Trusting the process

Trusting the process may be easy for some and more difficult for others. When you are young, there isn't a rigorous process similar to the one when you are older than 14 or 15. When you are young, your body is constantly changing, and your stroke is constantly evolving. There is no process to think about since you drop time at almost every single meet. I can still remember when I was young, and I would drop 10-15 seconds in some events every time we changed from short course to long course. There was no strategy you had to follow through the season in order to drop time. It was simple, all you had to do was train hard, and you would get results. However, this changes when you start getting older. Your strokes will never be perfect, and there will always be changes you are able to make in order for your stroke to become better. However, these changes will be small. The changes you make when you are older allow you to drop hundredths or maybe a second from your best time. The changes you make are not as drastic as the ones you made when you were younger. Therefore, there is a process put in place to allow you to better yourself. This was very hard for me to understand. All I wanted to do at practice was get in the water and train hard. I didn't want to think about the process or change what I had been doing since I kept on dropping time. However, this came back to haunt me later on. Since I had not put in place this strategy, I plateaued for two years. They were the hardest two years of my life. All I am trying to say is that coaches are here to help you in any way possible; they are not here to make you worse or annoy you; all they want to do is help. It took me two years to understand this. I wasted two years of my swimming career because I did not trust the process my coach put in place for me. Remember this the next time you go to practice, and take every word your coach tells you to heart, and I promise you, you will be a better swimmer because of it.