Learning to love routine
An essential insight for achieving mastery is that learning any challenging skill involves brief spurts forward, followed by a much longer plateau slightly higher than the previous one. To pursue Mastery, you must embrace the idea of spending most of your time on a plateau, continuing to practice enthusiastically even when you seem to be stagnating. Those occasional upward surges are not the only time progress is occurring. On an invisible, cellular level, learning and adaptation are constant, so long as you are giving your body tasks that require deep concentration to complete.
And you keep yourself on the path toward mastery by practicing primarily for the sake of practice itself. Rather than becoming frustrated by your seeming lack of progress, learn to appreciate your daily practice routine, just as much as you are thrilled by the periodic breakthrough. Just as Zen practice does, your swimming practice can bring peace and serenity by filling the space usually occupied by the problems and distractions of your external life.
Every time I enter a pool, I immediately enter a blissful sense of wellbeing, because it's proven to be one of the few areas of life in which I can consistently do just what I want. That sense of peace allows me to luxuriate in incremental progress. At the end of every year I know I'm swimming better than the year before, stroke counts slightly lower, fluency slightly greater. And perhaps once a year I get an electrifying moment of clarity or insight. But the routine between those moments is never boring because I feel I am never more fully myself than when working on mastery. The pleasure I have gained from swimming this way has led me to other activities — rowing, yoga, cross-country skiing — that offer similar opportunities for incremental improvement through mindful practice. Together they provide an encouraging sense that, even at age 50, I'm getting steadily better as an athlete.
The Tao of Practice
Just before the 2000 Olympics, I read an illuminating profile of Marion Jones, who was on her way to gold medals in sprints and hurdles. I can't recall the writer's name, but I took these notes: "She was endowed with the neurological on-off switches to take 47 steps in less than 11 seconds with no loss of power (the average person can take about 35)...Grueling conditioning helps. So does obsessive attention to the smallest details. Running 100 meters is a violent act, beginning with a gunshot. At the same time, the training involved is analogous to a concert pianist's mastering Chopin; both are performances that require ferocious concentration and a fanatical regimen that reduces learned muscular actions to nearly automatic responses.... She trains with punctilious precision, systematically solving tiny biomechanical problems that keep her from running fractionally faster than anyone else." The writer describes a training session: "I mostly see her stepping over 10 hurdles set three feet apart...and that's about all she is doing for the better part of three hours...drilling it into both mind and body...to maintain perfect posture, which helps to keep her feet below the center of mass, which helps her explode through the hips."
Marion Jones's practice sounds very much like the learning and practice forms I suggested in Chapters 12 and 13, but radically different from conventional grind-it-out swim training. This is what differentiates practice from a workout. For anyone on the master's journey, the word practice is not just something you do, but is akin to the Chinese word tao, which means path. A practice is anything you immerse yourself in as an integral part of your life. You practice skilled swimming, not just to swim faster, but for the inherent pleasure it brings.
Sports psychologist Dr. Bob Rotella observed that the best golfers on the PGA Tour, spend more time on the practice tee than less successful players. Are they best because they practice so much or do they practice so much because of the pressure or responsibility of being the best? Rotella learned, after interviewing them, that their primary motivation for practice was the sheer pleasure of performing at the peak of their abilities. Because they swing a golf club with such exquisite control, they are happy to spend hour upon hour doing it. And the volume and complete engagement of their practice reinforces their skills and dominance. Finally, the more their skills increase, the more they enjoy practice; the essence of a positive addiction.
A few of our students have shown an impatience to move from simple drills to advanced drills to swimming to swimming fast. In contrast, the most advanced TI practitioners, like Don Walsh, the TI Master Teacher and champion marathon swimmer I mentioned in Chapter 7, who have been practicing the drills for years, have learned to appreciate the subtleties and endless possibilities contained within even the most rudimentary techniques.
On occasion, Don may repeat a single drill for 30 minutes or more. The uninterrupted, meditative repetition expands his awareness significantly. What start out as barely noticeable variations in execution become significant and revealing and can be tweaked with much more subtlety. This is why Tiger Woods can swing a golf club for six or eight hours a day without a moment of boredom. He experiences and examines so much more in every swing than does the ordinary golfer that it offers an incredible richness of experience. This newness — new insights, new awareness in "old" skills and movements — banishes boredom and impatience forever.
Becoming a Master
As I said earlier, the rewards of mastery are not reserved only for those gifted with special talents. The process of practicing like a Master will enable you to achieve a higher level of excellence and a deeper sense of satisfaction. Here are several tools to help you start your journey:
Knowledge is Power
When spending your precious time at practice — and to commit yourself without reservation — it's essential that you be confident you're on the right path. If I have done my job well, this book — confirmed by your body's feedback — can be your source of that certainty. I expect that most of those who read this book will be self-coached, but a devoted student armed with knowledge, is better off than a student with a poor teacher. And even if you have a coach, the ultimate responsibility for progress toward Mastery lies not with your teacher but with you.
Videotapes can be a source of guidance and information. If a picture is worth 1000 words, then a moving picture is probably worth 10,000 words. But learning is immeasurably aided by feedback. And you can create feedback for yourself when a teacher isn't available by finding a practice partner.
Build a support system
You can work toward mastery on your own, but it helps to share the journey with others: People who have gone through the same process and can share their wisdom and insight. People who are on the path at the same time as you, so you can compare notes. People who are simply interested in your well-being and growth and will offer encouragement. Finally, you can recruit a practice partner. Share your knowledge and goals with them and invite them to join you on the path to mastery. You'll gain a better understanding of what you have been working on learning if you teach some part of it to a partner.. .and they will then be better equipped to help you right back.
Emotional equilibrium
Eugen Herrigel, in his book Zen in the Art of Archery, wrote that zen archers do not train primarily to shoot bullseyes, but to increase their selfunderstanding. Similarly, mastery is not a pursuit of perfection, but of self-knowledge — including your flaws and limitations. You'll never reach perfection anyway, and that's fortunate, because, you'll always have some higher goal inspiring you. And particularly in swimming, so long as you have Human DNA, you will never exhaust your opportunities for learning or improvement. Further, it's essential to feel clumsy or incompetent at times — and to smile at yourself when you do. The understanding of a master learner is measured by their willingness to surrender what they "know" in order to learn something new. When teaching a four-stroke camp, we observed that experienced backstrokers struggled far more with a new backstroke drill than those who were inexperienced in backstroke. Because they "knew" how backstroke should feel, they insisted on fitting this drill into that experience. The novices achieved fluency in the drill quickly. The experienced on
es began to approach the same fluency only when they allowed themselves to "forget" what they knew about backstroke. And they were soon swimming backstroke better than ever.
Use all your potentiality
In his influential book, Tao of Jeet Kune Do, Bruce Lee wrote that 10 minutes of practice with mind and body fully integrated is worth more than 10 hours of going through the motions. It's well known that most humans operate at only a tiny fraction of their true potential and that the key to realizing more of that potential is mental, not physical. When Jack Nicklaus was the world's dominant golfer, he revealed that he never hit a shot without first visualizing the ball's perfect flight and successful conclusion "sitting up there high and white and pretty on the green." Mindful practice in swimming will soon give you an archive of "mental movies," as captivating as Nicklaus's. Driving home from practice, you may find yourself reliving the pleasure of a rhythmic, fluid stroke. Impressions like these provide the basis for detailed recall and rehearsal of the way "great" swimming feels — or of the way it looks, after watching some masterful swimmer. As you become more Fishlike, practices and races can become so enjoyable that you'll find yourself replaying them, recalling the pleasures of fluid movement hours later, just as you relive other pleasant memories. These will give you a powerful tool for reinforcing the physical part of learning. Soon, your "warmup" (both for practice and races) will become as much mental as physical. Your imagery will begin to prime your nervous system as you "swim on your way to the pool."
Making the path to mastery a powerful habit will enrich the totality of your life experience. Though you began with the limited goal of swimming better in a triathlon, you can go well beyond that to making swimming a deeply satisfying experience to learning life lessons that can enrich nearly any valued undertaking.
Happy laps,
Terry Laughlin
New Paltz NY
October, 2001
Triathlon swimming made easy Page 20