Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Hi, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. I want to start this episode off with a story about something that happened earlier this week. Three months ago, I purchased a new surfboard. I had it custom made to the exact specs that I wanted, the exact size, and I was really looking forward to this board coming. Now, a week ago, the board finally arrived after three months of waiting, just checking the mail every day. So it finally arrived, so I waxed it up, put some fins in it, and I was waiting for some good conditions to surf this board in. I didn’t want to waste it when it was really choppy and windy and not nice conditions to surf in. So finally a day arrives and earlier this week, I take the board down to the beach and I go out and I catch a couple waves and it’s feeling really good.

Then this wave comes and I am surfing on my backhand, which means for me, I’m going right when I take off on the wave. And this is the best backhand wave I’ve ever surfed. The wave itself was okay, but the way I was surfing, this was the best I’d ever done in terms of had these three nice flowing turns. I was relaxed. I was in flow. It felt really good. And I thought, oh, I’ve just levelled up my surfing here. I’ve never felt this good going to my right. I had this big smile on my face as I was paddling back out to the line-up. Then on the next wave, paddle for it, take off, and I go for this top turn. And I’m a little bit confident here, so I try and push that turn a bit harder and a bit faster than normal. And what happens? My foot slips off, so the board turns to the side and then as I’m coming down off the top turn, I land with my knee on the rail and I’ve cracked the rail. A big crack on my brand new, not so cheap board.

And I was pretty frustrated. I was angry because I had this high high where I was thinking, yep, I’ve improved big time here. And then I go for the next one, ding my new board. And the reason I’m telling you this story is because in life we have ups and downs. We’ve always got the ying and the yang, but as we get better and we progress, our challenges and our problems, they evolve. 10 years ago, actually 15 years ago when I started surfing, the challenges that I had was not getting cleaned up as I was paddling out for the waves or just trying to actually go across the right wave rather than going straight. So the challenges I had back then were very different to the challenges I’ve got now. Dinging boards because I’m pushing too hard in turns and swings very much like that where as you progress and you get better, you’re going to have different challenges with your technique and your fitness and your skills.

But the overall baseline begins to rise. So even though we still have highs, we still have lows, the overall baseline and threshold will creep up over time. But it’s not going to stop you from having good days and bad days. Often I’ll get asked by people, like, what’s going on? Today I was from in 140 pace and yesterday I was from in 135. I just don’t, I don’t get it. Like what’s, what’s going wrong here? But we always have those good and bad days and sometimes it can change with how much sleep you have, how you’re feeling, how you’ve done a lot of training before that, how’s the stress with work and family and life. All these little different things, they play a different part. So what we want to try and do is just remember that that’s part of the journey and we can overall raise that baseline and have different challenges and different problems as we get better. But it is easy to forget that sometimes.

And I know when I came off that surfboard and I looked at my rail and saw it was dinged up to the first surf and thought, ah man, this is really annoying. It took a little while to calm down from that and go actually, all right, this is a good problem to have. My surfings improved a lot over the last 10 to 15 years. Doesn’t mean I’m not getting frustrated when those things happen, but it’s just part of the journey. In next week’s episode, I’m going to cover how you can raise the baseline of your aerobic fitness. Because most of you who are probably listening to this, you are probably training for some middle to longer distance events and the way that we can improve our overall speed there, a big part of that is your aerobic fitness. And I see people doing some things in training that aren’t benefiting them, that’s not really working for them as well as they could. So in next week’s episode, I’m going to cover in detail

what you can do to improve your overall aerobic fitness, how you can track it and the types of workouts that you need to do in order to make those gains. Because coming from a swimming background, this feels quite obvious and quite, how do you put it? It’s general knowledge coming from the swimming background, but a lot of people that I coach, they don’t have that background. So they’re stepping into this world without that knowledge. So that’s what I want to share next week. So tune in for how you can raise that overall baseline of your aerobic fitness so you can sustain a faster pace for the next event that you do. Thanks for listening. See you next week. This episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, Form Smart Swim Goggles. They’re more than a pair of goggles. Meet the world’s most powerful swim platform. See yourself improved with Form Smart Swim Goggles, including a free one-year membership

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