Sensitive and New Age
This excerpt from Art Aungst’s book Long Strokes in a Short Season is drawn from "Week 5 – Socrates Meets Sensitive New Age." The book, a week-by-week chronicle of how Art coached the Orchard Park High School girls team to a championship season, will be released this week.

As part of today’s practice, we had our three best IM swimmers do 4 x 125 butterfly as a relay. Here’s how they did the set:
1st: 100+25
2nd: 75+25+25
3rd: 50+25+25+25
4th: 25+25+25+25+25
There was a 5-second rest after each segment

My instructions were to swim as fast as possible. When each swimmer completed the 125, the next person started, so there was relatively long rest, but nowhere near enough for full recovery, meaning the cumulative effect of fatigue would grow with each repeat.

The swims were not timed, and the emphasis was on recognizing the onset of fatigue and learning to deal with it by staying in balance and maintaining a relaxed recovery when every instinct would be to tense up, flail the arms and lift the body ever higher while sinking the hips.

I constantly need to remind my wife and daughters that I am a SNAG—Sensitive New Age Guy. Reading over what I have written, I notice that some of this makes me seem like I really am. Anything that might come across that way is learned behavior. This book is about swimming fast. In order to write it, I have had to abandon many of the things that feel good and right to those of us who were behind the door when the powers-that-be distributed talent; now we can barely hide our disdain for those who were in the right place at the right time.

A muscle biopsy of my body (finding a muscle to biopsy through the adipose would be a challenge in itself) would reveal that I am the proud possessor of exactly four fast twitch fibers, most of them attached in proximity to where I can comfortably sit on them.

My athletic salvation has been in filling the roles that the fast guys didn’t want. I have been a lineman in football, a distance swimmer in the pool, the pick setter/lane clogger in basketball, a long distance triathalete, and a bike racer. When I played rugby, my lack of speed and the fact that I possess the kind of looks that could only be improved with violent face-first collisions relegated me to the scrum where I could dig out the ball and let the backs do the scoring.

Any of the modest success that I have experienced as an athlete has come through grinding it out and learning to live with pain. When I started coaching, there was no bigger proponent of the Nietzschean "that which doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger" mentality. The words "I want you to go slower and easier" were at first uttered with the same comfort level as "No thanks to the chicken wings and pizza, I’ll just have a salad with low calorie dressing, preferably with a side of ground glass." I knew what was good, but I didn’t especially like it.

In the past, I’d have thought nothing of a set of 4 x 125 fly, no breaks and little rest. If the swimmers puked after doing it, that was a good thing. If anybody really ticked me off in practice, they swam fly all practice. I could never figure out why I never had anybody who wanted to swim fly in meets.

What I have come to realize is that training sets have great value only when they involve a rigor other than the ability to endure pain.

Genuine toughness in swimming comes in overcoming the effects of fatigue, not through sheer work, but by building the instincts and habits that allow the body to go against every survival instinct it possesses. Our normal human-swimming instincts tell us to lift the head and use the arms to push down on the water to get more air, bringing the body more and more vertical, which will make the agony of the "big piano on the back" last half of the last lap feel more like an eternity.

Mental toughness is best taught by doing multiple repetitions at slow speeds with an emphasis on ease and relaxation to promote muscle memory. After this has been done, it is necessary to reinforce and more deeply imprint these patterns at gradually greater speeds – ultimately at race speed.

There is no way that a great race will not involve intense sensation; learning to remain efficient when in pain has a great deal of value. However, learning how to delay the onset of that pain through intelligent race strategy and countering the usual instinct involved when it does hit is far more valuable. A mind that is focused on how to swim is a much greater asset than one that is focused on how to endure, with the added benefit that the focus on technique will diminish the mind’s ability to focus on the pain.


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