This post is part of a series looking back on my experiences in navigating a life-changing ADHD diagnosis while also trying to prepare for my first solo marathon swim, and how these two things collided together in the most perfect way.
I’ve chosen to share my story openly so that it might help others who also dream of accomplishing big scary goals but feel held back by challenges they face in their own lives, no matter what those might be. I also hope my writing creates discussion, understanding, acceptance and inclusion for those that seek it.
This is a deeply personal journey. You're invited to engage in positive and productive discourse with me if you'd like, always happy to chat, but negative judgement isn't welcome here. Kindly move along if these posts – and me – are not for you!
I don't hate drills, even though it probably sounds like it...
It's not that I hate technique drills, it's just that I don't get it.
It's not that I haven't tried, it's just that they doesn't seem to stick for long.
And that's ok, because there are other options out there better suited for me.
I know, it's probably not a popular opinion, but I tend to cringe when my swim club coaches give us swim technique drills to do. Maybe it's not the drills themselves, maybe it's because a lot of the time they're given to us with little explanation as to what the drill is trying to achieve, or any feedback as to whether I'm doing them properly and achieving any kind of difference or improvement. And I often find my body in positions you'd never really swim in naturally, so it can be hard to understand why that's supposed to help improve my stroke. It's not that I don't want to try. Mostly I can't really tell if I'm doing it right and I go through the motions until I'm done, wondering what the point is...
I've also come to realize that my learning preferences probably affect my ability to apply traditional swim drills well. In my first post in this series, I talked about difficulties in my early school years - I seemed to process information differently depending on the situation, I had a hard time keeping hold of things in my head and did much better with written instruction or visual references. And I still do, I often find myself trying to translate verbal instruction into a visual representation of what's being discussed to get a picture of what's needed. Formal diagnosis for ADHD as an adult helped me better understand my brain's wiring and how to manage things to function better. We're working our way through the autism side, and no doubt there's things there too that helps me better understand myself in this way.
I know the following, which surprisingly, helps with my swimming quite a bit:
I'm a visual learner and have a photographic memory, something I first recognized in university. I studied for written exams by using different colour highlighters to mark up my text books, using different colours to categorize different types of information, and would be able to recall the text almost verbatim during the exam. It's a skill that's lessened a little over time as my ADHD symptoms have intensified, but visual stimuli of any kind is how I learn and internalize information best.
My proprioception generally sucks, that's the awareness you have of what your body is doing in the space it occupies and how to move it appropriately. Have you ever had a swim coach try to give you correction on something, but you're certain without a doubt that you are not doing that thing, and then they show you video of you doing exactly that thing they are trying to get you to correct? Yeah, some of us aren't great at recognizing what our body parts are actually doing compared to what we think they are doing. Sensory receptors in our muscles and joints are responsible for proprioception, cool thing is, you can work to improve it.
I need to know the "why", I really do need to. It's not that I don't trust a coach's instruction but I get genuinely frustrated inside if I can't connect purpose with movement (while my proprioception may suck, I actually do want it to work better!). If I ask "why" and can't get a clear answer or I'm made to feel like I'm being difficult or doubtful, I won't be asking again - why would I?
So how does all this connect to my training for The Search?
Simple - it was the key to completely reinventing how I moved in the water.
Swim Mastery and learning how we learn...
I remember showing up at the swim director's clubhouse the day after the swim, and triumphantly lifting my arms in the air. After 40km and 15hrs17mins of swimming freestyle, they felt pretty great, and I could move freely. "That's ALL Shannon!", I said with a big smile.
I was referring to Shannon Keegan, founder of Intrepid Water, and my swim coach. When I first came to Shannon for help, I was having significant issues with lower back pain and wasn't sure I'd ever make it above 25km. But frankly, my technique was messy and looking back it's a wonder that I wasn't more injured that I was. I needed things to change.
Shannon is certified in the Swim Mastery technique, developed by Tracey Baumann. Tracey recently released a book too, which I'm pouring through now - it looks great.
There are a few principles in the Swim Mastery approach that are fundamentals:
Developing proprioception is key, you need to be able to accurately understand how your body is really moving through the water in order to be sure you're applying safe swimming techniques or to be able to recognize when you aren't and correct yourself. I was going to need to be able to read what my body was doing better, and use that to tell it what to do next. Yikes, we had our work cut out for us.
Focusing intently on what you're doing in your swimming helps new patterns and processes become automatic, both as movements and neural pathways, and here's the beautiful thing - as things become more automatic, you can expect to also deepen your proprioception. Simply put, focus on specific things, do them often, it will become natural, and you'll be able to tell whether you're doing it right even when your coach isn't there watching you. Hold up, you mean I need to think a lot about swim stuff while I swim? Hmmm, that's usually my time to disconnect.
Spiral learning is the notion that each time you come back to something you've worked on before, you can know it more deeply, strengthen it, take it further each time. Focus on a skill repeatedly, increase your proprioception about how your body moves, make improvements that stick and keep getting better and better. No one-and-done drills? I'm listening.
As someone who has a hard time feeling what my body is doing in the water and who typically has issues with focus, you'd think the above might sound impossible to do.
But it ended up being the perfect approach.
Doing drills differently: it's all about the cues...
A cue is a specific instruction for a movement pattern or process.
Swim Mastery uses cues instead of traditional drills.
Here's why I like their approach and why it seems to work really well for me. Swim Mastery recognizes that there are different learning styles, which is not something I've seen many of my swim coaches take into account when teaching. Nothing personal, I recognize it must be hard to juggle a crowd of swimmers with different styles. But it's something you notice easily, when you understand your own learning needs well.
Auditory learners learn by hearing instructions or feedback. A coach's words or tuning into sounds the body makes while swimming are easily absorbed sources of feedback ("verbal cues"). This is definitely not me lol, nope. I do try, but it doesn't come easily.
Kinaesthetic learners are doers and feelers, they learn by doing something and experiencing it. Tactile feedback is especially easy to access, for example a coach moving or holding a body part into the correct position so the swimmer can feel where it should be or how it impacts how they move through the water ("touch cues"). This is me to some extent, the more I focus on feeling how I move in the water, the more I can tune in and develop using this learning style.
Visual learners learn through visual feedback and information. Pictures, diagrams, observing someone else, video analysis and visualization are especially impactful for the visual learner ("visual cues"). Now we're talking, this is definitely me, I have images flying through my busy little head pretty much all of the time!
These learning styles aren't necessarily exclusive, many people can work with one or more of them at the same time, and to different levels of success depending on the situation. If you're curious, here's Tracey providing auditory and kinaesthetic feedback to blind swimmer Gerrard Gosens, to help him prepare for his English Channel crossing.
In our work together, Shannon would have me use Swim Mastery visual cues (images) along with kinaesthetic cues (feelings) in my swim workouts, and then we'd discuss it afterwards; how it felt when I was holding the image in my mind, what holding the image did for various parts of my body, what feedback I got from how my body moved through the water. It was an entirely new approach for me. It took awhile to get used to, but once I did, I incorporated it into every single pool and open water swim.
Here's an example, my favourite one - angel wings.
Imagine the movement of your scapula sliding forward and your arm moving forward as a single unit, slight bend to the elbow, hand low and close to the water's surface. Combined with a rotated body at just the right angle, it creates a lot of momentum.
Want to know more, read the book! Or hire a Swim Mastery coach :-)
You can see why this kind of imagery works well for someone who's a visual and kinaesthetic learner, and has a harder time processing verbal-only input. But it's a great tool for anyone, really, cue work is just a different way of getting your body into the right shapes.
The way it's applied in swim practices is also interesting, let's come back to the notion of focus I mentioned earlier. The cues get used in focus work in the pool. I show up at swim practices with my little waterproof notebook, and a few cues written down in it. Depending on the type of workout I'm doing, I'm focusing my attention on each cue for a period of time, or a certain distance, or for as long as I can to see what happens. I repeat this multiple times, sometimes switching up between multiple cues, or pairing them together.
You'd think that with ADHD, focusing for any amount of time would be a struggle, but it's actually the opposite. Focusing my attention on the cues and what they're doing to my body easily becomes a sort of hyperfocus, a place to channel my attention and energy with purpose, and I find I can hold focus on cues for very long periods throughout a swim. I also find it calming, centering. Kinda neat.
I imagine most people just see me going up and down the lane during my workouts, but I am constantly focusing and constantly thinking and working on something. Every single time. And because I train my body and mind to think this way in the pool, I'm able to bring these skills into open water, and tune in to my body and correct myself throughout a training swim or event, just by bringing visual cues and kinaesthetic feedback into my mind and then into my body. This is how my proprioception eventually improved in the lead up to The Search, I became more aware of what my body was actually doing and could better direct it into the right positions by pulling the right cue into my mind.
I'm also convinced that bringing this focus work, visualizing cues, and proprioception awareness about my body contributes to my ability to enter into deep flow states while swimming, where I'm intently aware of what my body is doing but also floating through the movements effortlessly. When doing these things repeatedly while on a long swim, my focus can become incredibly narrow and intense, and it lifts me into that "moving meditation" state. I wrote about my experience of flow state on The Search in a previous post, if you're interested.
I'll never have perfect swim technique, instead I like to think of it as always improving. That's the beauty of spiral learning, you can just keep coming back to it again and again...
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