When speed is a gift and when a theft
My weekend mornings start at the pool now. My weekdays’ evenings end there, too.
Anoushka’s training has stepped up. There are early starts, longer sets and competitions that creep into every weekend. Sitting on the steps, I’ve picked up the language swimmers use with each other. Splits. Negative splits. Underwater to the 15. Descend by 50. It’s a vocabulary of precision, repetition and the slow process of teaching a body to move well.
One topic that comes up a lot between her, her coaches and other parents is yardage. How many metres a swimmer covers in a day or a week. It’s seductively tempting to believe that more distance automatically means more fitness and faster times. But it isn’t that simple. A swimmer can churn out endless laps and still plateau if their stroke wastes energy, if their turns leak time or their breathing throws off their rhythm.
The best swimmers focus on quality. They work on the exact pitch of the hand entering the water, the tightness of a streamline, the way the head stays steady as the body rolls. They repeat these things over and over until the movement belongs to them. Daniel Chambliss, in his study of Olympic swimmers, called this the mundanity of excellence. It’s the idea that greatness is built through small, consistent details, repeated with care until they live in the body.
Watching Anoushka has made me think a lot about how I learn, not just in sport but in my own body, in my inner life and in the “bodies” of the organisations I work with. Over time, I’ve noticed four different ways of trying to improve: hacking, rewiring, repatterning and, eventually, a kind of devotional practice I think of as sadhana.
Hacking
In 2017 I treated my body like an engineering problem.
I tracked macros, measured ketones and blood glucose, and logged every workout. My muscles were outputs, my food was input, my training was a process. The goal was to get from zero to three as quickly as possible, the way a swimmer might try to shave time by adding more and more yardage.
It worked for a while. But like a swimmer chasing distance without fixing their stroke, my improvements were fragile. The moment life added stress, travel or illness, the whole thing wobbled. I had skipped the slow, repetitive drills that let you feel the water and adapt when conditions change.
Hacking produces quick, visible results. But it bypasses the long, sometimes tedious refinement that makes those results last.
Rewiring
Later, I shifted to something closer to rewiring.
In the pool, rewiring is when a swimmer changes the structure of their training, adds resistance work or shifts breathing patterns to match race strategy. For me it meant changing nutrition, reorganising training cycles, making recovery and rest part of the plan.
In organisations, I see rewiring when leaders rebuild infrastructure, adopt new tools or change workflows. It is decisive and often necessary, especially when the environment shifts like it has with AI. But like a new training programme, rewiring still needs time in the water. Skip the adaptation, and you get a body or a team that looks ready but struggles when the pace changes.
Repatterning
The deepest changes for me have come from repatterning.
In swimming, this is the slow work of refining the catch, finding an efficient kick, and timing the breath so it flows without breaking the bodyline. You do it through drills that isolate one movement and rebuild it. From the stands, it can look like nothing is happening. In the water, it changes everything.
In my body, it has meant waking up deep core stabilisers, strengthening neglected foot muscles and rebalancing posture so overworked areas can let go.
In my emotional life, it has been noticing when I rush to solve someone’s discomfort and learning to stay with it.
Psychologically, it has meant catching myself when I grab at clarity too quickly just to ease my own restlessness. These are the nervous system equivalents of stroke drills, teaching myself not to overreact.
Repatterning is invisible until suddenly it isn’t. A swimmer who has repatterned their stroke holds form under pressure. An organisation that has repatterned its culture holds shape when things get rough.
Sadhana
Beyond repatterning is sadhana.
In swimming, I think of sadhana as the relationship a swimmer has with the water itself. At the elite level, the warm-up isn’t just a formality before the main set. It is a way of settling into that relationship. The push off the wall is clean, not because it will shave a fraction of a second, but because that is how you begin a conversation with the pool. Technique work still appears in the session, even when there is no meet coming up and no coach timing the repeats, because the point is to stay in touch with the feel of the stroke.
In my own life, sadhana is showing up to Pilates with no milestone in mind. I walk into the studio and, before the first movement, I notice how my body feels that day — where it is heavy, where it is tight, where it feels open. Greeting my body means adjusting the work to match that reality, not forcing it to match yesterday’s plan. It is the part of the session where the work is not about progress but about presence.
Professionally, I feel sadhana in my writing practice. I sit down to the page not to hit a word count, but to see what might emerge in the act of paying attention. Some days it flows, some days it tangles, but the point is to keep the relationship with the work alive. The act changes me, even when the output goes nowhere.
This is the paradox of sadhana. You are no longer chasing improvement, yet it shapes you anyway. Repatterning still carries an agenda of getting better; sadhana lets go of that. You return because the practice itself has become a home, whether in the lane, on the mat, at the desk, and in returning, you find that something in you has shifted all the same.
In organisations, sadhana might mean keeping certain human processes even when automation could replace them, because those are the moments where trust is built and culture breathes. It is choosing not to skip the “warm-up lengths” because that is when the team learns to move together.
The Organisation as a Body
The more I watch swimming, the more I see organisations as bodies. Strategy is the skeleton. Workflows are the muscles. Culture is the connective tissue. Trust is the breath. Leadership is the nervous system.
Hacking is like overtraining one muscle group. You get a quick visual change but imbalance creeps in.
Rewiring is like surgery. Sometimes it is essential, but recovery takes time.
Repatterning is physiotherapy. Small, deliberate adjustments that restore healthy movement.
Sadhana is living in the body with care, keeping it coherent season after season, not just ready for the next race.
Bodies, whether human or organisational, learn slowly. They embed excellence in the mundane. They need time in the water, not just yardage on the log. The temptation now is to skip from zero to three, to outsource the awkward starts. But the nervous system of a body, and the culture of an organisation, is formed in those awkward starts. That is where coordination emerges and resilience is made.
Hacking will get you moving, rewiring will help you adapt, repatterning will bring you into coherence, and sadhana will keep you whole. The art, in the lane, in the body, in the boardroom, is knowing when speed is a gift and when it is a theft. If you skip the mundane, you might find yourself with a body that looks ready for the race but can’t hold form when the water gets rough.
Originally published on Substack on 9 August 2025. Read on Substack →
Gautam John 
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