Who Wants In?

It was a confluence of two events tonight. The first I was reading Moneyball again and loving it. Then relating it to swimming. Doing what I do best, geeking out. The second thing was I watched a 23 year old named Katie Price swim the 200 Breast. She has been sitting near us during the meet and we chatted a bit after her morning swim. She was excited by making it back to finals. Then tonight she did something extraordinary and dropped 2 seconds to make Olympic trials for the first time in her life. I asked her why it happened at 23 and not while in college and I got a familiar answer. She said she was swimming less, with more quality, more strength and more quickness AND she had only been training again for 3 months.

We're doing it wrong!!!! As a sport, we are doing it wrong. Swimming as a post grad is not about fitness. In fact, it never is about fitness, it is just when you are young you need more repetition to learn the stroke. Swimming is about technique, quality, strength and quickness, yet so few programs train this way. Swimming is about the sum of the parts. The addition of the start, the turns, the breaths, the breakouts and the strokes themselves. Its not about the outcome. Not about the times. It's about how you get to the times. Training harder is a knee jerk reaction to a problem. So your splits dropped off. No one is asking why, they make an assumption based on the traditions of the sport. So few are trying anything new and different. The sport is looking at the programs and swimmers that are doing it differently and saying that they are aberrations. Saying that it is luck or residual fitness or that swimmer is a freak or that it will not work for you.That's what "they" say. That is the conventional wisdom. That it cannot be learned, that it is nature. It can be learned, but it takes the right environment, the right training and the right commitment.

So here it is. An open invitation to the post grad swimmers of the world. Who wants in? RallySport Aquatics is creating a post-grad national training group. If you are interested in a complete commitment to a different kind of training and a belief that you can swim dramatically faster than you ever have before, we want you in Boulder. Rob Putnam and I are creating a different kind of movement in the sport of swimming and we want you involved. The goal is Olympic Trials and beyond, both for 2012 and 2016.

Who wants in? Email me a gholicky@yahoo.com and spread the word.