What Runners Can Learn From Swimmers
Although swimming and running are primarily aerobic exercises, there are a lot of differences above and beyond the fact that one takes place in water and the other does not. During an early morning Master’s swim practice, my mind wandered to the similarities and differences of swimming and running. As a high school cross country and distance track coach, I am always looking to be a better coach and help my athletes be faster runners and more importantly better people. As I reflected, my mind came to 3 things that runners can learn from swimmers:
Focus. The importance and power of focus in the moment and on one’s purpose.
While fatigued and oxygen-deprived, how mentally strong swimmers have to be to continue to push and keep their goals (team and personal) in the forefront of their attention is amazing. One thing unique to swimming is the fact that the vast majority of the time while training and competing, you are alone with your thoughts. No fans cheering, no coaches coaching, no teammates joking, no music to motivate- just you with your own thoughts-motivations-doubts following a line painted at the bottom of the pool. One’s self-talk is the only voice that you hear while swimming. The power of positive self-talk in this environment is incredible.
Swimming is a non-impact sport. This allows athletes to have longer practice times and be able to spend more time at specific intensities (ie- race pace). 6–7 days a week of practices, 2 a day practices, each being 2+ hours in length are routine and expected for elite level swimmers. To be able to endure this amount of training for years on end requires athletes to have a very strong purpose for their training and racing.
Purpose
Beginning with the end in mind, What do you want? To become? To do? Your future first begins as a narrative that your brain tells you. You must know what you want to accomplish and WHY this is important to you. Clarity is key. The more clarity you have with your desired outcome and why this is meaningful to you, the more likely you are to succeed in reaching that state. The journey to being better than yesterday requires you to know and continually revisit your “why”. This “why” will be the fuel for you to execute the actions that your dream state demands. Your focus in the moment is connected to your end vision. The clearer your vision for the future, the easier it is to focus on what is currently required of you.
Having a purpose encompasses a lot- purpose for the interval, purpose for the workout, purpose for your goals, purpose for your life! In sport it boils down to being both physically and mentally present at training (completing your training with purpose) and to having goals (your purpose for completing the workout and race).
A typical main set of a swim practice could be:
4 rounds of:
[
100 swim at 200 Race Pace with :30 rest
2x 50 at 100 Race Pace with :20 rest
4x 25 faster than 100 race pace with :10 rest
200 easy swim recovery
]
This is a very difficult set to complete with lots of race pace swimming and minimal rest. As swimmers are in the midst of completing the first round, they could easily be thinking ahead to the future saying “There is no way I can do this! I have not even finished the first round and I am dead! How in the world will I be able to complete another 3 rounds of this?!” As soon as athletes do this, then they have gone from improvement mode to survival mode- they have lost sight of their purpose for doing what they are doing. Staying in the moment, focusing on the task at hand and giving your best effort are the keys to success with swimming, running, and life!
Form and Technique.
Water is 800 times denser than air, so how efficiently you move through it will determine its resistance. In swimming, success hinges on how efficiently you can move through the water and requires an entirely different set of technical skills than any other land-based sport. For this reason, any flaw in form is magnified exponentially in the water. Technique in swimming is so vital that being able to move through the water efficiently determines how well you swim more than being in great shape does.
The more tired one gets, the harder it is to maintain good form. Yet, maintaining good form will not only allow you to swim/race faster but also allow you to redirect your attention from the pain of training/racing to a tangible, executable action (point your toes, roll your hips, blow bubbles while under water, etc).
You get what you focus on; if you focus on the pain of training and racing, then that will consume your consciousness. And vice versa, if you focus on your breathing and form, this will allow you to maintain ideal body position and thus race faster.
Athletes must learn to swim before jumping into a pool. However, running is something we have been doing since early childhood. Because of this, there is not as much emphasis on teaching good running form and technique. Not only is form important for racing faster, but more importantly for injury prevention as a distance runner.
In a similar vein, the incorporation of auxiliary body parts/muscles to maintain and even increase speed. For swimmers, this is the kick propelling the body forward. Ask any swim coach what athletes should do when their arms start getting tired, their answer will be “Kick More!” For runners this is using your arms to drive your legs- the faster your elbows move, the faster your knees move, the faster your feet move, the faster you move!
The Importance of Variety.
Swimming is a very physically and mentally demanding sport. As an outsider looking in, elite level swimmers can be viewed as having a monotonous athletic lifestyle: sleep, eat, swim- rinse and repeat twice each day. To ensure both mental and physical freshness, variety is an important piece of training. What does this look like?
- Different strokes (freestyle, backstroke, butterfly breaststroke)
- Focus on refining technique, sometimes with aids (paddles, fins, snorkels)
- Incorporating different energy systems (aerobic, anaerobic, CNS)
- Different pool distances (short course, long course, open water)
A runner’s lifestyle can be viewed in a similar lens: sleep, eat, run — repeat. Incorporating variety in training is key for building a lifelong love for the sport!
In closing, there was a study done by Daniel F. Chambliss called “Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers.” He presents and analyzes quantitative and qualitative data derived from longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of swimmers.
“Excellence is mundane. Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly. Excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time.”
What can be learned from this? Whether you are a swimmer, runner, trumpet player, scientist, architect, person in the world today… rule your habits, rule your life. To do what others can’t, you must consistently and repeatedly do what others don’t. If your daily habits are exceptional, you’ll become extra-ordinary. Consistently repeated, this purposeful extra-ordinary behavior creates the habit of excellence.
Practice Habits Lead to Competition Habits Lead to Competition Results.
