The Language of Competitive Swimming

‘Doing’ competitive swimming and completing the countless hours of training, however, is not just a case of undertaking these various body techniques in a planned structure where different elements are pieced together to bring about a desired training effect. Mastery of these individual elements is not enough. The competitive swimming lifeworld also has a language of its own, where terms or acronyms such as ‘freestyle’, ‘red’, ‘ 100’, or ‘B/E7’ have a specific meaning that the swimmer must embody (see appendix 7 for further examples and explanations of these terms). The swimmers must develop a ‘feel’ for this language that enables them to understand, respond to, and execute the various techniques in order for the session to function effectively. As Crossley (2004a) has perceptively noted in relation to circuit class attendees, participation presupposes ‘fluency’ in this language. For example, for the various colours, such as ‘red’ or ‘white’ that the coaches at ANP Swimming use to designate different swimming intensities to achieve their desired effect, the swimmers must firstly recognise that said specific colour is next in the training plan and be able to adjust their speed to ensure said colour is achieved. The words ‘red’ or ‘white’ therefore take on a more significant meaning, which is ‘this next rep(s), or part of a rep, is

to be swum at a red intensity which correlates to an anaerobic threshold heartrate of around 170 beats per minute. You need to adjust your swimming pace to ensure that this heart-rate is achieved’. In order for this to happen and the session to continue as planned,

each swimmer must be versed in this language and understand what their target time is, what this pace or intensity feels like, and be able to shift to this pace instantly as well as being tuned-in to what is going on around them. This requires a level of bodily know-how rather than merely a conceptual knowledge-that (Crossley, 2004a), and exemplifies the centrality of the mind-body linkage. To know somatically what these elements are is to be able to do them. Thus, there is a powerful link between words and bodily action just as the following fieldnote emphasises:

One thing I did make a note of this evening is how the swimmers translate what the coach writes on the session into bodily action. They have to have an understanding of what the written words mean in an embodied action. The same with when the coach gives them feedback, they have to be able to translate the coach’s words into bodily action and all within an aquatic world (Fieldnote, 12th _{July 2018 PM).}

156 The experience of new members to the squad also indicates how this language is a learnt skill. Newcomers, not versed in each coach’s specific short-hand terminology often struggle to comprehend to what the colours, or acronyms refer, as the following extract from one of the group interviews shows:

GMC: So, to inhabit this world you have to understand [what things like] 3x400 at red pace actually mean. I know that may not be a good example, but it is an example.

Scott: Well I didn’t have a clue, cos it’s my first year obviously, so I didn’t have the colour system and even before that in my old club we had different terms. We used to always base everything off pb+ so like it makes it, so now the colours I feel like it’s a better interpretation, like now I’ve learnt it, it’s better. Wade: Like everything relates though don’t it, do you know what I mean Eddie: That’s why Nick does the colours. That’s the biggest thing, I think when all the freshers come in, you see like he will say Red, like threshold and some people are sitting there chilling doing like, what I would call A2 which is easier than threshold and then some people are absolutely smashing it so, it just takes a while to adapt to what a coach actually wants by what he says (Group Interview three, 16th _{July 2018).}

This inability to execute training repetitions at the correct intensity also adds weight to the notion that the habitus of the swimmer is both structured and structuring (Crossley, 2004a). The newcomer has not yet incorporated a ‘feel’ for this specific lifeworld. Their ANP Swimming habitus is in this respect a work in progress. Although they are experienced swimmers with significant amounts of embodied swimming knowledge, they are still unfamiliar with the socio-cultural nuances, including the language of ANP Swimming. As time progresses, however, these newcomers come to learn the language, often with help from other swimmers, developing a feel for these elements. This ‘feel’ is vital to the swimmers’ continued involvement in this lifeworld, because the smooth running of, and the swimmers continued participation in the various sessions, as well as their continued improvement, all depend upon it. The swimmers learn to embody the coach’s terminology and thus begin to understand how to inhabit the ANP Swimming lifeworld and the competitive swimming lifeworld more generally. They then begin to play an active role in the reproduction of competitive swimming as a social practice. However, this ‘feel’ can often be thrown off, due to what Crossley (2004a) notes is a ‘lived temporality of action’. Should the coach introduce new terminology, suddenly everyone once again becomes somewhat of a newcomer, as occurred when Nick began to embrace a new training

157 modality that utilises different concepts, ideas, and terminology for how training sets are designed. In doing this, everyone’s habitus, including my own was challenged, temporarily fractured, and thrown-into disarray, highlighting that however embedded and embodied skills may become, they are not necessarily learnt once-and-for-all (Allen-Collinson, 2016). Additionally, and as with technique, despite the language relating to specific embodied modes of being, the ability of the swimmer to execute these as desired is very temporally specific, again highlighting the fluid and evolving daily nature of ‘doing’. Logan alludes to this in the following extract about how his white pace (a base level aerobic training pace) differs from a morning session to an evening one:

Like for me yesterday, my white pace changed by about four or five seconds between the morning and the afternoon just because of how I was feeling. Like we'd had the long weekend off and I was feeling awful in the morning and I felt better in the evening, and that’s how much it changed by (Group interview two, 10th _{July 2018).}

This unpredictability of how the swimmers are going to feel each day subsequently becomes one of the most challenging aspects of the sport, and as Bruce says:

I think that’s why a lot of people, would struggle in this environment. Like one day you feel good, like Logan said, wake up in the morning feel shit, go training again feel better. Train tonight feel shit. Go tomorrow, feel shit, go back the next day feel good and it’s like, it’s so up and so down that it’s, it’s a lot to take a lot of the time and you've got to find a way that you can sort of zone out from it a bit (Group interview two, 10th _{July 2018).}

Despite the prevalence of this rollercoaster of feelings, this phenomenon of unpredictability was not always appreciated by the coaches in their planning, who, despite having both been swimmers themselves, often had an expected level of how the swimmers ‘should’ be feeling that didn’t match up to how the swimmers actually did feel. Using Logan’s example of long weekends off, the coaches would expect the swimmers to arrive back for Monday morning training refreshed and ready to go. However, the swimmers on occasion felt sluggish and unable to complete the workouts as designed. Despite this disparity, however, the coaches would, where possible, adjust the workouts or give those struggling the option of swimming easier until they began to feel better; but at other times they just pushed on through.

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5.4 Conclusion

The purpose of this chapter has been to highlight to the reader some of the body and reflexive body techniques that play a key part in the swimmer’s ability to inhabit the competitive swimming lifeworld, and how the acquisition of these techniques and skilled behaviours is not simply achieved through the repetitive rehearsal of coherent movements in an activity over time. This process is a much more complex, cyclical phenomenon that demands practical experimentation, discovery and the ability to constantly adjust and adapt depending on the practice (Downey, 2005), as well as linking mind, body and world. As Lea (2009, p. 467) notes, skilled behaviour must “conjugate with the context”. The process of skill acquisition and ‘doing’ thus becomes less about ‘prestigious imitation’ as Mauss (1979) described this, when individuals imitate the actions of those who have been successful and in whom they have confidence, and more about the fundamentally social nature of such learning as requiring input from others (Shilling, 2007; Throsby, 2016); for example, coaches, other swimmers, or support staff. In this way the body is socialised, in that individuals take patterns of action into their ‘flesh’, and that flesh is conditioned by the activity. The body and its capabilities are therefore profoundly shaped by the social, cultural, and physical-cultural.

The ‘doing’ of swimming thus does not occur in a socio-cultural vacuum, it is socially shaped, and offers insight into the dynamic and dialectical nature of embodied action as well as the centrality and malleability of our embodied being in the world. Our embodiment thus offers us a unique reference point from which to experience the world, as well as simultaneously being shaped on an ongoing basis by time, space and our relation to others. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is a useful resource in analysing this dynamic as he acknowledges not only the centrality of the body to our experiencing of the world, but also the capacity for humans to expand their body schemas through the learning of new, or the development of older skills, sometimes involving the use of body auxiliaries. Our bodies to Merleau-Ponty are the unique point from which we engage with the world. From this standpoint one’s own body, or le corps propre, anchors the swimmers in, and allows them to engage with the world around them; “we are our bodies” and they are our very way of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Dasein). In emphasizing the centrality of the body Merleau-Ponty (1968), in his later work, recast the notion of being-in-the-world as flesh-of-the-world, or

159 ‘chair’, to better convey what (Allen-Collinson & Owton, 2014, p. 549) term our “corpo- reality”. It is this ‘corpo-reality’ that allows the swimmers to engage with the different practices of their aquatic environment in order to bring about, through intelligent practice (Marchand, 2010), both reflective and pre-reflective skilled ‘doing’. As a result, the swimmers develop a tacit, embodied knowledge, or know-how that forms their aquatic corporeal schema. The swimming body is thus a lived body or Leib, that is conscious, active, reflexive, and linked to the world as part of a single mind-body-world system. It should be cautioned, however, that skill and habit are not permanent and as well as offering the capacity to being developed they can also degenerate. This highlights how the competitive swimming lifeworld is a dynamic, fluid, and lived-through structure in-process, that constantly ‘(de-)evolves’ as an effect of the interactions, or lack of interactions that an agent has with others, and their physical aquatic environment. As such my findings resonate with those from within other sport and physical cultures, for example, circuit training (Crossley, 2004a), surfing (Ford & Brown, 2006), and open water marathon swimming (Throsby, 2016).

Being able to ‘do’ swimming and work towards developing the competitive swimming habitus thus resides in the embodied capacity of each swimmer, through continued interaction with their aquatic lifeworld, to incorporate information into their body schema with a view to maintaining or increasing the standard of their skilled action. As has been highlighted above, this process does not occur in a ‘motor programming information processing’ style but is lived and developed through an interaction of mind-body and environment. Learning and doing are therefore not unidirectional processes but involve a cyclical process where a swimmer’s body becomes the focus of their intentionality, again and again as new skills or adjustments are developed. This constant ebbing and flowing of states draws attention to how knowing skill is inherently open-ended, with no finite point of proficiency (Shilling, 2017). Swimmers can always seek to change something within their own corporeal limits, with the intention of becoming faster or more efficient. To understand ‘doing’ as part of a lived interaction between body and world, one also needs to understand the sensory transformations and information that facilitate and arise from such ‘doing’. It is these sensory elements on which the following chapter focuses in detailing the ‘shifted sensorium’ (Potter, 2008) of competitive swimming.

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