Courtesy: Rebecca Adams Renner
Imagine this.
The biggest meet of the year is two weeks away.
Taper has started. You’re healthy, well-rested, and hitting your times almost effortlessly in practice. The psych sheet drops and there are no surprises—the meet is lining up exactly like you pictured it.
Travel is seamless. Your hotel is perfect, dinner is exactly what you wanted, and you get the best night’s sleep you’ve had all season. Meet day comes and you’re rested and refreshed. Warm-up isn’t crowded, the water is the perfect temperature, and you feel amazing. Your first race goes exactly as planned.
And then you wake up.
Because this almost never happens.
Championship meets are complex. Dozens of events. Hundreds of swimmers. Trials, finals, travel, unfamiliar pools, changing schedules. Something is going to happen that you didn’t expect. I call these disruptions, and they affect every swimmer at every championship meet. A disruption is anything unexpected that pulls you away from your plan.
Here’s the part most swimmers get wrong: disruption itself isn’t the problem. It’s normal. It’s built into every championship meet that has ever been swum. The problem begins when disruption starts making decisions for you. The moment a swimmer consciously or unconsciously decides “I can’t swim well because…”, disruption has already won. You can’t stop disruption. The question is whether it pulls your attention outward – toward everything you can’t do anything about – or whether you return your attention to your plan.
That’s the whole game. Not avoiding disruption. Building the ability to make it less …disruptive.
To do that, it helps to understand what disruption actually looks like. Disruption shows up in two places:
- before the race
- during the race
It looks different in each.
Before the Race
With multiple days of racing, dozens of events, and hundreds of swimmers moving through the same pool, it’s rare for a championship meet to unfold without a glitch. Add travel—hotels, unfamiliar food, unfamiliar pools, maybe even a time zone change—and some kind of disruption is almost guaranteed.
Disruption becomes a challenge the moment a swimmer decides they can’t race well because:
- the hotel was too noisy
- they ran out of pancakes at breakfast
- the van got a flat tire on the way to the pool
- the pool is too warm
- there’s not enough time between events
- the timing system was down for forty minutes
Whatever the reason, the swimmer has handed something outside their control the power to determine their race—before the race has even started.
During the Race
Disruption during a race looks different, but the mechanism is exactly the same.
Consciously or not, every swimmer builds a race plan around two expectations:
• how they expect the race to feel
• where they expect to be relative to the field
Then the field goes out faster than expected. Or slower. Someone in the next lane pulls ahead. Your stroke feels off. When you’re not prepared for those moments, your attention gets pulled outward and you begin reacting instead of executing.
In your head it sounds like:
- Why is she out so fast?
- Why is he right there?
- How am I ahead?
Reality doesn’t match your expectations, and your attention gets pulled off your race plan and onto whatever is happening around you.
Disruption is guaranteed. Here’s how to prepare for it.
Before the meet: Anticipate
Make a list of every disruption you’ve experienced at a championship meet. Then add the “what ifs”: What if warm-up is crowded? What if I can’t sleep the night before? What if my tech suit rips? What if the field goes out faster than I expect? For each one, think through how you’ll respond. Then when something unexpected happens, it’s no longer a shock. You’ve already been there.
When it happens: Stay neutral
When disruption hits, strip it down to what’s actually happening. Not “this is terrible, now I’m going to get tight.” Just “the timing system is down.” No judgment, just what’s happening. Then ask: what’s my next step? Maybe that’s putting your headphones back on, chatting with a teammate or going back to your pre-race routine.
During the race: Put your virtual blinders on
In horse racing, trainers use blinders to block a horse’s peripheral vision so it stays focused straight ahead. Virtual blinders do the same thing for your attention. When someone in the next lane pulls ahead, or you find yourself unexpectedly ahead, your attention wants to go sideways and away from your race plan. Virtual blinders bring it back to your own lane and your own race. You’ll still see the swimmer next to you. You just stop giving them your attention.
The takeaway
Some sort of disruption will happen at every championship meet you ever swim.
The swimmers who consistently deliver the performance they trained for aren’t the ones who had the perfect warm-up, the perfect amount of time between events, or the perfect night’s sleep. They’re the ones who developed the ability to notice disruption without letting it take over.
Disruption isn’t a sign something has gone wrong.
It’s a sign you’re at a championship meet.
ABOUT Rebecca Adams Renner
Rebecca Adams Renner is the founder of the Swim Mindset Collective, which provides mindset training programs for swim teams. She also writes The Missing Set, a publication that explores mindset in swimming. A former Division I swimmer at Dartmouth, nationally ranked Masters swimmer, and swim parent, she spent 24 years at IBM before turning her focus full-time to helping swimmers deliver the performance they trained for. Learn more at swimmindsetcollective.com/about.
