Having Fun With Planning Your Swimming Goals

By Olivier Poirier-Leroy

Oh, hello...

If you are like me, you are amazing at planning. In fact, if unchecked, I can easily lose half of my day planning stuff I want to do tomorrow, next week, or next year. Planning allows us to dream freely, to look ahead at what life will be like when things are "just perfect."

And truthfully, planning is fun.

Action, on the other hand...

A little bit of planning is good, and quite necessary. But when you resort to planning (like I caught myself doing this afternoon - again) instead of action, you begin to sacrifice results.

The Symptoms of Planning Too Much

Tell me if this sounds feel familiar...

There is something you want to do, nay, have to do to achieve your swimming goals, but the whole process of starting has got you so overwhelmed, so intimidated, that you continually put off truly committing to it until either:

1. It's too late and you don't do it all or
2. You rush to get it done at the last minute, doing a half-ass job

If you've been a student at any point in your life you know this experience well. I can still feel that knot in my stomach, sitting at my laptop in the library staring at a blank monitor, the cursor blinking judgingly at me in the empty word processing document, putting up a continuous train of excuses...

So why do we do this to ourselves?

The illusion of perfect action is one of the biggest obstacles to your success in the pool.

That what you have to do has to be done flawlessly.

That you are not allowed to fail on the first go.

That it has to be done right... Or not at all.

We want to start doing something, but we feel like our initial efforts won't be good enough, so we look around for more information, take a break, or generally postpone what we wanna do for as long as humanely possible.

"Oh, I'll start really training when I feel better."

"I'll start doing extra stretching after practice tomorrow."

"I'll start breathing bi-laterally once I get that super rad new bathing suit."

And so on.

Of course you know nothing is really perfect, so how can we continually chase "perfect" conditions? 

The only perfect condition you need is this moment right now.

Not next month.

Not when you "feel like it."

And definitely not tomorrow.

It's now.

Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national level swimmer based out of Victoria, BC. In feeding his passion for swimming, he has developed YourSwimBook, a powerful log book and goal setting guide made specifically for swimmers. Sign up for the YourSwimBook newsletter (free) and get weekly motivational tips by clicking here.