Read on; we promise: they’re all related! Recently there was a flurry of excitement because researchers found that Capuchin monkeys would go on strike if they did not get equal pay for equal work [see “Monkeys reject unequal pay,” Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, Nature 425, 297 - 299 (18 Sep 2003) Letters to Nature]. It appears some monkeys who were getting rewarded with cucumbers (akin to fast food for Capuchins) were quite upset when they saw their peers getting rewarded with grapes (more like three-star food in the Michelin guide for Capuchins). Evidently, even among Capuchin monkeys there can be high-performing teams and teams wracked with internal dissension. We humans conduct a large proportion of our activities organized into teams also. This cuts across a spectrum of activities from building houses for the economically disadvantaged to providing healthcare to developing high-tech products. The “Team” concept is currently in vogue in the corporate world where high-performing teams are considered the key to unleashing new productivity. Being in a team also implies having a coach. This is taken for granted in the sporting arena where we have enshrined many iconic models of The Coach but Life Coaches, Facilitators and other forms of coaches have lately become popularized in non-athletic endeavors. It is amazing that for an activity that is so key to success in so many areas of our existence, we often make a complete dog’s breakfast of coaching. There is definitely magic involved in good coaching. There is some part that has to do with transferring the knowledge to perform particular skills (“teaching”) and there is another part that has to do with inspiration and motivation (“leading”). There is also a piece that is closer to directing a choir: keeping everyone singing off the same sheet of music at the same time (“organizing”). If you are interested in good coaching, you will be interested in reading Long Strokes in a Short Season written by veteran TI coach Art Aungst. If you are also interested in fast, elegant swimming, you are in for a treat. Coach Aungst is a highly successful coach of the Orchard Park High School girls swim team in western New York State. The book traces his team through one season. The book is multi-dimensional: there are detailed swim workouts, there are wry observations on the workings of both the adolescent and, shall we say, chronologically more mature mind, and there are touching moments that might bring a tear to the eye. It is also slap-your-thigh funny. Wait until you get to the ferret-legging part. What’s the meaning of “quality?” Coach Aungst quotes several times from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM), a cult classic for those of us of the boomer generation. ZMM asked a very puzzling question. What is quality? How can it be measured? In the corporate world, this has real, practical implications: What incentives should be in place to ensure that employees generate products of the highest quality? When it comes to swim coaches, they are generally judged on how many champions (Olympic, All-America, State, etc.) they have produced. Unfortunately, as with many quality metrics, this does not necessarily measure the quality of the coaching. In fact, it has been known in the corporate world for a long time that sometimes the introduction of the quality metric distorts the system so that employees focus on meeting the metric rather than achieving the underlying quality. Think about lines of software code (or bug fixes) as a quality metric. In the swimming arena, gifted athletes sometimes achieve very high levels with any coach, without a coach, or despite the coach (as Coach Aungst points out in his book). A coach in the local Little League was a perennial winner. The other coaches were somewhat peeved at this and complained that the winning coach was cream-skimming the best players at the start of the season. The winning coach thought this was absurd and told the other coaches, at the start of the next season, to select their teams and give him the players they did not want. When he won again the next season with the so-called bottom-of-the-barrel picks, they had to admit: There is something to this coaching business. This may be a better measure of the quality of a coach than the ability to produce an individual star: Can you take a large population of swimmers and move the global average significantly towards the outstanding side of the chart? A few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Coach Aungst at his pool. His High School team came in for practice. An important meet was coming up, so his swimmers were doing a light workout. The mood was purposeful but not somber. No one was blistering down the pool. What was remarkable, however, was the collective and consistent flow and grace of the group. I knew about Art’s dual meet record and results in the state championships but this sight made more of an impression than his record. Coach Aungst runs a technique-focused program and, in particular, embraces the drills and methods drawn from Total Immersion (TI). The TI program is quite well-known and its principles have reached a wide audience through its books, videos and its signature weekend workshops. Swimming (any of the strokes) is a complex maneuver with a lot of moving parts. TI focuses on breaking the stroke down into bite-size chunks and perfecting each chunk before putting all the pieces back together. Golf writers have always waxed poetic about the unique challenge of golf caused by the offset hosel. As the World Series approaches, baseball commentators proclaim the magic of baseball in which a game can be over in less than an hour or go on for 25 innings [see Game Length Records, www.baseball-almanac.com]. Similarly, swimming has its own mysteries, the most obvious of which is to trying to propel oneself forward through a dense medium that is incompatible with normal lung function. Inspiration for the “average” swimmer As I was swimming this morning I was mulling over what I had learned from Art’s book; though, on the surface, written for coaches, it’s immensely valuable as well for “average” swimmers as a source of subtle insights. It occurred to me that there are very few sports that demand such symmetry from body movements. Why does the catch and roll on my dominant side feel so much smoother than the same motion on my non-dominant side? I didn't see Sammy Sosa batting lefty! I didn't see Derek Jeter throw with his left hand! Golf, tennis, basketball, hockey, football, snowboarding: they all have asymmetry in the body motions. Perhaps cycling has some of the same demands for symmetry: to check if your pedal strokes are perfectly symmetrical, next time you go for a ride, unclip one shoe and see if you can pedal the same “circles” with the left leg working alone as you can with just the right leg. TI has tried to make the magic of swimming accessible to the “average” person. For some reason, TI seems to have inspired skepticism among some swim coaches, whose reaction seems to be: “Until you’ve produced an Olympic Champion, you are not really in the club.” But as discussed earlier, this is not necessarily the definitive measure. A more frequent objection seems to be: “There is no substitute for yardage.” This may in fact be true but there is an additional question: What kind of yardage? So far, there have been no child prodigies in physics. The reason that is given is that there is a huge body of accumulated knowledge that must be absorbed before the aspiring physicist can advance the field. Stephen R. Covey (in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) uses a different metaphor to make the same point. It goes something like this: Two woodsmen are using a two-person saw to fell a large tree. Despite their vigorous efforts little progress is being made. A third woodsman arrives and notices that the saw blade is completely dull. When he asks the huffing and puffing woodsmen why they do not sharpen the blade, they reply that they do not have the time: they are too busy sawing. One might argue that the same applies to swimming. The blade must be sharpened or the skill mastered before the yardage can be advantageously applied. So the question of how much yardage may be more a question of lifecycle: Where are you in terms of skill development and what are you trying to achieve? Another objection raised is that TI is just window dressing for what the majority of conventional coaches are saying now anyway. The underwater camera work at the recent World Championships was extremely telling. Despite a lot of variation in arm motion above the water, there was remarkable uniformity under the water even with variations caused by differences in height, flexibility and so forth. Nowadays there appears to be much more attention paid to reducing drag (e.g., lower head position), core body rotation in long axis strokes, and body “wave” in short axis strokes. These are all key principles of TI so perhaps the differences are really at the margins. If so, this can only be good news because, just like driving the car or taking the train to work, both will get you there. The journey, however, will be different in each case. The pleasure of the personal journey The whole debate of TI vs. “conventional wisdom” when it comes to swimming technique may be missing the point. It seems to me, and I think is demonstrated in Coach Aungst’s book, that TI is as much about an approach to learning and walking the path to the unreachable goal of perfection in a particular skill as it is about swimming. This begs the question: Why do we swim? Many swimmers who swim diligently every day like to get in the pool and swim their preferred mile (or two) while “tuning out.” Others love the challenge of cranking out the greatest number of yards in the allotted time or meeting the intervals in a tough set. Some just like kicking the tail of the swimmer in the adjoining lane. Each is supporting the chlorine-removing-shampoo industry in his or her own way. TI happens to stress the thoughtful, mindful practice of striving for excellence in a difficult skill. Mastering a difficult skill can be greatly helped by a like-minded coach. Robert Twigger in the book Angry White Pyjamas writes of his experiences in studying Aikido in Japan: “Chino was a master at establishing a group rhythm. All the Japanese excelled at this, and when a group rhythm has been established your endurance is multiplied six or seven fold.” I suspect the same applies to swimming. There is a rhythm that kicks in when one is part of a group workout especially when form must triumph over fatigue. But there is no doubt that the solitary workout can be just as rewarding when one has access to the tools to make it so – such as the step-by-step drill sequences, “Mindful Swimming” focus points, and objective criteria to identify mastery of each step. Being a frequent occupant of the slow lane, I find it is not difficult to fall into a “Hey, why did I get the dish of cucumbers when those guys are being fed peeled grapes” lapse of confidence, especially when looking at the seed times for a competitive meet. Long Strokes in a Short Season reminds me that one can travel very far along the path, perhaps even to the Olympic Games for some, or not so far, but it is a personal journey and that is actually the great joy. Cedric Druce lives with his family in New Jersey and currently works in business development for an Internet company. He spends the early morning in the pool trying to avoid air bubbles and the rest of the day trying to avoid Internet bubbles. You can reach Cedric at ezeeswim365@yahoo.com. To read free excerpts from “Long Strokes…” click here All materials included in this website are Copyright © 2007 by Total Immersion, Inc. All rights reserved. No portion of this website may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission in writing from Total Immersion, Inc. For information, contact: Total Immersion, Inc., 246 Main Street, Suite 15A, New Paltz, NY 12561 Or e-mail us.