PART 2
MH: I love it. It’s what I try to do with 400m track sprinters.
BB: Yep. It sounds like there’s a lot of similarities between what your guys do and what we do in the pool, besides the load runners have to bear which is obviously a completely different issue.
MH: Runners have impact and gravity.
BB: And we are floating, which is a completely different issue.
MH: But your swimmers have a power-endurance issue which is significant. But the time scales are very similar: three-quarters of a minute, give or take a couple of seconds. James swam for 47.6sec and a good time for a male 400m runner is 44sec.
BB: And we’re got a dive start. They break out at four or five seconds. So you take that out and race time/distances are pretty spot-on the same.
MH: Why do we suddenly have a world champion in the men’s 100 free. We’ve never had one. We had Michael Wenden win the 1968 Olympics and we’ve had a few near misses in Michael Klim and Eamonn Sullivan. It’s obvious James is a great athlete, but we’ve had great swimmers before.
BB: I don’t know the differences. I wasn’t involved with Eamonn specifically in that preparation, or Klimmy specifically in that preparation. But we work on James’s composure before we work on his race. In training we’ll work on his race: work on his starts. We’ll do 50 starts, we’ll do 50 first 25 metres. We’ll do thousands of second 25m. We’ll do heaps of back-end, over and over and over again. So I have no doubts he can execute all that. But he needs to be in the frame of mind to get it, so we work on his frame of mind – at the meet. Not necessarily at his race. He knows how to race. He knows his race components. They are so tightly and specifically practised over and over again. He knows how to do that. I just know that he composes himself well enough to go: What I’ve got to do is execute my race well and be in the frame of mind to do it. If I’m in the right frame of mind that I can execute my race to my best then I know at least half the field will get very tense. They’re going to get angry and they’re going to do as Alpha males do and they’re going to get into the contest.
I was reading a good book about ‘emotional intelligence’. They were talking abiout how the IQ just drops away when you get into an emotional state. When you’re angry all the blood goes to your hands and feet because you’ve got to fight. When you’re afraid, blood goes to your legs because you’ve got to run. It goes away from your brain. But if you’re composed or if you’re happy, blood flows to your brain. If you’re not emotionally distracted you’ve got to be in a better state to be more intelligent to execute the way you want to execute. And that’s what we do going into meets, more than we do talking about everything they’ve got to do during a race because they know what they have to do. They know how to do it. They’re racers.
MH: Do you work with a sports psychologist at all?
BB: Just started to. From world champs to Olympics I wanted him to have contact with our sports psych who has just started at NSWIS. They had one or two chats before he went away (to world champs). So that was good.
MH: So that’s value added largely since the world titles.
BB: Pretty much. So James did a couple of sessions before he went to China and I talked to him about some issues, but I really wanted to just introduce that so that we have another part of the team to go to.
This world championships wasn’t about this worlds. This worlds was about London (the Olympic Games in 2012). That was the whole thing, even going into the final. It was: mate, feel the way you want to feel behind the blocks next year at London. Give yourself a practice run. And if you can hold up that against these boys here, you can do it next year and so that’s a good advantage for you. So if you come third and you hold together that’s great. If you lose the plot and come third then we’re no further ahead and in fact we’re probably behind where we want to be next year. Feel the way you want to feel behind the blocks and you’ll execute as well as you can. You’ll give yourself a shot at them.
MH: Are you doing anything different with him. He was always a good finisher was he not.
BB: Yes he was.
MH: So the task was to improve the front end of the race.
BB: The task was to make the front end faster but not to compromise the back end of the race. I didn’t want to throw away his strength for the sake of his weakness. There’s a temptation. A lot of people were telling me: ‘You’ve got to work on his speed.’
We don’t have to work on his speed. Not his top-end speed. We don’t have to work on that at all. A lot of other sprint coaches are working on top-end speed. We just do a lot of practice at race speed and make him faster at race speed, so his easy speed is faster. Not his fast speed is faster. His easy speed had to get faster. We do a lot of easy-speed work , rather than top-end speed. A lot of coaches were saying you’re got to get his top-end speed up. But that’s not the way he swims. He doesn’t even swim with a top-end speed stroke. It’s almost a 200m-type timing. We did a lot of work to make that better and he’s now now a second faster than he was at Trials last year down the first 50m. But his stroke rate and his stroke count are the same.
MH: Kenneth Graham (NSWIS senior sports scientist) came to you last year with a couple of ideas, some depletion sets. On the track it was maybe three or four 60m sprints off a minute and then 30 seconds rest before sprinting a flat-out 200m. The 400m boys said the 200m then felt like the last 200m of a 400m race. They had to run the 200m without any phosphates stores which had been depleted by the explosive set of 60m sprints. They had no nitro to cheat with. Was that concept any use to you?
BB: Love it. Absolutely love it. I love it because it’s short and it’s sharp. I like it a lot physically but I think psychologically for them, they can give it to themselves, give it to themselves and give it to themselves and then go again. And then I can rest them. They can give me 100 per cent on that set, rather than them thinking oh here we go again, he’s just going to bash the shit out of us until we can’t move.
Here’s a set with purpose that we can focus on. It’s short enough, we can try to go fast. Absolutely. Psychologically they can give me effort. Physically it’s very specific to the back-end of the race when they haven’t got anything even neuro-muscularly through the back of the race as much as they haven’t got any phosphate system running. Neuro-muscularly they’ve been stuffed. They’re aerobic system has been screwed because we put them on about 10sec rest before the last 50m.
MH: Similar work I like is the longer rep followed by short reps. It’s a different type of depletion. Have you tried any of that?
BB: I’ve done some of that stuff with turns.
MH: Where to now?
BB: Good question. I don’t think he’s swum a perfect race. He’s swum components of a perfect race and the relay swim was pretty good. He did a pretty good job. But he’s still a fair way from swimming the perfect race. He’s still a fair way from being the perfect swimmer.
So rather than saying, here are our goals, it was kind of a surreal moment at the meet. Everyone was jumping round. It was crazy. And I was so stupidly calm. I wasn’t there in the moment. Instead of jumping up and down I was looking at my watch thinking geez that’s a good swim, he’s done a good job there. He’s put all his components together. And I was happy like that as if we were at the state titles and a 10-year-old had just done a race well. Both the relay and the individual race were like that for me.
It’s not about where do we go, where does he go now. It’s about here’s the parts of the race I think he can do better. Herre’s where I think he can improve. Lets just improve these parts of the race and, if he’s composed enough, he’ll execute under pressure.