Message to the team after Provincial Championships

We are finished with the prelude, on Monday we took a day off - that was the page turning to the opening line of chapter one of the 2009 swim season.

Lets spend a short amount of time patting ourselves on the back for a good job at the Provincial meet. First, head on over to the "Team Ranking" link at the meet results page (click on February 2009). Winskill Dolphins - 2nd place to Island Swimming / VASC. Congratulations to all of you who scored at the meet to get that result. We had a lot of good results, highlighted by Vito's 8 individual gold medals (very Phelpsian!), Clarissa qualifying for the 2009 Age-Group Nationals (first Provincial group swimmer to make the meet - congratulations Ben!), Luke qualifying for the 2009 British Age-Group Championships, and Nicole, Sidney, Sarah, Nunu, Colette, Matt and Markus qualifying for the 2009 Far Westerns meet in San Jose.

All of those performances were, at the time, spectacular but if the best we do this season is place second as a team at Provincials in the spring then we've missed the big picture.

One of the most important questions to ask yourself with your swimming is, overall, am I improving FASTER than everyone else? Before the meet we challenged you to produce more than 10-40-99, which was 10 gold medals, 40 total medals and 99 finals swims (our total from the 2008 season's two Provincial championships combined). It's important to understand that qualifying for a meet is just the first step, once you get there you must to have the imagination and determination to make the final.

The next step is winning a medal. Any lane in the final is able to win a medal, we had some great examples this weekend of inspired performances from outside lanes;
Elliott Lee - Silver medal from lane 7
Matt Lock - Bronze medal from lane 2
Clarissa Tan - Bronze medal from lane 1
Markus Thormeyer - Silver medal from lane 8

Our total over the weekend was 16-41-104, so we surpassed the previous year's totals in every measure. Nice job. Better was that heading into the meet we had 118 swims ranked in the top 10, but after the weekend was done we came out with 134 top ten performances! That's a pretty major improvement over seed times from those swimmers and in those events where you were clearly not favoured to make a final.

But this is just the beginning. Think about RIGHT NOW as a starting point for your season. From here we head back to the drawing board and work on the MANY technical issues we have to correct to become the best swimmers in Canada before July. One of the best goals you can have as an age-group swimmer is to equal your SCM times by the end of the LCM season. That is, if your short course time was 58.70 in the 100 Free, lets make it a goal to get down to that time long course. Hopefully you're figuring out by now that the improvements you make are directly related to the amount of meaningful work you put in day-in and day-out over at Winskill... what you do at the commonwealth pool has relatively little influence on your races compared to your training habits at home. A smart swimmer will realize quickly that the more in touch they are with their technique and the better their workouts have been leading up to a meet the faster they swim in the race.

Over the next few months you have a period of time where you can, if you choose, become MUCH faster than your competitors. The easiest thing to do after a major competition is take a week off (as some clubs are doing) and then come back with a little bit of work, all while thinking about how great you are now that you placed 2nd at the Provincial championships.

Big deal. On NONE of the goal sheets did we mention our team placing at Provincials. Nowhere did we discuss how we wanted to do in February. All the goals we've been focused on since late August have to do with the upcoming summer. If you recognize that this past weekend was a good step in the right direction, then keep taking those steps, eventually we will end up down the road as having a season we can really feel successful about.

There are a few important points to reflect on this week;

1. This is just the beginning of our season. We have a long way to go before July and August, where the real goals lie. Don't lose focus on those things we've set out to accomplish
2. Your success or failure at a meet does not hinge on your warmup at the meet, how you feel that day or what you had for breakfast. What matters is the months, weeks and hundreds of hours of training you've put in LEADING up to that meet.
   
3. No one on the planet has technique that is "good enough". We are far from the best, so we had better out how to be better, and do it quicker than everyone else. Everyone is improving, everyone is working hard... our challenge is to work harder and better than everyone else!

So... three things to do;
FOCUS ON THE END GOAL
WORK HARDER THAN EVERYONE ELSE
TECHNIQUE IN TRAINING