Comfortable vs Familiar – A ramble
I was just recently listening to a podcast; nothing to do with freediving, in fact it was about running, but many concepts resonate with my ideas of training in freediving. This one was about training plans for running, and the conversation touched on to different workout’s training intensity and to how by doing certain workouts you will eventually get comfortable with them, while there are other workouts that are so tough and intense that you will never get comfortable with, but you will eventually get familiar with them (which is not the same thing!) and this will help you to tolerate them (which is also not the same as comfortable). But an important point to stress is that the athlete needs to know if they should or shouldn’t expect a certain workout to eventually become comfortable, so they dont keep wondering if they are failing to progress in their training because they are expecting a certain thing to become comfortable when it doesn’t.
That so much reflects certain exercises we do in freediving especially in pool training, and how some of them will become comfortable and you may even enjoy them despite pushing 100% of your abilities (think of repetitions of short sprints for example – I absolutely love them) while others will always make you nervous (think or the dreaded “long dive” at the beginning of a session!)
The long dive
Let’s linger a moment longer on this: for who is not familiar with the long dive, this can be slightly different things, like a max, or a sub-max, or a 80% effort for example.
When I assign a long dive to a student, even though I have a secret expectation in terms of length, I always phrase it as an “effort-based exercise” but I bet the moment you read it you thought in terms of numbers, and that’s unfortunately very normal (I do the same!). But ideally you just want to think effort and not meters (or minutes if it’s static). So for the greener or more nervous students I sometimes try to camouflage it as something else, for example by asking a student to go at a slower speed, or wear short fins, or do a discipline that they didn’t do for a while, or do a static before they start swimming: this way they will immediately know that they won’t be able to match their PB distance and this helps distracting them from the actual numbers. This often works the first time, but once that’s done they will have this new number they achieved and they will feel they have to beat it next time, so I’ll have to come up with some other parameter to change.But you can’t always disguise the long dive, because as uncomfortable as it feels, you must become familiar with it. You have to face it and find a way to cope with the idea that you will be uncomfortable (before, during and especially towards the end) and that by doing it over and over you will learn to control your emotions (at least to a certain degree) and to resist that horrible gut urge to find an excuse and run away to avoid doing it!
If you don’t learn to do this, just imagine how you will live the experience of performing at a competition. You will literally freak out and go home with such a negative and traumatising experience that you will never want to do that ever again.
And this is why I dont believe in “gentle-only” training approach. At an emotional level there’s nothing gentle about performing during a competition, and therefore you need to learn how to deal with it before you get yourself in that stressful situation.
When I assign a long dive to a student, even though I have a secret expectation in terms of length, I always phrase it as an “effort-based exercise” but I bet the moment you read it you thought in terms of numbers, and that’s unfortunately very normal (I do the same!). But ideally you just want to think effort and not meters (or minutes if it’s static). So for the greener or more nervous students I sometimes try to camouflage it as something else, for example by asking a student to go at a slower speed, or wear short fins, or do a discipline that they didn’t do for a while, or do a static before they start swimming: this way they will immediately know that they won’t be able to match their PB distance and this helps distracting them from the actual numbers. This often works the first time, but once that’s done they will have this new number they achieved and they will feel they have to beat it next time, so I’ll have to come up with some other parameter to change.But you can’t always disguise the long dive, because as uncomfortable as it feels, you must become familiar with it. You have to face it and find a way to cope with the idea that you will be uncomfortable (before, during and especially towards the end) and that by doing it over and over you will learn to control your emotions (at least to a certain degree) and to resist that horrible gut urge to find an excuse and run away to avoid doing it!
If you don’t learn to do this, just imagine how you will live the experience of performing at a competition. You will literally freak out and go home with such a negative and traumatising experience that you will never want to do that ever again.
And this is why I dont believe in “gentle-only” training approach. At an emotional level there’s nothing gentle about performing during a competition, and therefore you need to learn how to deal with it before you get yourself in that stressful situation.
How do I go about it?
It’s a fine balance, you can’t do long dives at every training, as it wears you down really quickly. But they also cannot be so far apart that you almost have time to forget how it feels to go through the experience and what tools you used to cope with it.
(Of course the frequency of these dives highly vary also depending on where you are in your training cycle) .
I can almost feel my students panicking the moment I give them that assignment, sometimes they need to be talked into it, sometimes they start the dive knowing already they will give up half way, and that’s also ok because that’s life and we aren’t always successful in our endeavours (and often that failure gives you more motivation for the next time).
Personally I still dont feel comfortable before a long dive, and I dont think I will ever be. The short explanation about the way I approach it is by always tell myself to do 100m and a turn (no matter the discipline) and then “I’ll see how I feel” which is just me fooling myself because I know exactly how i feel after 100m after having done a million of those. But self-fooling seems to work for me, because I manage not to build up too much expectations during my preparation. Then I kind of wing it from there, and once I’m in the middle of it I often catch myself thinking stuff like “if I give up now I’ll be so upset with myself” or “there’s no way in hell I’m gonna do another one if I give up now so I better make this one count”. Then some suffering will befall me but I know it’s transient so I’m waiting for the moment where it becomes easier again, and by then I’ll be giving myself short terms goals, like 5 more kicks, or just this last turn (see my last post where all this is explored in more details).
This may be working for you or it may not, in the end you need to build your own tools: your coach can give you a suggestion and you have to work with it, try something out, keep what works and drop what doesn’t until you come up with your own “system”, which takes a lot of trial and error, but I think it’s a lot of fun (in a semi-fucked-up way) because it’s during these sessions that I (still to this day) learn so much about myself and how my mind works.
