By Paul Tenorio
If you can even touch the work ethic the great ones, like Michael Phelps, use to be the best, then, even if you're as slow as Paul Tenorio, you can maximize your potential. (Photo by Gero Breloer/AP)
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In order to truly be successful, in my opinion — and this extends beyond sports — you can never be satisfied.
What makes someone great — the Jordans, the Tigers, the Hamms, the Phelps’ — is the drive. The never-gonna-quit mentality. The idea that I can always get better.
So every day when I swim, no matter how far I’ve come or how hard I work or whatever workout I do that I feel good about, I know how much more I can do, how much farther I can go.
In journalism, I constantly work to get to the level of the writers around me that I admire, some of whom I grew up reading. In swimming, where I am approaching four months in the pool, the vast potential for improvement ahead can hardly even be articulated.
There is so much to learn.
Every day I watch film of myself taken from that day’s practice, every day I think about what I did in the workout and I try to figure out how I can get better. Sure, I am able to swim longer distances…but am I doing it the right way? What is my technique like when I’m tired? How hard am I going in and out of turns? What can I do to be more efficient?
The biggest challenge of all this, of course, isn’t to write about it after the fact, but rather to analyze and realize it during the workout.
Today’s workout was an awesome example. The point of the whole set was to get you dogged tired and say, ‘Okay, now keep sprinting.’ This was a challenge to every swimmer to make sure that not only were you working hard and going fast, but that you were doing it the right way.
The set broke down like this:
Warm-up:
200 swim, 100 kick, 200 pull, 100 kick; 300 swim, 100 kick, 300 pull, 100 kick.
50 all-out sprint
200 kick
Two 50s all-out sprint
200 kick, two 25s zero breath
Three 50s all-out sprint
200 kick, four 25s zero breath
Four 50s all-out sprint
200 kick, six 25s zero breath
Five 50s all-out sprint
This set, in my opinion, is designed just as much to test your mental fortitude as it is to test your physical ability. If you do it right, you should be barely able to finish that 15th 50.
I used to get so frustrated during soccer practices back in the day when I saw people absolutely kicking butt in the the last sprints of a long sprint workout. It seems counter-intuitive to be mad at that. I should be happy my teammates are doing well. But that wasn’t the point. To me I always felt like, if you aren’t bent over sucking air and dying during those last sprints, you haven’t been doing it right. It doesn’t matter if you’re the fastest guy running (or in the pool) or the slowest. If everyone is going all out then everyone should by gassed after each sprint.
Thus, when you heard the set this morning you could easily think to yourself, ‘Okay, I’ll go a bit more toned down on the three 50s sprint,’ or ‘I’ll pace myself on the first and second of those final five sprints.’ But then you’re losing the whole entire point of the workout. This is about learning how to push through exhaustion. This is about creating a reference point to the third wall of a 100 or the final wall of a 200. When your arms feel like they each weigh 150 pounds, can you still push yourself?
I admit, I wasn’t perfect today. I was really, really tired and my form stunk as a result. It’s not that I wasn’t trying. In fact I would propose that it was the opposite. Because I was so tired and still desperately trying to go fast, my body was finding ways to feel like it was doing work without hurting.
But, as I said above, this was about going hard and fast — and doing it the right way.
So as I worked through the set and tried to catch my breath amid cramps and exhaustion, I was lucky to have Zack Wise next to me coaching me up, even ducking under water to see where my stroke was failing.
I wasn’t anchoring and pulling enough, my arms were sliding out before pulling down (super inefficient) and in the final 50 I was almost bobbing up out of the water instead of rotating through the hips and shoulder and keeping my stroke long, powerful and efficient.
I could have looked at the advice as a negative. That I was lazy and figured out a way to get around the hard work…while still working hard — that I lost the full effect of the workout. Instead, I’m choosing to look at it as what I talked about in the opening of this blog — I still have so much to learn and so many ways to get better.
As much as I took away the physical and mental aspects of today’s workout — getting tired and still going as hard as I could — what I learned most was that I have a million things I can do better with my stroke, a million ways to get better every day.
Jeff King has emphasized to me everything Zack pointed out today, but when someone separately watches you and takes time out of his day and workout to talk to you about it, you start to really wrap your mind around the improvements that need to happen.
Most importantly it provides the motivation to wake up and — no matter how sore you might be (and trust me I’ll be sore) — get back into the pool and maintain that focus to get better.
If you want to be great, if you want to do something the right way, that’s the drive it’s going to take.
I’ll never be a Michael Phelps or Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. But if I can just hit a little on that mentality of greatness, if I can aspire to work my hardest the way they work their hardest, at least I can get as much out of it as I’m putting in.
Washington Post reporter Paul Tenorio will train with a swim club over the next few months and chronicle his journey as he attempts to transform from regular guy/sports reporter to competitive swimmer — everything from his waistline to his best times.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Diving Back In. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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