The most important relationship you can have

Okay, NO I’m not about to start doling out relationship advice here.

Except where it relates to your success at swimming and triathlon.

And no, the most important relationship you can have here is not with your bike. Or your Garmin. Or even with your significant other!

As you may have guessed, this is your relationship with yourself.

With a negative self view, you will get frustrated, stay stuck, and even give in. You may end up in the “swimming is just not for me!” camp, and let go of your triathlon dreams — whether they are to finish a race, or to move up in the standings.

One of the keys to success in swimming, just like with any area of life, is to maintain a massive amount of self acceptance.

Imagine this. Let’s say you’re climbing Mt Everest. And you have no watch or way of knowing how far it is to the top. Someone in your group says, “It’s 5 more hours of climbing and we’ll reach the peak!”

And 5 hours goes by, and you are feeling exhausted, but yet… you’re nowhere near the top.

In fact, it looks like it’s going to be ANOTHER 5 hours to get to the peak.

What happens to you emotionally then? Likely, you will have a very difficult time keeping your motivation and spirits up to do rest of the climb.

Your mind told your body 5 hours to go, so you geared up for that. You had some bad info, and it hurt your efforts, badly.

So with swimming, the same thing can happen. If you start out with a fuzzy self concept, you may expect improvements to come to you easily, to nail swimming and just “train harder”, increase intervals, “do more yardage”, etc. because you overestimated your starting point.

And none of these will “work” because they are being implemented too soon.

Having a clear self concept and being 100% self accepting is at the heart of successful swim training.

That’s why we created our online course, Tri Swim Success, with a beginning, (that includes a “where are you now” assessment”), step-by-step progression, and end results in mind.

To your swim success!

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