Weekend Edition: You're Not as Done as You Think

Happy weekend, everybody. The Weekend Edition is meant to be read in pajamas, coffee in hand, ideally not within arm's reach of a pace clock. It's where we step back from the sets and the send-offs and talk about the bigger stuff, the mindset that actually decides how far you go in this sport.

Reading through the messages I get, there's a whole spectrum of triathletes here. Some are drowning, literally dreading the swim and just trying to survive it. Some are in the thick middle, grinding away, looking for a way forward. But there's a third type I want to talk about today, and he's a funny one. Call him the Front-Packer.

The Front-Packer

The Front-Packer is the athlete who's decided he's arrived. Swimming is his strong leg. He comes out of the water near the front, he beats most of his age group to T1, and somewhere along the way he concluded that the swim is handled and there's nothing left to learn. "Swimming's my thing," he'll tell me. "I don't really need a coach for it."

And every time I hear it, I think about Michael Phelps.

Here's a guy who is, without argument, the greatest swimmer who has ever lived. Twenty-three Olympic gold medals. And he had a coach standing on the deck for every single one of them, a coach whose entire job was to lie awake thinking up new ways to shave another hundredth of a second off a man who was already the fastest human in history. Same with Lochte. Same with every world-record holder you can name. Not one of them ever stood up and said "I'm good, I've got this, I don't need coaching anymore." The best swimmers on the planet, the people who actually had a real claim to being done improving, were the most relentlessly coached athletes in the sport.

So when a triathlete who swims a very respectable but entirely mortal pace tells me he's beyond needing help, I have to smile a little. If Michael Phelps wasn't done, my guy, you're definitely not done.

Did You Ever Consider?

And here's the part the Front-Packer never considers, the part that should actually excite him. He's already good, which means he's closer to the payoff than anyone. He's got the fitness, the comfort in the water, the raw engine. All that's missing is the coaching and the right training to convert all of that into speed he's currently leaving on the table. The struggling swimmer has to build everything from scratch. The Front-Packer just has to stop coasting. He could probably find more improvement, faster, than almost anyone in the field, if he'd just quit deciding he's already at the summit when he's maybe halfway up.

I Just Want To Finish

Now flip all the way to the other end of the spectrum, because there's an opposite character who makes the opposite mistake.

This is the swimmer who has set the bar on the floor. "I just want good enough technique to finish," she'll say. "I'm not trying to be fast, I just don't want to drown out there." And I get the instinct, the swim scares her, so she's made peace with it by aiming as low as humanly possible. Just survive. Just finish.

This is the exact same thing I see with people who say they'll never be able to retire. They're so buried, so far from the goal, that the whole idea of getting genuinely good feels absurd, so they opt out of even trying. They don't picture improvement because they can't imagine it applying to them.

Little-By-Little

But here's what I'd tell her, the same thing I'd tell the person who thinks they'll work forever. You don't have to picture the mountaintop. You don't have to decide today that you're going to be a front-pack swimmer. You just have to get a little better than you are right now, with someone who actually knows how to teach you, and then a little better than that. And the funny thing about actually learning to swim properly instead of just flailing your way to a finish, is that "good enough to survive" quietly turns into "wait, I'm kind of good at this now." People who start out just hoping not to drown end up making packs they never dreamed of, because they aimed low, got coached, and blew right past their own tiny goal.

Levels To Climb

That's the whole message, and it's the same for both of them, the Front-Packer who thinks he's done and the survivor who thinks she can't. Don't opt out of getting better. There's a whole scale here, and every single step up it is worth climbing. Almost nobody is actually at the top, and almost nobody is truly stuck at the bottom. You're somewhere in the middle, like everyone, with a ton of room to move up, and the only thing that keeps you where you are is deciding you're done.

So why not just get better? Learn to actually swim, train the right way, get a real set of eyes on your stroke. Do that, and I promise you'll surprise yourself with where you end up. The greatest swimmer in history still had a coach. What on earth makes you think you don't need one?

Get your lazy stroke moving. See you in the water.

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