Author: gkjohn

What I learned watching swimmers who tried to skip the boring parts

 

The air is sharp with chlorine. The tiled deck sweats under bare feet. It’s 5:30 in the morning, the pool lights throwing pale gold onto the water. Swimmers slip in, shoulders rolling, arms slicing the surface. Lap after lap after lap. The sound is rhythmic, almost metronomic — breath, splash, turn, push. It’s tedious if you watch it wrong. But if you watch it right, you see a thousand micro-corrections, the slow burn of lungs learning to hold more, the stubborn patience of a body teaching itself to move with less waste and more grace.

This is where I sit most mornings now, watching Anoushka train. Cup of coffee cooling in my hands, watching the same strokes repeated hundreds of times. At first, I thought I was just being a supportive parent. Now I realise the pool has been teaching me things I couldn’t learn anywhere else.

There’s a girl in lane three who joined the squad a few months ago. Strong, athletic, clearly talented. She asked the coach about technique videos, wanted to know if there were apps that could analyse her stroke. Could she skip ahead to the advanced sets? The coach just smiled and pointed to the kickboard. “Start there,” she said.

I watched her face. The disappointment was subtle but unmistakable. Kicking looked so basic, so beneath someone of her obvious ability. She wanted the elegant parts – the butterfly sets, the race pace intervals, the stuff that looked like real swimming. Instead, she got 400 meters of kick with a board, focusing on keeping her knees underwater, feeling the water catch her feet.

For weeks, she approached every drill like it was something to get through. Her kick sets were perfunctory. Her catch-up stroke was rushed. She kept glancing at the faster lanes, clearly wondering when she’d graduate to the “real” training.

Then something shifted. Maybe it was fatigue, maybe boredom, but she started actually paying attention to what her body was doing. I watched her hold a streamline off the wall for an extra beat, not because the coach demanded it, but because she seemed curious about how it felt. She began experimenting with her hand entry, making tiny adjustments set by set.

The change wasn’t dramatic. Her times didn’t suddenly drop. But something in her stroke started to look different. More connected. Like the parts were talking to each other instead of working separately.

Last week, she swam next to one of the senior swimmers in a distance set. Same pace, same interval. But watching them side by side, you could see the difference. The senior swimmer looked like she was having a conversation with the water. Every stroke seemed to build on the one before it. Her breathing was so integrated into her stroke that it looked effortless, even as the pace climbed.

The newer girl was working just as hard, maybe harder. But there were tiny gaps in her stroke, moments where the rhythm stuttered, places where effort wasn’t translating into speed. Not wrong, exactly. Just not yet fluent.

It reminded me of watching someone speak a language they’ve studied versus someone who grew up speaking it. Both can communicate. But one has patterns written into their body in a way that the other is still learning.

That’s what the pool keeps showing me. Excellence isn’t a destination you arrive at by skipping steps. It’s built stroke by stroke, breath by breath, in the repetition that most people think is boring. Daniel Chambliss wrote about this – how the best swimmers he studied weren’t just more talented, they were more willing to pay attention to mundane details that others glossed over.

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And what the bar knows about becoming

 

I have been here long enough to learn the tides of a room. Morning light that climbs the far wall, the humid breath of the monsoon before it settles, the faint sweet-sharp of disinfectant under the heavier smell of rubber mats. I know the way chalk floats when the bucket is handled too hard, the way metal answers metal in small talk. I remember the first time you reached for me.

Your hands landed wide and uncertain, fingers cold then suddenly hot as the blood rushed in. You wrapped your thumbs late, tried to crush me as if force could quiet the doubt. The knurling found soft skin and held on. Your shoulders jumped to your ears before your feet left the floor. When you pulled, everything pulled at once and nothing pulled in the right order. Your neck tugged forward, eyes straining, the sinews in your jaw standing out like rope. Elbows flared, wrists bent to angles they were not built to hold, forearms blazing as the lactic fire climbed. Your ribs stayed caged. Breath was a thief that took what it needed and left too soon. For a half second the weight lifted, then your legs flailed for a foothold that was not there, heels scuffing the mat with a squeak you pretended not to hear. The skin under your left palm shifted and pinched. When you slid back to the ground, I felt the heat you left behind.

You did not return right away. People often do not. I watched you from a distance instead. You took to the corners where the room is quieter. On a reformer, springs sighed as you pressed and drew, pressed and drew again, someone’s voice guiding your ribs to widen sideways, then backward where air is shy. The cue was simple but not easy. “Fill the back of your shirt.” I saw your chest stop trying to do the breath’s whole job. Your belly stopped bracing against the world. You learned to make a small hammock with your pelvis so your spine could rest in it. None of this looked like it had anything to do with me, which is why it mattered.

You stood on one foot and the music changed from bravado to listening. At first your toes clawed the floor, white-knuckled against the mat. Weeks later they learned to spread. I watched the tripod of your foot find the ground: big toe, little toe, heel. The ankle stopped locking. The knee stopped running away. Hips began to stack. Somewhere else, on a different day, you lay on the floor with a band around your wrists, pushing out just enough to wake the small muscles that pull your shoulder blades flat and low. Your hands shook in the way that means the quiet parts are finally being asked to help.

You still visited me. You came with chalk on your fingers that smelled like dry rain. Sometimes you only hung and counted slow seconds out loud. Sometimes you tried to climb and could not. But by then the approach had changed. You stood beneath me and let your breath arrive before your grip. You placed your hands with a small ritual: fingers first, then thumbs, then a brief twist of the arms so the elbows knew where to point. Shoulders set down toward back pockets instead of up toward ears. I felt the bones of your shoulder blades glide instead of jam. You were learning to let the movement begin below the neck.

There were days of friction. You pulled and stalled at the same place for a month, a plateau so flat you could have camped on it. I have learned that the room is most honest in those weeks. Your palms hardened, callus forming ridges my knurling read like Braille. You sanded them down with a pumice stone and came back the next day. You changed the way you held me. Not a death grip, but a set that turned the bar into a hook, pressure resting against the pad under the pinky and ring finger so the wrist could stay straight. You practiced leaving the floor with quiet feet. You practiced arriving into the hang with your ribs still soft.

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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.

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Is the point of hiring to judge or to serve?

 

That’s the question Graham Duncan begins with in a remarkable essay on hiring. I return to it often, not just because it’s well written (it is), but because it opens up a much deeper conversation.

On the surface, it’s a post about assessing candidates. But it reads more like a meditation on how we come to know people and how much of that depends on whether we’ve come to know ourselves.

Duncan approaches hiring not as a performance review in disguise, but as a relational process. He doesn’t pretend that it’s easy or neat and starts from a different place: that everyone is capable of excellence in the right context, and that our work, as managers, leaders, or peers, is to help them find that context. That might be in our team. It might be somewhere else entirely. But it’s an act of care either way.

That framing resonated deeply with me. Especially his use of Robert Kegan’s adult development theory because it is something that shaped my own coaching training and continues to influence how I see leadership and systems change. Duncan draws attention to the “self-transforming mind,” that stage where one begins to question not just the conclusions we reach, but the frameworks we use to get there. It’s a stance that’s curious, reflexive, and aware of its own limits.

It’s also a reminder that clarity doesn’t come from standing above complexity, but from moving within it: with care, humility, and attention.

And while Duncan is writing about hiring, I found myself reading it as a much broader pattern that applies just as much to how we build teams, hold performance conversations, structure collaborations, or try to work across systems.

It’s the same thread that runs through my own work and writing:

That connection, not abstraction, is what creates the conditions for insight and movement.

That we are always in relationship: with people, with context, with our own assumptions.

That leadership, especially in complex systems, is less about certainty and more about discernment. And that discernment starts by noticing what water we’re swimming in—our own and each other’s.

Duncan’s post doesn’t offer a method so much as a stance. And for me, that’s the most useful kind of guidance.

If you’re someone thinking about hiring, or building teams, or simply trying to navigate complexity in more human ways, I think you’ll find this piece meaningful. Possibly even centering.

You can read it: https://grahamduncan.blog/whats-going-on-here/

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Originally published on Substack on 7 August 2025. Read on Substack →