Juggling

Totally dodged a bullet while coaching at the pool this morning.

This morning was one of those days where you head out the door knowing you are about to get rather damp. It had been raining all night and I had no reason to think it was going to stop raining simply because I was going to be standing outside next to a pool.

Oh well I thought, this is all part of coaching I guess, taking the good with the bad, you can't only turn up on the nice warm sunny days. I headed out the door wearing about four layers and carrying a towel.

Amazingly though I actually made it through the entire session with out getting rained on. 90 minutes by the pool and not a drop. It looked threatening now and then, but thankfully the actual precipitation held off. It was even a little bit warm. I sort of feel like I should head out and buy a lotto ticket.

While I didn't get wet, the session was still challenging in other ways. Paul Newsome is away this week and so this morning I was down the pool coaching with Sal Scafidi. When Sal and I coach together we tend to coach two lanes each. Wednesday morning is a very big session (about 45 swimmers) and so spiting the squad in two makes the session much more manageable. This morning though I really struggled, even with the squad in half.

The issue was that even though I was only looking after two lanes, there were actually 5 groups of swimmers across those two lanes. In one lane I had one super fast swimmer working on his own pace and two groups of fast swimmers working at the same pace. In my other lane I had one group swimming at one pace and a second group swimming slightly slower. To make things more difficult the session today called for a lot of adjusting of the tempo timers that the groups were using.

With the two lanes broken up across five groups I was constantly jumping between groups adjusting times and giving new instructions. Of course with different paces the groups moved through the session at different speeds, which meant all the groups were up to different parts of the program. It was a lot to think about and keep track of. It was also a good insight into how hectic some training sessions can be. Certainly for the first half of the session I felt like I was struggling to keep it under control. My big fear with the session was that people would be left feeling like they weren't getting a good session due to my lack of organisational coordination.

I think we got there in the end though. I felt like while I struggled, I did manage to hold it together and while the sessions may have started off shaky, they firmed up by the end. Everybody seemed to do what they were meant to, when they were meant to do it, in the way they were supposed to be doing it. Certainly it looked like everyone got out of the pool feeling like they had had a good solid workout.

If the people in the pool didn't get a good workout then I certainly did. I got to the end of the session feeling pretty mentally wrung out. I almost would have preferred to be doing the 1000m effort that the guys in the pool were doing.

Almost...