter that you can barely complete 25 yards now—you will!

How different from the wishful thinking I done for the first 25 years of my swimming life.

The TI Self-Coached Workshop has been designed upon this principle.

I was there mainly to cheer daughter Betsy in her first triathlon — at the 70.3 distance. Betsy has taught TI for quite a few  years–to infants as well as octogenarians, to  nervous, even phobic, beginners as well as English Channel aspirants.  She’s also raced in open water several times a year, since her mid-20s. Her first triathlon was

True to form I never actually saw her take a single stroke, recognizing her only as she stood and peeled off her cap after 1.2 miles in Seneca Lake. I saw her flash by on the bike as  she left the transition to start 56 miles, and never again (I rode my own bike around Geneva to pass the time.). On the 13.1-mile run I found her by working backward from the finish to the 9-mile mark, then accompanied her for the last 4 miles, a stretch during which she passed dozens of competitors — and was passed by no one. Betsy improved her position by maintaining a relaxed smooth stride and walking only briefly at water stops, while others struggled with deteriorating form or walked for long stretches.  Though it was 85 degrees with an unforgiving sun, she looked remarkably fresh.

While I felt a father’s pride there, my memorable moment came over two hours after Betsy’s finish of 7 hrs 23 minutes. Indeed more than 90 minutes after the race was declared officially over at the 8 hour mark. Several minutes apart, at about 9 hours and 30 minutes — after the finish area had been broken down and taken away, the results trailer had been packed up, the spectators had departed and when all that remained of the post-race meal were some cold, glutinous squares of pizza — two final finishers came down the home stretch. One was a man in his 50s greeted by his wife and daughter and two volunteers who held up a length of discarded boundary tape for him to break, the other a woman wearing the green jersey of “Team Z,” who cheered her final steps lustily.

At least to me they’re anonymous–I realized belatedly I should have asked their names–because they don’t show up in the results. But I thought about the mental strength it takes to be  on the course alone, with the aid stations already closed, the cheering spectators departed, the hot sun beating and miles still to go, knowing your accomplishment will receive no official notice. But this–finishing what you started for your own satisfaction–seems to me, more than the fast times of elites that receive far more attention in the tri media, the true essence of this and all endurance sports.

I watched the race leaders during parts of the run and was impressed by their light. fluid, fast strides. But  they kind of made it look easy, and enjoyed support and encouragement  all along from aid station volunteers and spectators. They also tend to be the center of gravity and attention in the sport, particularly its media.

However, the great majority of the 1000 or so athletes I watched on Sunday appeared to be running to participate in a ‘healthful fellowship’ than to prove themselves athletically. But their keenest personal focus–in those hot, draining final miles–was to finish what they started. So this is a salute to those who traversed the hardest miles to do so.

I can’t help but add that persistence itself draws on particular brain circuits and the final finisher in an endurance event grows the persistence circuit more than anyone.

Its  message can be capsulized as:

1. The purpose of life is happiness.

2. Once  basic  needs are met, happiness is determined more by the state of one’s mind than by external conditions, circumstances, or events.

3. Happiness can be achieved through the systematic training of our hearts and minds, through reshaping  attitudes and outlook.

4. The key to happiness is in your own hands.

More succinctly, the Dalai Lama advises,  before making a choice  ask: “Will this bring me happiness?”

Reading this yesterday brought to mind an experience from last November:

Kaizen Happiness

Eight months ago, I met opera director Paolo Carignani in Manhattan. We swam  at Reebok Fitness Club before Alice and I watched him conduct a performance of Aida at the Met Opera.  Paolo had transformed himself into the picture of grace with TI practice (aided by TI Coaches in  Zurich, NY, Tokyo and Barcelona. )

Paolo always practices TI before a performance, because it increases his energy (as we saw, conducting an opera demands incredible endurance–Aida lasted over 3 hours) and even makes his conducting movements more fluid!  But he was even more emphatic about the importance of a  more holistic effect: Several times he repeated “TI has such a gift for making people happy!”

Two days later, after finishing a practice in a very happy state myself, I was reading an article about a zen roshi who conducts a weekly devotion near Woodstock. He said “People seem much happier as they leave the service.”

Suddenly this confluence of happy thoughts produced the most inspiring possibility I’d ever considered — Kaizen Happiness!

As with all things Kaizen, this would result in:

1) Continuously increasing one’s knowledge of how to  create feelings of happiness; and

2) Continuously deepen the quality of happiness one feels.

If you could do both, you might one day inspire someone to say of you (as Howard Cutler wrote of the Dalai Lama): “I still had a long way to go before achieving the kind of pervasive joy that he seemed to radiate so effortlessly.”

Since that week in November I have had a clearer vision of the direction of my own swimming, and the Total Immersion program: Aim both more consistently toward the Pursuit of Happiness.

I’ll expand further on this idea  in posts to follow, but invite you to ask yourself before any practice or set: How will this bring me happiness?