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Hello and welcome to the Swim Brief. I am Krista Santis, and this week on the Swim Brief, we interrupt the flow of the last few weeks and go back to a solo podcast. I meant to, and I've been teasing a podcast with my wife, Kate, but uh two things conspired against our scheduled recording, which would have been last Friday. Um, one was that we had a snowstorm for the first time in two years here in South Jersey that canceled school and meant that instead of us having free rain over our house, uh, it was invaded by our school-aged children. It would not have been a good environment for recording the podcast. The other is that, if I'm just being honest, we weren't getting along very well on Friday. Nothing to do with the snowstorm. We had some things to talk through that are not going to be on the podcast, and it would feel weird to talk about other things for a recorded, you know, podcast that would blast out to the world. It just wasn't the right uh atmosphere for it. Um so today I'm going to give you a training update and some of the insights I have from training myself for my next Swim Meet. Um, people who listen to the podcast, I should, you know, welcome new listeners here always by saying this podcast uh takes insights from my coaching and also my conversations with other coaching, and yes, even in this case, the coaching of myself. Um and I have been in a long period of training uh for my next meet, which will finally be this upcoming weekend, January 28th. Uh I haven't competed since the summer. I was meant to compete in November and I got COVID and um then I got sick again before the next possible meet, but now I'm I'm finally healthy and uh ready to compete. Uh but before I do get into that training discussion, I've got one piece of housekeeping and one more comment from above. The housekeeping is uh that recently I had Nikki Kett on the podcast, and actually tomorrow I'm going to be going on Nikki Kett's podcast. Um and I'm looking up uh in the background what the title Sports Bras, Jock Straps, and Crystals. Um great name. I'm really excited to go on it. Um and I'm excited to be a guest on a podcast. So I will for sure uh share with you all a link to that. So, you know, if you're interested, you can go and you can go listen to it. Um the other thing I wanted to say is, you know, uh commenting on I was thinking of just some more errant thoughts, I would say, on having my wife on the podcast. I I think in in our modern uh day, there is some measure of pressure uh when sharing stuff uh to humanize yourself and share from your personal life. Um I have to say, for for my own purposes, I generally don't feel that pressure as I basically just share stuff I want to share, and for the most part, I leave my wife and kids out of what I'm sharing. Um because they, you know, for instance, my kids can't really consent to being a part of this podcast. I guess I can discuss some stuff about being a dad, this, that, and the other thing. But um if I were to make them a big part of what I was doing, I just don't feel like that would be right. Um, you know, in the case of Kate coming on, my wife coming on to um the podcast, you know, uh that's something she can agree to, and you know, we can have, as we have had like 10 different conversations. What are we gonna talk about on the podcast again? Guys, it's gonna be great. I can't wait. Um I treat this podcast and all my social media presence as if I was in a big room full of people, not people of my choosing, right? I can't choose what's in that room, but I do have a giant loudspeaker where everyone can hear what I say, right? And I think a lot of us do like personal stuff about people we follow because it makes them seem more authentic. But I would say the perception of authentic and actually authentic are two very different things. I think you should assume that I and anyone else doing something like what I'm doing is doing some level of performance. Like, as in if I were being truly authentic, I would have recorded a tense conversation with Kate last Friday so you could, quote, see my real life, but I didn't, because honestly, that sounds really stupid from a relationship perspective. I value my marriage a lot more than this podcast, and it also sounds deeply uncomfortable for you, the listener. So let's turn to a personal topic that is much lighter. That is the pursuits of your host's swimming dreams here at 40 years old. To sum up how I am thinking going into this meet, I would say this my expectations are really high. I am thinking about going really, really fast. Now, as I said earlier, I haven't competed since July, and even that was uh a last-minute attempt to swim in a poorly organized outdoor short course meters competition. And it served as a reminder that spontaneously deciding to enter a swimming competition is not always the best idea. Worked out for me uh in January of last year, um, probably because my expectations were so low. And also that in this case I firmly reject the European side of my character in the form of short course meters. Yuck. Since then, I've made a ton of progress in terms of my training, and I want to update you guys on some of it because I think it's more so than you know hearing about specifically what I'm doing. I think the process is the interesting part, and I think there's stuff that's valuable in here, right? If you're a swimmer, if you're a coach, if you're a parent of a swimmer. Um it's been a year since I started training for swimming again. I started up last, you know, New Year's 2023. Um I did my first competition a year prior to this one. I got talked into it, you know, just a few weeks back in to training. I think, you know, I should have had better training logs. I'm I'm I'm uh doing all of this off the top of my head, but I'm pretty confident I I may have cracked a thousand yards in a single workout prior to that meet. And my warm-up consisted of eight twenty-fives on 45. And honestly, for like the first two weeks after not having swam, I think I was off training, really, any kind of consistent training of swimming for about six years. I was totally gassed. 825s on 45. Um by the summer, where I put up some times that I was really excited about. I had worked my way up to just slightly under 2,000 yards per practice, more like, you know, 1700, 1750, 1800. Um, this would probably be a good time to interject that yes, I am using volume as a measure here. Um one of the reasons for that is two plus years working with Paul Donovan at Jersey Wahoos has fully indoctrinated me into the camp that volume does matter. And second, because the content of those workouts has generally been pretty consistent, which makes the volume even more relevant, right? Um, you know, you can certainly dilute the value of increasing your training volume by doing a lot of very low intensity yards, which by the way, I think for like longevity and health, um, I probably should be doing more low-intensity yards. But, you know, since I am training to see how fast I can go in 50s and hundreds of yards, like some some real like just like get in and you know swim without really uh uh breathing hard at all, like yeah, I could get 3,000 done probably pretty pretty efficiently at this point, but that's that's not what I've been doing. Um as I said, I guess I skipped ahead. My my past month, my volume per practice is 3,000 yards or more. I've had a few up above 3,000 yards. I'm doing the same volume, by the way, in roughly the same amount of time. So um what used to take me uh an hour to do, and this also I could give credit to Paul Donovan here because I think it's a useful measure to do volume per like per hour, right? So what used to take me uh about an hour to do 1800 yards, now I can do 3,3200. I've gone up as high as 3,500 in an hour. Um somewhere in the fall, I became convinced mainly through reading Alan Cousins' The Science of Maximal Athletic Development, a book I recommend to everybody. I think it's wonderful. Um, and I became interested in developing my aerobic system again. Uh I hadn't really put any effort into doing that since college. And um I became convinced that it actually would help me first off, it would help me, even in races as short as A50, that the cross-training uh effect of it would help me at the very specific thing I was trying to do. But again, as I referenced, like probably more low-intensity stuff, I believe it's going to help me life-wise. Um it it's great, it serves a dual purpose. Um and since I hadn't done this since college, uh the beginning attempts of trying to do aerobic were were really rough. Like I'm too embarrassed I won't even tell you where I started with it. And this was, you know, six to eight months into uh returning to consistently swimming. I swim about three times a week. But just in the same way that 825 is on 45, you know, if I were to do that for a warm-up now, which I don't, it no longer feels challenging. The development curve really moved dramatically for me after a while. Um I guess then I I should edit that a significant portion of my volume increase has come from adding aerobic work. I'm putting it in quotes for those of you listening, and I'll explain that in a second. Um because well, I'll explain it now, because my ego, I would say, my ego and my completely outbalanced, like I have a lot in comparison to myself as a college swimmer, I have way more speed relative to my capacity, my fitness overall, right? Um so the combination of those two things doesn't really allow me to go slow enough to do real, like, you know, uh I've heard people reference zone two cardio, like, you know, you should be able to like be able to have a conversation with somebody without, you know, uh huffing and puffing, pink pace. Um, if we go off some swimming terminology, whatever you want to call it. I don't think I'm really doing that truly. Um I'm actually very close to my aerobic pace of my college days, like my per 100 college pace on these aerobic sets that I'm doing, but the rest intervals are still like 20 seconds higher per hundred. And so realistically, am I doing more of like a like a threshold type thing? Yeah, probably. Um and I the way I'm looking at it is you know, I had all these years of essentially just doing some um anaerobic capacity work and speed work. Um now I'm stretching down to some aerobic threshold work as a bridge to maybe actually getting to work on my aerobic capacity, right? To to uh build a base or rebuild a base, as we as we could say. Um another project I've been working on training-wise, and a lot of this I I give credit to um one of my many coaches. You know, I train by myself every day, but the reality is I have a lot of people that are helping me. This is something I talk to athletes and coaches about all the time. I think that it's really, really important to have a lot of people that are supporting you in whatever you're doing. Um, I'm gonna credit Joel Rawlings here. You've heard Joel on the podcast. Um I send him video of my stroke, um, especially every time I do a competition. Um, and the stuff that he sends me, like it's enough coaching, honestly. The all the stuff that he sends me after one breaststroke race is like enough to last me a lifetime in terms of feedback. And I I, in concert, from what I was hearing from Joel, really wanted to change something about my breaststroke. Namely, I was taking too many damn strokes. My best time in the past decade was uh one of the 105 I did uh this past May. I shave for that meat, um, put on a suit. And uh in fact, just to reference, I'm gonna check how many strokes I took. Just one second, I'll be right back. Okay, sweet Jesus. Uh by 25, I took five, eight, eight, and ten strokes. So I actually doubled my stroke count from the first twenty five to the last twenty five. Okay, now that I've ripped off that embarrassment, um shortly after that swim, the pool that I train at, uh, again to my great annoyance, if you were paying attention earlier, it shifted to short course meters for the summer. And what was I most annoyed about was, well, when you look at the number of strokes I was taking per 25 and breaststroke, um when I tried to swim breaststroke and short course meters, it was a humiliatingly high number of strokes. Um in fact, I won't even admit how many strokes I was taking uh uh doing these uh 25s and 50s in practice. So what did I do? Well, before I do that, let me first make a confession. Um I was a college coach at Georgia Tech, I talked a really good game about how much access we had to long horse water. At the snap of a finger, we could get the pool switched over, and all summer long we could train in 10 long course lanes, even if sometimes we barely had enough people to fill those lanes. Um, which by the way, Georgia Tech seems to be doing awesome right now. I'm really psyched for them. Um honestly, I think it's it's been going really, really well. I want that team to be uh good, and um I still do feel a connection to it despite some of my tortured relationships with people there. Um but that's not my confession. My confession is that I didn't like writing practice for long course in those days. This was my uh my minimalist phase, right? My minimum volume phase. And LCM long course meters, it eliminated small yardage staples like, you know, 25s. Or I guess you could do 25s, but then you had to float in the middle of the pool. Not wanting to be a deadbeat coach, I looked for ways to liven up my LCM workouts so they didn't, you know, serve the people I was coaching really poorly. So I started to look for the opportunities in long course meters. And I think one obvious opportunity, if I just go to the above, if you're somebody that loves a lot of 25s, um it'll seem really basic, but all the best stuff is basic, and actually executing on basic stuff is is where all the uh nuance and and fun is, I think. Uh swimmers have a bigger opportunity to develop the actual skill of swimming when they're not bouncing off a wall every few seconds. You know, in that case, Division I swimmers do a lot of bouncing off of walls. In fact, they sort of have to in order to adapt to the conditions. So I took that same mindset over to me in a short course matter meters environment. I had to adapt. I started to train breaststroke with little to no focus on speed, just like how could I get from one end to the other without taking a lot of strokes? I started playing around, the kind of thing, you know, that actually I think probably most swimmers in a team environment don't get to do. Like, um, and that's another baby's maybe insight from this. Like, you know, you you can look at what I'm doing and say, oh, what a shame, you know, he trains by himself and it must be lonely and hard to motivate. Well, like, what are the opportunities in that? The opportunities in that is that uh I can do whatever I want. If I think that I should spend some time playing around with something, I can do that, right? So I spent some time playing around. I worked on a five-stroke breaststroke short course meters 25. Then I worked on a four-stroke version. Then I tried to see if I could do three strokes. That was basically about as little as I could do. Um, and then I started to work back up. How fast could I go and take four strokes? How fast could I do take five strokes? If I let myself take six strokes, how much speed do I gain by doing that? And so when I transitioned back to yards, all of a sudden it was quite easy to do a four-stroke breaststroke 25 and not go slow, not particularly fast, but not slow. Um, you know, if you say my uh race pace that I'm shooting for, right, I'm trying to break a minute, so really realistically, like you gotta touch that wall and and see a 14 because you know you're gonna have to do a turn and everything. Um I would say, you know, I could do a four-stroke 25 when I came back in 20 seconds. I wanted to say 19, but I don't want to lie. Um and so so not slow, but not fast. Um and I should also add that uh it's a goal of mine now to only take four strokes on the first 25, but to see if I can more importantly, that's only one stroke different than what I did in the previous meet, but see if I can actually get through that last 25 in eight strokes versus ten, right? So um that much proportionally less, or maybe even seven. Seven would be great. Um, but uh I know that's a lot to move in uh in a short period of time. Um and I can actually hit the pace that I want to achieve with six strokes per 25. Do you think I could just turn and sustain that forever? I I don't know yet. Um I should add that for the 10500 breaststroke listeners to remember that I was unable to train any significant amount of breaststroke, and I'm proud to report that I now do sets of 25s and gulp even 50s in breaststroke, maintaining race pace. So uh I'm feeling really confident. I'm feeling quite positive about this weekend. I'm thinking, I should say, I'm just using my own terminology, I'm thinking quite positively. Um I have the normal nervous jitters and fears um that I don't think will ever go away when I go to a swim meet. I I know that I am way fitter than I was a year ago, and still much fitter than the summer. I know I'm stronger. Uh obviously, based on what I just read, I I feel I think that my skill level is better. Um, but the one thing that is uncertain is that I've actually gained that much speed. So I'm sort of expecting one of two outcomes. One was I will swim really fast, and um that will line up perfectly with what I've just described, all the positives. Um and the other one is well, I'll do a bit better, but you know, maybe some of the stuff that I'm doing, it just has a longer payoff down the line. You know, like a lot of this stuff when you're doing training that's maybe not directly one-to-one relevant to your race speed, um, sometimes that stuff has a long tail, or it allows you to train more, right? It actually, this is the insight I'm taking from Alan Cousins is you know, building up those capacities actually can allow you to do more specifically. Training to do a greater volume of specific training. So that in the long term you're enhancing your ability to train really specifically as well. And that has expectations high. I guess where I want to finish is walking my walk in terms of the work I've been out there doing with teams. I've been visiting colleges and I've been encouraging more swimmers to share their goals, seek out support, and rather than avoid vocalizing their goals or thinking about them, I've seen a lot of people in the audience where they don't even vocalize what they want to achieve because they feel in some way it actually makes it harder to perform. And I think this is I I've seen a lot of this sort of in pop psychology, you know, and especially this time of year because um of the sort of infernal reputation of New Year's resolutions, right? People still make them, but then there's sort of this counter crowd that's like, well, actually, New Year's resolutions are dumb because most people fail on them. Um and I think one of the things that's gotten attached to that too is like telling other people what your resolution is doesn't work, like, or because a lot of people fail. Well, I I mean, I believe people when they say this, because I've lived it. I I've used my own expectations against myself more times than I would like to admit. And I think that the point of struggling with your own expectations is not to learn that you should avoid your expectations. You're being given an opportunity. When you're struggling with something, you're being given a learning opportunity, right? That's what I believe. And um just avoiding learning, it doesn't work. Um, it keeps you stuck in the same place. So having high expectations for yourself, I think first off, I believe it's good and probably the most important ingredient for success in anything you try. But having a process whereby you weaponize high expectations against yourself is not necessary. It is a learned skill, and you can learn to do something else. In my case, I am learning that high expectations just represent an honest assessment of what I want. And it takes consistent training of my cognitive processes to direct my thoughts towards it being something I want versus the pressure of it being something I need to happen. So, again, as I said, I'm sharing all this because I think there's some value to be gleaned for coaches, parents, and athletes, hearing my own process for how I train myself, and just how I incorporate coaching despite being by myself when I'm actually at the pool. So, everybody look forward to the ups and downs of a 17-year relationship willing to listening to Kate and I on a podcast a week from now. You'll hear about what it means to have a partnership in this crazy, ever-changing world, and you'll get to hear the person who knows me best flip the script and ask the questions. She really always wants me to answer for all of you. Um, look for me on Nikki Katz Podcast. I have no idea when that's coming out, but uh I will let you guys all know. And until then, you can always reach out to me swimbriefpodcast at gmail.com, Christycoach.com, fill out a contact form, or on Instagram, Christy underscore coach. Thank you again for listening, and I will see you soon.