Irrational Learning in Swimming – The grown-up path to learning movement

All through our lives, we claim to be rational beings.  The fact that we are rational, many argue, is what separates us from other animals.  But sometimes, being rational is not enough.  One can learn all that is logical about swimming and still drown.  Why?  Because learning swimming is not rational!  There are plenty of experts out there, with logical systems of success.  But if any of them worked consistently, then no one would be reading my articles. 

In the triathlon community, it is the swim that frustrates people the most.  Many just want to finish their race and are scared off by fears of suffocating.  And some of the talented athletes don’t join the triathlon community at all because the swim is so tough to learn.   Some try and get by reading articles (like this one) and watching dvd’s.  They learn a lot of great tips, try them out, and then get frustrated even more because they don’t get faster.

I want to eliminate your fear of swimming.  And I want to do it in a message that applies to everyone.  I don’t care who you are, so long as you want to learn.  You can be a first timer looking to survive, or a world class track runner who wants to go pro.  The overall message to you is the same.  The reason why people have a tough time taking a rational approach to swimming is simple.  Learning swimming is not rational.      

In this article, I will talk about my own experiences with irrational learning in sport.  In my case, the sport of endless frustration was running.  The root cause of my running inabilities are the same as many experience in the water.  If you know anything about running, you will probably think my experiences are funny.  And that is okay.  After all, clumsy is funny.  Laurel and Hardy made a career out of it.

I have been swimming my whole life, and it was the only sport I ever did as a child.  When I was 10 months old my parents enrolled me in those “swim dunk” sessions where I was dropped into the pool, and pulled out just before drowning.  I started swimming competitively at 6 years old, attended my first national championships at 14, Olympic trials at 19.  My parents tried to get me into other sports, like soccer, tennis and baseball.  But I hated them all because I wasn’t good at them. 

I am and always have been a terrible runner.  For the first couple of years in triathlon, I just set my embarrassing run aside and forgot about it.  It was shameful to finish top-3 overall in the swim, and not be able to run under 9 minute miles.  I got tired of people thinking I cut the swim short every time.  I mean, how could I have cut the swim short every single race?  Fortunately, fate would intervene. 

I finished a half iron in 2001 in the usual manner.  My run was so bad I made potholes with every step.  But a long day of racing re-injured my low back.  I always had spinal problems from the swimming days.  But this injury was real bad.  I couldn’t sit in a bike, a chair or a car without a lot of pain.  The odd thing was, it didn’t hurt if I kept my back straight.  So I could run, but that was it.  I ran every day and did nothing else for 6 months.

I took on the ambitious plan of solving my running problems in that time.  I read every single publication on running I could find.  I talked with people, and most of all, I trained as hard as I could.  I would go until my shins bruised.  Then I would tape them up and run some more.  I used to think that my substandard running was because I didn’t train hard enough, and that I didn’t know the techniques enough.

I set myself on a treadmill and tried a radically different running style from normal that I learned from magazine articles.  Rather than the usual way of throwing everything into each stride (shoulders, hips, head…  the runners in the audience can start laughing now), I tried a novel approach of:  1) locking up the trunk and 2) foot striking below (as opposed to as far in front as humanly possible).  And you know what?  Running radically caused my heart rate to decrease by 20 beats per minutes at the same speed.  Many would assume this to be a turning point.  But it felt stupid and wrong.  It was almost as embarrassing to run fast and stupid as it was to run slow and silly.   

How can this be?  If my learning was rational, then I should have seen the improved result that a radical technique made, then instantly changed my definition of normal.  But I pursued the denial strategy instead.  I kept throwing those shoulders and planting my feet forward.  I only switched to radical when I had no choice:  it was below freezing, I was exhausted, and miles away from home.  Sure, the radical way would let me survive another day.  But I would go right back to my crummy shoulder throws when given the choice.

You learn best when under stress.  This is the first tenet of irrational learning.  It is, very very, hard to give up a feeling of what’s right, even when you know that it is wrong.  You have to give yourself no choice but to go radical.  If you get to choose, you will stick with what you’ve got, no matter what you’ve read, no matter who has coached you.  I would never tell you to go out in the freezing cold and hope to survive just to do a triathlon.  But you have to face stress in some fashion, and you have to be worried.  It is this worry that opens you up to new ideas. 

It took two whole months for me to realize that it might (just might) be a good idea to run radical at the start of my run, not just when I had to.  So I decided to try it.  I would run radical all the time.  No matter how easy it was, nor how much faster I went, I would run radical even if it killed me.  You might think that’s the end of the story, but it is not.  It turned out, running radical all the time was tough.

Every time I lost focus, I would switch back to normal.  If I were running on a treadmill and not constantly thinking, radical, radical, radical, my heart rate would instantly jump up 20 beats per minute.  I would finish every single run feeling more mentally exhausted than physically exhausted.  I had final exams in college that were easier than some of those training runs. 

Running radical made me feel like I would fall flat on my face.  Every single stride a panic voice in my head would scream, “YOU IDIOT!  YOU’LL FALL!”  My strategy was to tell myself to fall, and that it was okay to fall.  I felt like a masochist.  Funny thing, I didn’t come close to falling.  Any running coach looking at my stride would probably have told me that my feet were still planting too far forward!  How long do you think it took to run radical all the time without thinking?  Can you believe it took 4 months, keeping at it every day?

Learning movement takes time.  This is the second tenet of irrational learning.  In my case, knowing how to run fast was 10% of the battle.  The remaining 90% was feeling how to run fast.  The human mind has a lot of hard wiring that got put in place when we were small children.  That wiring doesn’t get re-programmed just because we expect instant gratification from ourselves.  Maybe someday we will invent some brain implant that can re-organize the brain quickly.  Until then we are stuck with who we are. 

The greatest challenge adults face in learning a new sport is feeling, not technique.  Movement in adults is only learned under stress and over time.  The brain doesn’t understand how to move in new ways when you get older, even if those new ways make rational sense.  If you start swimming at age 30 for instance, it is like telling your brain to live in a 3-dimensional world when it exists in two dimensions.  How do you accomplish that?  I have spent my coaching career seeking this very goal.  I have done it myself in running, and I have used my experiences to help many in swimming.  And I want to help you!

Future articles will talk about how the mind works in swimming, how the body works in swimming, how swimming works in water, and what’s so different about swimming.  I get so many clients who are frustrated because every sport comes easy for them except for swimming.  Understanding why this occurs is vital to overcoming the obstacles of learning.  The mind-body relationship is related to the techniques of swimming fast, and the strategy of training.  They cannot be separated. 

My articles will seek a balance of training, technique and neurology in swimming.  Irrational learning demands it.  We will talk more about the fundamentals of swim technique and training.  We will cover what it means to learn over time and under stress.  And if you can stick with it, no matter how easy it is or how much faster you go, I am confident that you will enjoy swimming a lot more.  I hope to see more of you at the races, and with less fear of the water!