Why compete?

小臭贝

You call yourself a fitness swimmer. You attend 2 - 4 workouts per week intending to get your heart rate up for a goodly period of time while enjoying a group atmosphere and, hopefully, improving your swimming technique and speed. Your doctor, your co-workers and friends, your significant other, numerous magazine articles and the conventional wisdom all hold that this kind of activity is good for you and you should do it (or something like it) for the rest of your life. You swim because it is good for you, not because you are one of those hard-core, competition driven, yardage crazy, lactate hungry, racing animals in the fast lane.

"Therefore," you conclude, "competition is not for me."

Let's think through this for a moment. If we were to poll the ranks of "competitive" swimmers and inquire as to their desires regarding fitness, I suspect we would find little difference between your interests and theirs. Almost without exception, competitors call themselves "fitness swimmers" too. Why, then, do they enter events, pay entry fees, wear special suits, shave their bodies bald, drag themselves around the globe (or perhaps just across town) and generally subject themselves to the rules and rigors of the competitive experience?

In a word, motivation. When you train your body to perform an activity, it is natural to want to measure your ability from time to time. When you see improvement it spurs a desire for further advances through additional training. This training / feedback / training cycle continues to feed upon itself, creating daily motivation to Just Do It.
Swimming in competition is a wonderful way to measure your ability. If your key desire is aerobic fitness, swimming the distance events in pool meets or doing open water swims are ideal. If your fitness goals include raw speed, power and explosiveness then sprint events are going to be appealing.

Planning ahead for a competition motivates you to train so that you will be prepared for the event. The extra adrenalin experienced during competition helps you to put forth your best effort in determining how good you really are at that moment. Improvements are realized in dropping minutes, seconds or tenths of seconds off your times from one competition to the next. Seeing these improvements provides motivation to go back to the workout pool and train for further improvements.

Besides feeding the training / feedback / training cycle, competition offers additional opportunities to learn from other swimmers that are going through the same experiences you are. Learning experiences in meets contribute to the motivation you take back to the training pool.

And perhaps most importantly, swimming in a meet occasionally provides much needed variety to your swimming experience.

So, if you concluded somewhere along the line that competition was not for you, I would urge you to rethink your position and perhaps attend one of the low-key meets this fall, like the Houstonian meet in October. You don't have to get hard-core. Just Do It cuz it's good for you

This Article first appeared in Schwimmvergnugen, the monthly newsletter of H2Ouston Swims.

Coach Emmett Hines is the head coach of H2Ouston Swims. He has coached competitive Masters swimming in Houston since 1982 and was selected as United States Masters Swimming's Coach of the Year in 1993. Currently he coaches workouts at the University of Texas Health Science Center, the University of Houston and The Houstonian Club.