I hope you all had a great holiday season and now are ready for the new year! I know I am. We have a new President, a new attitude and hope for a better year. I even renewed a tradition I had lost for the past few years; writing down my goals. I cannot tell you how important it is to not only have goals, but to also write them down. I had forgotten that the difference between having goals and having them written down can mean achieving them or not. Writing them will help you achieve them.

We just came off of the best technique camps we have ever had over the Christmas season. We were busy from mid December until January 7. My daughter, Bebe, our camp director, gave me Christmas day off!! But I loved every minute of the camps. I love to teach and share my years of experience as a swimmer, coach and now, a stroke technician. It is very rewarding to see how fast swimmers can improve by just changing a few details in their stroke. I am reminded about how critical technique is in the sport of swimming. Little things make big differences.

Last year, I wrote a blog called The 7 Degree Tilt, in which I described how tilting the outboard motors on our boat a mere 7 degrees adds 10 mph of speed to the boat. Wow! Like with the boat, the human body can speed up with some ’7 degree tilts’ of its own. Water is not very forgiving nor is the human body very streamlined. To swim fast, we must learn to do some things with our bodies that are not intuitive. The reason for this is that fast swimmers are not just about power. They find the right compromise between power and drag. This is tricky. The arm and leg positions that maximize potential power can also increase drag, negating the advantage of the additional power. Therefore, the most advantageous positions for the arm pull (and leg kick) may not be either what you think or where they feel the strongest. That is why we all need good coaching. It is really tough to figure all of this out on your own.

We have taught hundreds of campers here at The Race Club and I cannot recall one who was doing everything right when he or she arrived. More often than not, of the three fundamentals I teach for fast swimming, most are not achieving two of them and some, all three. The reasons? 1) Too much emphasis on getting the heart and lungs in shape (cardiorespiratory system) and 2) Not enough correct stroke technique training. I guess this bodes well for The Race Club as there is apparently a great need for good technique camps for swimming. I hope you will come and try ours. We are now offering camps at the University of Miami and in Islamorada, the Florida Keys.

Oh, by the way, one of my new goals for the year is to help a growing group of Masters swimmers who had ties to the famous swim coach, Doc Counsilman, at Indiana University, win one more National championship for Doc. We call ourselves Hoosier Daddys. I have learned that at 57 years of age, my recovery is not what it used to be so I started taking our new product, Thunderbolt. It really works, especially if you take it with the liquid Oxygen! I am not promising any world records in Indianapolis next summer, but I can tell you my workouts are already better. Hope you will try some soon. You can find both products in our online store.

Yours in Swimming,

Gary Sr.