In Part one of The Old Man and the Lake, our reporter shared his story about dealing with the sudden onset of chronic illness; how time, persistence, and swimming helped him regain his athletic life, and the odyssey of swimming across the Mackinac Straits. In part two, the story continues with his ongoing swimming saga post bridge swim, and the lessons learned about goal setting and the reality of dealing with disappointing outcomes.
Next up on the race calendar the weekend following the Mackinac Bridge Swim was an event called Swim Teal Lake. This is a 2.25 mile point to point swim the length of beautiful Teal Lake in Negaunee, Michigan. Teal lake is a gorgeous inland lake with clean clear water and no motorized craft allowed in it. It’s therefore just about a perfect venue for swimming. A low key fun event with under 70 participants, the race has the decided feel of a local neighborhood happening, which it is.
Everything came together for me at Teal Lake in an unusual confluence of good outcomes. I paced myself perfectly, swam in a straight line, and ended with just a little bit left in the tank. This —and the small field—put me in the unusual position of winning my age group. This was something I had never previously come close to doing. I recognized it was a bit of a unicorn, but nonetheless, I savored the moment and enjoyed the success.
After the washing machine like experience of the Bridge Swim, Teal Lake felt like an easy jog in the park. At the finish, I had to remind myself that it was only a few years ago that a 2.25 mile swim would have been physically impossible for me, and remind myself to enjoy the moment.
There wasn’t a lot of time to savor the victory since I still had the Swim to the Moon 5-k race ahead of me which was only three weeks away. Swim to the Moon has enjoyed phenomenal growth as long distance open water swimming generally has been enjoying a surge in popularity. The event is now held over two days. It includes a 15-k swim—a staggering 9.3 miles, which is somewhat incomprehensible to me—and over the weekend there are almost 1,000 participants in all of the different events.
For Swim to the Moon, I had a very specific performance goal in mind. My finish times had been hovering just above two hours for the last two years and I was determined to punch through the 120 minute barrier. In search of this goal, and in preparation for the Bridge Swim, I spent a lot of time working with a swim coach to refine my technique and make myself more efficient. My old technique dated back to the mid-80s, and things have changed quite a bit in technique philosophy in the ensuing decades. So, I broke down my technique and basically had to relearn how to swim. By the time late summer rolled around I was swimming completely differently and felt like I was primed to break the two hour barrier. It felt like going from using mostly V-1 to being able to go mostly V-2.
My strategy had been to settle in at the fastest pace I could sustain and try to hold it. I stuck to this strategy and only looked once at my watch the entire swim. But herein lies the problem with focusing on outcome goals instead of process goals. In Swim to the Moon, I swam hard, felt like I was swimming in a straight line, and fought through multiple major leg cramps throughout the swim. The entire race I felt like I had the two hour mark in the bag.
As I approached the finish line, I was confident I had achieved my goal, but was then quickly crushed when upon exiting the water I looked down at my watch and saw 2:07 staring me in the face. Not the outcome I had wanted—not even very close. Instead of being proud and happy upon exiting the water, I was upset and confused. How could I feel like I was swimming so well, with my rebuilt stroke, and be five minutes slower than the previous year?
Unwittingly, I was enabling the arch enemy of happiness—comparison. Comparing yourself to others and to your former self is unproductive and I should know better, but nonetheless I went down that road.
It took my wife’s positive mindset to urge me to remember the road I had journeyed the past eight years and to think back to how much it took to get from the couch to the pool, to marathon swimming. We also looked up the winner’s results and saw that all of the top swimmers were a couple of minutes slower than the prior year. The fact that everyone was a little slower was some consolation.
But this is the trap in focusing on performance goals. There are just too many things out of your control for it to be a good metric. The wind might be from a bad direction, the course might be set up slightly differently, you might encounter traffic which negatively affects you—similar to ski racing. Or, you just might not have a great day. All of these things, and others, were possible factors affecting my time. I’ve really tried to learn the lesson to focus on process and not outcome, but focusing on outcomes is a difficult mindset to walk away from.
I’m proud of my efforts to reclaim part of my life. I’m proud of the discipline and persistence it took to get from the couch to completing long swims, but part of me still felt empty, dissatisfied, and lacking. It’s one thing to say, “focus on process goals,” it’s another thing to reach deep into your psyche and override deep personality traits and learned behaviors to actually make that shift happen.
If I contrast how I felt after Swim to the Moon compared to the Mackinac Bridge Swim, the difference is stark. After the Bridge Swim, once I had recovered, I felt a great sense of accomplishment, pride, and satisfaction. After my 5-k swim, I didn’t feel any of that initially. It took a great deal of reflection to bring the positive emotions to the top. I think one big difference was that the Bridge swim wasn’t a race; it was an event to test your individual ability to make it to the other side of the lake. Since there wasn’t any timing involved, there wasn’t any of the baggage which goes with that. There wasn’t any comparison to others, and the only metric which mattered was crossing the finish line. Free from the built in outcome goals of racing, mentally I found myself in a way better place after the Bridge swim. Does this argue for giving up racing, or not wearing a watch? I’m not sure, but there is a case to be made for it. Should I force myself after a race to walk away without looking at the results and promise never to check them online? That seems contrived and completely artificial. If I’ve really reached the point where process matters more than outcome, then I should be able to find myself at the bottom of the results sheet and not really care. You can’t fake satisfaction.
If I am being completely honest with myself I just haven’t reached the point where I can truthfully say that process goals mean more to me than outcome goals. I still look at race results and think about what it would take to trim 10 percent from my times. I still commit the cardinal sin of comparing myself to others on the results list. Maybe I don’t trust the process enough, or maybe the idea of results are just too hard wired into my psychological makeup to change? After all, most of the arc of my life—and probably the same for most people reading this— has been charted along outcome goals since being a teenager. Are the test scores good enough, is the GPA high enough, is the bar result passing, are the jury verdicts positive, are the annual revenues high enough, are the election returns the right ones? All of these outcomes from different parts of careers in different parts of my life mattered deeply and guided my efforts for decades. And here is where there is a larger societal disconnect. In most of life, process isn’t rewarded; outcomes are. The outcome based view of success applies to almost every walk of life. Have a leaky faucet that the plumber didn’t repair properly, or a lawsuit that didn’t go well? No one really cares about the process in these circumstances, just the results. The list is almost endless of areas of life where only the outcome matters. It’s mainly in athletics that process goals are focused on; so it’s a bit of an outlier.
To turn everything in one’s head around and say, “I’m not going to worry about the result, and just think about the process along the way,” may at the end of the day be a more positive and productive mindset, but converting my outlook to truly accepting the process as being more important than the outcome may be a more daunting task than dragging myself out of the hole I was put into by chronic illness, or dragging myself across the Mackinac Straits.
So, now that I’ve fought my way back to being able to compete, I might have one more challenge to overcome; starting to focus on enjoying the journey, appreciating the process, and worrying less about the results. I don’t know if that’s an achievable goal, but it might be just as important as getting myself back into the game in the first place, and like the man said in part one of this article, “I didn’t say it would be easy, I said it would be worth it.”
