Let’s Hear It for Our Coaches
Thanking your coaches is always important, but as we celebrate Coach Appreciation Week, the first full week of October, try to be extra thankful.
Being a Masters coach is a tough job or volunteer responsibility.
Our coaches lead groups of swimmers of varying ages, talents, and desires. Some swimmers want to do repeat 100s on 1:15, some on 1:40. Some swimmers want to do 25s, others 300s. Some swimmers want to mix in strokes, others only want to do freestyle. Oh, and their coach might only have four lanes to work with.
How do coaches every day write a warm-up, preset, main set, kick set, and cool-down that totals about 3,500 yards/meters in 60 to 75 minutes? This in addition to knowing everyone’s names and what’s happening in their lives, ensuring all swimmers are paying their club dues, providing technique advice to everyone, persuading them to compete in meets, and, with some clubs, serving as a lifeguard? What sorcery is this?
I learned just how challenging writing a workout for a large group of people can be in April while swimming with Landshark Aquatic Masters in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. (I’ve been spoiled swimming with Sarasota Sharks Masters, which has a head coach and several assistant coaches to write and lead workouts.) Like many USMS clubs, Landshark doesn’t have a dedicated coach, meaning swimmers have to bring workouts every day (or repeat one that’s been saved).
I decided to create a "Fast Friday" with a main set I stole from Novaquatics Masters Assistant Coach Joshua Hanson. After 1,100 of warm-up and preset, we went six times through the following: 3 x 25s at 100 race pace with a rest interval of half of your 25 time (so if your goal time was 1:00, you’d rest 7½ seconds after the first and second 25s) and a 125 recovery. This was followed by a cool-down for a quick 2,500.
No, this wasn’t an easy workout to explain. And I ended up miscalculating the total distance and length of the workout despite checking my math several times. But everyone seemed to enjoy it despite my worrying how it would go over.
Writing workouts is just one part of what our coaches do for us every day. Without them coming up with and leading creative sets that push us, we wouldn’t get the health and training benefits from our workouts that we so deeply love.
Thanking your coaches is always important, but as we celebrate Coach Appreciation Week, the first full week in October, try to be extra thankful. Think of ways you can appreciate your coaches, whether that’s writing them a note, giving them a present, or letting the facility know how wonderful they are. The fact that they do everything they do as well as they do is amazing.
