Blog
Dream Big
It’s a fresh start.
New season, new squad, new coach perhaps. A chance to build good habits, break old ones, and gain a fresh perspective on the seasons that have come before. It's time to set your goals for the season ahead. For some, this will be easy. The targets will be to get faster and stronger and more skilful. For others, it will be to make Nationals, break records and win medals. Whichever category you are in, it is important to write it down and set the goal up with a clear vision of how to achieve it.
I often find that my athletes are scared to commit to a goal fully. In the nicest way possible, goals are often very unrealistic or very, very easy to achieve. Some want to make the Olympics at age 12, others say they will be happy with a PB.
Now the problem with the above examples, is one is perhaps a little naïve. Making the Olympics so young would be a great outcome, and yet also highly improbable. There is a saying, “The more you know, the more you realise you don’t know”. In this case, the more you train and compete, the more you realise how hard it is to continue to improve at exponential rates. Whilst a nine-year-old could drop five seconds on a 50m freestyle in one season, an eighteen-year-old may be ecstatic with a 0.1 second PB in the same event. The better you get, the harder it is to find the margins of improvement. For the eight-year-old who wants to be an Olympian in 4 years, the goal may morph into smaller steps with knowledge and time dedicated to honing their craft and the milestone goal of Olympics is redefined to 12 years time.
The other example, simply aiming for a PB, can sometimes feel disingenuous. . Getting better in training, in the gym, in skills and in competition outcomes, is surely a given with the commitment of training. Getting a PB is the reward of hard work yes, but also in some sense very vague. This leads to PB’s once achieved either in-season or at the end of a season being deemed not good enough. Especially with comparison to peers or National and International meets.
Now the goal can of course be progressed if achieved ahead of time. The PB in April can mean new end of season goals. The love for a new event can become a goal we didn’t think of in August. But the start of season goal should be written down and specific. It should be said out loud to your coach, your parents and your teammates. It should serve as a daily reminder, particularly in times of fatigue, why you are structuring your life around a sport that demands so much.
If you are still reading, I’ll let you in on my own goals and why I think saying them out loud is important.
In January 2026, I decided I’d start running.
I hate running and always have. It does not come naturally to me and is very much because of my love of swimming that I did next to no running in my youth, and especially not in my 20’s. It was not necessary for my swimming athleticism and arguably detrimental to it once I’d fully moved into a sport with zero impact in daily training.
I stopped training for sport back in 2017. For a while, the freedom to do whatever felt great. I could swim when I wanted, gym when I felt like it and had no obligation to get better at anything. I toyed with the idea of masters swimming. But I can’t swim for fun. If I swim, I want to be the best, and I know first hand the level of commitment that takes. I could do Crossfit or Hyrox, they would be doable events. But I think (maybe naively) that I would be good at these events as well…and I’d go all in on being the best. I don’t want that commitment.
But with running. I know I suck at it. I have no frame of reference with how good a runner I once was, because I would consider myself as very bad at it. Zero idea about my technique, zero stamina and a massive amount of discomfort at sweating so much whilst moving so slow.
So, I’ve made it my goal. Initially it was to run twice a week. Very vague. What distance? For how long? Vague. Very achievable as the boundaries are moveable. Then I redefined what I meant. One treadmill run of intervals and one progressively longer run. Slightly more structure I hope you would agree. But largely still very obscure. I was scared to commit to something I could possibly fail at, and there wasn’t an end goal to measure progress.
In the spirit of what I teach my athletes, I set an end goal or at the very least, a jumping off point. In January 2027, I’m racing the Burj 2 Burj half marathon. The goal now has a date of achievement, and a set distance. The only variable being how fast I complete it in. Measurable progress can now be made.
The learning curve has been massive. I’ve picked up some injuries which if I’d used my coaching brain would have been avoidable. But my naivety in my own ability meant I had a few false starts in moving forward with the goal.
I got a friend to program my runs which has been excellent. Being held accountable for training and committing to the goal has been a massive help. When I’m busy, tired and a little scared of the distance, it would be very easy to not do it when nobody is there to remind me of the ‘why’.
At first, running was a secret. The Burj 2 Burj was a secret. The quietness of my goal meant that at any point I could stop running and nobody would know I’d failed. But that’s silly. If I don’t run a half marathon in January, it’s not a failure. There might be a hundred reasons why I don’t make the start line or indeed cross the finish line, and I would be inclined to say they are probably out with my control. For now, I’m doing everything I can to get there. And completing the event will be a massive achievement.
So to the swimmers, let’s shout about your goals. Dream big. Write it down and work towards the outcome daily. Your teammates, parents and coaches are here to help guide, support and cheer for you whether you succeed or fail, you will be proud of yourself for committing to the goal in the first place.
And to the parents, who is up for joining my run club?