January 11, 2010
News For
SWIM
PARENTS
Published by
The American Swimming Coaches Association
5101 NW 21
Ave., Suite 200
Fort Lauderdale FL
33309
___________________________________________________________________
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.
