Can You "Learn Talent"?
By TERRY LAUGHLIN


In late 1963, at age 12, I tried out for a swim team for the first time. Though this was as grassroots as swimming gets – an elementary school squad put together to practice perhaps four times then compete in an annual Catholic schools meet – I didn't make the cut. In fact, my tryout lap prompted one coach to attempt a rescue. (I outswam him to the wall.)

Two years later I tried out for my high school team and made it – not because my swimming had progressed much; our first-year team was accepting all comers. I fell deeply in love with swimming from that moment and was undiscouraged when, as a senior, I qualified only for the "novice" championship, racing mostly against freshmen. (I won my first medal there and still have it.) As a college distance swimmer I managed to win a few races in dual meets against minor rivals, but nothing in my early years suggested any great swimming promise.

Yet this year, on the verge of turning 55, I set three goals that can only be called audacious for someone with such an unremarkable history: (1) to win a National Masters Long Distance Championship, (2) to break a National Masters Long Distance record and, (3) to win a medal at the World Masters Championship. Between June and August, I accomplished all three, winning two national titles (at 3K and 2-Miles) and breaking two national records (for the 1-Mile and 2-Mile Cable Swims) for good measure.

This raises two questions of relevance to many of us who devote ourselves to swimming improvement: (1) What level of achievement can we aspire to, and (2) what role does “talent” play? If someone as demonstrably “average”
as me can aspire to and achieve a national championship or record, what goals are realistic for others? These questions have lately interested a group academics and researchers called the Expert Performance Movement. Anders Ericsson a psychology professor at Florida State University and his colleagues worldwide recently published the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," after studying expert performers in pursuits ranging from sports to surgery, music, chess, and stock picking. They discovered that “talent” is highly overrated. Masterful performers are nearly always made, not born.

Many of us limit our potential by believing we were born “ordinary.” While, it often appears to us that talented people make it look easy, Ericsson says the opposite is true. “The best performers almost always practice the most.” For example Ericsson found that winners of piano competitions had practiced over 10,000 hours by the age of 20, while also-rans only practiced 2,000 to 5,000 hours.

But sheer repetition doesn’t explain why some people become better than others. Tiger Woods dominates the PGA Tour, but that doesn’t mean his rivals are driving range slackers. Ericsson explained that the best performers practice in purposeful and thoughtful ways. He termed it “Deliberate Practice” but his description sounds identical to what we call “Mindful (or Examined) Swimming.”

Average performers tend to feel they’re getting the job done if they have the self-discipline to smack 100 tennis forehands, or grind out long sets of freestyle repeats. Expert performers set specific goals closely related to the mastery they seek, tirelessly perform self-checks, stay completely in the moment, and never become complacent. Tiger Woods scrutinizes video or snapshots of his swing, analyzes each part, then drills subtle tweaks until they’re automated responses. And when he was already winning more than anyone else, he took apart his swing, endured a year of adjustment during which his scores rose and earnings fell, then emerged more dominant than ever.

Looking at swimming, while average swimmers focus mainly on getting in shape, Alexandre Popov, the most dominant sprinter in history, sometimes trained six hours a day for races that lasted less than 50 seconds. When asked why, his coach, Gennady Touretski said “More opportunities to imprint correct technique.” The techniques he worked on included details like a more relaxed forearm on recovery and a cleaner entry. Sound familiar to those of you practicing “Marionette Arms” and “Mail Slot” entries?

The most relevant message in all of this for adult swimmers is that we should tackle new challenges in middle age and beyond – especially those we thought required ‘talents’ we’re not sure we possess. Swimming is unique among all sports in the opportunity it offers to compensate for physical “ordinariness” with superior mindfulness. Moving a human body through water requires so many subtle skills that the combination of time and clear focus can add more to your mastery than whatever age may subtract from your physical capacity.

Swimming efficiently is a game of skill rather than an athletic contest, influenced more by how well you solve movement puzzles than by your power or endurance. And puzzles are solved by curiosity, self-awareness, concentration, and patience, faculties that only grow keener over time.

Steve Kelly, a devoted TI swimmer from Columbus OH described his own approach on our Discussion Forum: “Though my progress is uneven. I feel every day that I am closing in on the fundamentals of better swimming. I think about this puzzle every day. I watched portions of the Freestyle Made Easy DVD over and over again to imprint the images into memory. I ask myself ‘how are those guys doing it?’ Then I go to the pool and really slow down and isolate key movements that propel you forward and keep you balanced. ‘Where are my hands and arms? What do they feel like? What minute adjustments can alter the feeling on my hands. Do I feel tense or rigid?’ Whenever there’s a good swimmer there I study what they’re doing and compare their stroke with mine. It’s important to have a curious and persistent disposition. Swim as often as time permits. If you can hit the water daily you'll stand a better chance of remembering yesterday’s problems.”

The essence of swimming is how we take each stroke, and on a deeper level how we experience those strokes. And swimming provides more opportunity to be guided by sensation than any other sport. In a medium as viscous as water, we’re literally swimming through a “sea of sensation.”

Thousands of hours of Mindful Swimming practice has helped me organize sensation-based training to a level others have devoted to organizing numbers-based training – lap count, heart rate, repeat time and rest interval. While other swimmers are tracking numbers, I’m thinking about how each stroke feels, what those feelings reveal about efficiency and the muscle memory being created with each stroke.

And while others think about the “training effect” of their laps in terms of the energy system, I visualize electrical signals traveling from the nerves in my hand to my brain and back to the muscles in my hand as I try to control elusive water slightly better. While others focus on getting stronger and fitter, I’m trying to swim with ever more technical precision and artful grace. Because perfection is unachievable, I can return to the pool day after day feeling there are new sensations to access, insights to gain, and refinement to achieve. Best of all, unlike the aerobic system, the passage of time will not impede or constrain any of that. Consequently I’ll set my sights even higher – now that I’ve won a national championship, I’ll be aiming to become a World Champion. In fact I’ve already registered for the next Masters World Championship – April 2008 in Perth Australia. Care to join me?

Portions of this article are excerpted from Extraordinary Swimming for Every Body, Terry Laughlin’s latest book, which will be released in the first week in December.

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