Another great day

As usual, it was an uplifting, amazing day at practice.  The entire team will be at a meet this weekend so it was a short practice consisting of only "meet warmup".  It was basically a fun 45 minutes of blast swimming and race pace starts with breakouts.  I followed what others were doing and got ready to race since I'm swimming a difficult practice set tomorrow.

There were mulitple times during today's short practice that I simply watched and listened to the coaches advise other swimmers on how to improve.  It's fascinating to listen to their training techniques, I'm just learning constantly.  A fun little mini-set we did was to see if we could touch the 15 meter mark with a dive and no kicking or pulling at all.  This means we dove in and didn't move our bodies at all.  After one try at 14 meters, I hit 15.5 meters, among the furthest of us who were trying it.

After practice I helped with some technology issues on deck, moments like those make me feel like I'm contributing to the program in more than a few ways.  Before I left I met a man named Mark who was referred to as the "Mad Scientist" by the coaches.  He has apparently developed a system and accompanying computer program to tow a swimmer through the water at any speed and measure lots of aspects of the fluid dynamics.  It was awesome to just listen to this guy, he just had high level physics information spilling out of his cranium.  He couldn't seem to talk enough about it.  I could listen to this guy all day, it was really interesting stuff.  So the downside of this weekend is that I won't get to race, the upside is that I get to be one of the first swimmers to try out this machine!

As I was walking out, I was treated to a short conversation with both Assistant Coach Mark and Head Coach Mike.  I spoke with Mark about vitamins and suppliments for a few minutes before Mike came over to give me a run down on my practice tomorrow.  Afterward, I asked them both flat out, "so how do you think I'm doing?".  It was really the first time in a month that I presented the question to them.  I think I got an honest answer as well.  Mike said "I think you're doing well, you've made some good changes".  Mark followed with "I was just telling Mike the other day that you're picking up things quicker compared to everyone else, it's sort of frustrating"... he said frustrating in the sense that teaching others was comparitively frustrating.  Mike ended with "Your biggest problem is your head".  When he said this, I thought he was going to follow with something regarding my head position while swimming.  As in: I need to put my head down during freestyle or tip it back during backstroke.  However he was referring to psychologically.  He said "You need to elevate yourself.  You need to stop seeing yourself as Kevin and see youself as something more.  You did it the other day.  I asked you to become more than you saw yourself as, and you did it... you beat that other guy, you beat him by a lot!  You need to change your head, you don't have the time to change Kevin, you need to tap into your alter ego, figure out where that is and do it".

It's conversations like that which leave me speechless.  I'm on the deck of the University of Michigan, where Olympians have been trained and competed, I'm talking to one of the best sprint coaches on the planet and he's telling me I have more potential than even I think I do.  I can't think of many other situations in my life that have rendered me speechless.  Good job Mike.