In the past, Carson has talked about using brainspotting, a targeted psychotherapy treatment that uses specific eye positions to help people access and process emotional pain and stress, to get better at performing in high pressure moments.

What he talked about in the Pan Pacs interview was something much simpler.

In his 200 fly prelims swim at Pan Pacs, Carson said he had trouble staying in his own lane (go to 28:40 in the interview to listen). He went to his coach, Bob Bowman and said:

“… I can’t say in my own lane. I keep watching and when I see someone else coming up I just start spinning and I get freaked out and my whole body starts to hurt”

Bob’s solution? Not some complicated mindset routine. Nothing complicated at all. He simply gave Carson some things to think about for each 50 and told him to pretend like he was doing 4x50s in practice the way Bob told him to do it.

The result? According to Carson, the race “just went by like that”. He tied his best time and said he felt like he “unlocked something there.”

In the 400 IM, Carson reported falling into the same trap during prelims - looking around at the other swimmers. At the 150 turn, he looked over and saw Rex Maurer and Bobby Finke right next to him and knowing their reputation as closers he started spiraling. He again went to Bob and talked about how he could not stop looking around.

Once again, Bob gave him things to work on including the second 50 of breaststroke and the first 50 of freestyle. Carson followed directions and just like in the 200 fly final he found focusing on the race and not his competitors changed everything for him.

So what are the lessons here?

Elite swimmers aren’t immune to the four challenges.

If you have not read my article on the Four Challenges, please check it out. What Carson describes in this interview is the 3rd challenge - disruption. With disruption, a swimmer’s attention get pulled outward onto things happening around them. Carson’s description of not being able to stay in his own lane is a perfect example of this challenge at work. Being an Olympian doesn’t make him immune to it.

The first step to addressing a challenge is naming it

The key step that Carson took was noticing the challenge, naming it and then talking to his coach about it. Then, together with Bob, he developed a plan to address it. Notice that he didn’t just get frustrated and throw up his hands after his race — he actually noticed what was going on with his mindset. Doing that then allowed him to come up with the specific plan with Bob’s help.

Sometimes the best solutions are the simple ones

This one is so important. Sometimes it seems like mindset work is complicated or too hard. It does not have to be. Bob’s solution for Carson was simply to focus on specific aspects of his race and pretend he was at practice. Could it get any simpler than that?

It’s not one and done

Carson was candid that even after he “unlocked” something in his 200 fly final he still struggled with the same thing during his 400 IM prelims swim the next day. It took another not so great swim, and another conversation with Bob to remember what he had to do in order to stay in his own lane. I am sure he will have to continue to work on this in the future. In fact, Carson himself said this is something he has struggled with his whole career.

Conclusion

Mindset training does not have to be complicated. It does not always require a lengthy routine, a complicated visualization, or some elaborate mental strategy.

Often it starts with something much simpler: noticing what is getting in your way, naming it, and finding one thing you can do to get yourself back on track.

For Carson, it was four 50s.

Simple? Yes.

Easy? Not necessarily.

And that may be the difference.

The goal of mindset training isn’t to make championship racing easy. It is to give swimmers simple tools they can use when racing gets hard.

Between shuttling kids to practices and traveling to meets where we spend three or more entire days on the pool deck, the sport demands a lot of us.

On top of all this, many parents, consciously or unconsciously, shoulder the burden of their swimmer’s mindset. As the meet approaches, we start wondering where our swimmer’s head is at. Do they seem excited? Confident? Nervous? What are they saying about taper?

During the meet, things can get even more intense. We watch our swimmer on the pool deck, trying to read their mood from afar and wondering whether we should text something encouraging or just leave them alone. If a swim does not go as planned, things can get even harder as we struggle to figure out what to say to help our swimmer without making things worse.

I recently surveyed swim parents and asked what was the most challenging aspect of championship meets for them. Several of the responses hit on exactly this point:

• “Keeping my swimmer relaxed and positive”

• “Keeping her morale up and her anxiety in check for the duration of the meet”

• “Dealing with my swimmer’s moodiness”

Notice how many of these responses are about trying to manage something that ultimately belongs to the swimmer.

I know exactly how these parents feel because I used to be in the same boat.

During championship meets, I would be on edge all weekend—monitoring my daughter’s moods, trying to say the right things and generally feeling that I was somehow responsible for her mindset. It was exhausting.

It was also not effective.

What finally set me free was realizing that my daughter is the only one who can take responsibility for her mindset. My job as a parent is to support her. That distinction has changed everything for me.

The Turning Point

The turning point came at Winter Juniors during my daughter’s senior year. She had been chasing a WJRs cut for years and had finally made it. This was a big moment for her and her biggest national meet to date.

As my husband and I dropped her off in front of the pool on the first day, I thought about what I could say. What was the right thing to get her motivated, help her handle the pressure and do her best?

I decided in that moment that I was simply going to give her a hug and tell her I loved her. Every bone in my body was screaming that I should be saying more. But I held my tongue and let her go.

It went the same way for the rest of the meet. Every session, I gave her a hug and sent her on her way. She had what would be the best meet of her life up to that point.

The lesson wasn’t that my hug somehow gave her magical powers. It was that I didn’t need to do anything other than support her.

A few years later, she had a championship meet that did not go as planned. After a disappointing showing in the 400 IM final, my text to her was:

“I am so sorry. I know that wasn’t what you wanted. Let me know if you want to talk.”

I wasn’t trying to problem solve. I wasn’t trying to put a positive spin on the swim. I wasn’t pretending it wasn’t disappointing. I was simply letting her know she was supported.

What I Want Parents to Know

Every parent wants the best for their swimmer and wants to support them in every way they can. Otherwise, we probably wouldn’t be in this sport.

But here is the message I have for every swim parent:

You can support your swimmer’s mindset, but you cannot manage it for them.

So what is a parent’s job when it comes to their swimmer’s mindset?

It is NOT to:

• keep them calm

• keep them positive

• manage their anxiety

• protect their confidence

• make sure they have the right attitude

This doesn’t mean you can’t help when your swimmer is struggling. It means you don’t have to take responsibility for making sure they feel a certain way.

What parents can do is:

• provide support

• create space

• listen

• let their swimmer experience their own emotions

• allow them to develop their own tools

The swimmer leads. You support.

So What Does That Actually Look Like?

The goal is for swimmers to learn how to manage their own mindset while knowing they can ask for support when they need it.

That means learning and experimenting with different strategies and approaches and figuring out what works for them. The parent’s job is to support that process without taking it over.

Parents can help by sharing resources —books, articles, interviews with top swimmers, or programs like the Swim Mindset Collective - and then giving the swimmer space to see what resonates.

During a meet, the parent’s role shifts even more toward supporting rather than directing. Let the swimmer lead, but help them learn from their experience.

After a meet, for example, instead of immediately analyzing what went wrong or telling them what they should do differently, you might ask:

“What did you learn?”

“What worked for you?”

“Is there anything you’d want to try differently next time?”

Regardless of the outcome, every meet gives a swimmer an opportunity to learn something they can use the next time they race.

A championship meet can be an emotional roller coaster for a swimmer, but it can be one for the parent too. We care so much that it is easy to start believing that if we can manage their nerves, keep the mood positive and say exactly the right thing, we can somehow help control the outcome.

We can’t.

Our swimmers have to learn how to manage their own mindset. They have to experience the pressure, the uncertainty, the great swims, the bad swims and everything in between. We can support them through all of it without taking responsibility for how they feel or how they perform.

Sometimes the most helpful thing we can do is not do more.

It’s giving them the space to do it themselves.

One of my favorite parts of watching high-level championship meets is listening to the swimmers talk after their races. The post-race interviews often reveal far more about mindset than you might expect. One of the most interesting things I consistently notice is that the struggles don’t disappear just because a swimmer is an Olympian, a world record holder or one of the best in the world.

Here are three interviews from last week’s Pan Pacific Championships that caught my attention.

Summer McIntosh: “I was overthinking rather than just racing”

After her 200 freestyle, Summer McIntosh was disappointed with her race. What struck me was that she didn’t blame her training or her preparation - she blamed her mindset.

Specifically, she said:

“I was overthinking rather than just racing.”

She also said she felt like she had more left when she touched the wall.

Despite all the work she’d put in, she said it was ultimately about “doing it on the day and being mentally prepared.”

Katie Ledecky: “You never know what to expect”

Katie Ledecky talked about being “pretty nervous” before her first race of the meet. That caught my attention because we tend to assume that swimmers at her level must have figured this part out by now. Certainly, someone like Katie Ledecky, who has been swimming on an international stage for well over a decade doesn’t get nervous?

However, she openly talked about her nerves and also noted that some of her best 1500s have come in more relaxed environments. She shared that she needed to learn how to pace herself correctly to swim the times she wanted to swim in these kinds of meets.

She also mentioned the meet schedule and specifically that the distance events were being held at 9:15 p.m.—hardly an ideal setup for a 1500.

Lani Pallister: “The most nervous I’ve ever felt”

After her 800 freestyle, Lani Pallister said she was: “the most nervous I’ve ever felt in my entire life.” Again, this wasn’t an age-group swimmer at their first championship meet - this was an elite international swimmer competing at a major championship.

I think there are some important takeaways here for swimmers at every level.

1. Nerves don’t mean you’re not ready.

Swimmers often assume that feeling nervous before a race means something has gone wrong. They start thinking it means that they are not prepared or not confident. They start trying to find ways to get rid of the nerves.

What these interviews show is that even the best swimmers in the world get nervous before important races. Feeling nervous isn’t evidence that you’re not ready – it’s a normal response to racing when something matters to you.

You’ll often hear people say things like “reframe your nerves as excitement”. I’m not a big fan of that advice because a swimmer can’t simply flip a switch and decide that nervousness is now excitement. What they can learn to do is notice the nerves without deciding that they mean something is wrong. Remembering that even world record holders feel nervous can help.

2. Championship swimming rarely happens under ideal conditions.

Katie Ledecky swimming a 1500 at 9:15 p.m. isn’t exactly the situation you’d choose if you could design the perfect conditions for a distance race - but that’s championship swimming.

The schedule isn’t yours to control - neither are the delays, the noise, the warm-up situation, the meet format or a hundred other things that can happen around a race. At some point, every swimmer has to learn how to race when conditions aren’t exactly what they wanted. And as Katie’s comment showed, that’s an ongoing process — you don’t automatically figure it all out once you become elite.

3. Even elite swimmers can get caught in their own heads.

Summer’s comment about overthinking is another reminder that having an excellent race plan doesn’t guarantee you’ll execute it perfectly when the pressure is on.

Sometimes the challenge isn’t knowing what to do - It’s being able to actually do it when the moment arrives. That’s true for an Olympic champion just as it is for a swimmer racing at their first championship meet.

My biggest overall takeaway from these interviews: These are some of the best swimmers in the world, and they’re still figuring out how to handle nerves, uncertainty, imperfect conditions and the tendency to overthink when the stakes are high. They are still noticing things about themselves, adapting, experimenting and figuring out how they want to respond in different situations.

That’s probably one of the most useful things any swimmer can take from watching elite competition. You don’t eventually arrive at some point where mindset is “solved.” There are always new situations, new challenges and new things to learn about how you respond.

Imagine this.

The biggest meet of the year is two weeks away.

Taper has started. You’re healthy, well-rested, and hitting your times almost effortlessly in practice. The psych sheet drops and there are no surprises—the meet is lining up exactly like you pictured it.

Travel is seamless. Your hotel is perfect, dinner is exactly what you wanted, and you get the best night’s sleep you’ve had all season. Meet day comes and you’re rested and refreshed. Warm-up isn’t crowded, the water’s the perfect temperature, and you feel amazing. Your first race goes exactly as planned.

Then you wake up.

Because this never happens.

Championship meets are complex. Dozens of events. Hundreds of swimmers. Trials, finals, travel, unfamiliar pools, changing schedules. Something is going to happen that you didn’t expect.

I call these disruptions, and they affect every swimmer at every championship meet.

A disruption is anything unexpected that pulls you away from your plan.

Here’s the part most swimmers get wrong.

Disruption itself isn’t the problem. It’s normal. It’s built into every championship meet that has ever been swum. The problem begins when disruption starts making decisions for you.

The moment a swimmer consciously or unconsciously decides “I can’t swim well because…”, disruption has already won. You can’t stop disruption. It’s outside your control. What you can control is whether it pulls your attention outward—toward everything you can’t do anything about—or whether you return your attention to your plan.

That’s the whole game. Not avoiding disruption. Building the ability to make it less …disruptive.

To do that, it helps to understand what disruption actually looks like. Disruption shows up in two places:

• before the race

• during the race

It looks different in each.

Before the race

With multiple days of racing, dozens of events, and hundreds of swimmers moving through the same pool, it’s rare for a championship meet to unfold without a glitch. Add travel—hotels, unfamiliar food, unfamiliar pools, maybe even a time zone change—and some kind of disruption is almost guaranteed.

Disruption becomes a challenge the moment a swimmer decides “I can’t swim well because...”:

• the hotel was too noisy

• they ran out of pancakes at breakfast

• the van got a flat tire on the way to the pool

• the pool is too warm

• there’s not enough time between events

• the timing system was down for forty minutes

Whatever the reason, the swimmer has handed something outside their control the power to determine their race—before the race has even started.

During the race

Disruption during a race looks different, but the mechanism is exactly the same. Consciously or not, every swimmer builds a race plan around two expectations:

• how they expect the race to feel

• where they expect to be relative to the field

Then the field goes out faster than expected. Or slower. Someone in the next lane surges early. You feel fatigued after the first 50. Your stroke feels off.

When you’re not prepared for those moments, your attention gets pulled outward and you begin reacting instead of executing.

In your head it sounds like:

• Why is she out so fast?

• Why is he right there?

• Why does it hurt already?

The result? You back off when you didn’t need to. You push too early. You tighten up. Reality doesn’t match your expectations forcing your attention off your race plan and onto whatever is happening in the environment.

You can’t control disruption. You can train your response.

Some sort of disruption will happen at every championship meet you ever swim.

The swimmers who consistently deliver the performance they trained for aren’t the ones who had the perfect warm-up, the perfect amount of time between events, or the perfect night’s sleep. They’re the ones who developed the ability to notice disruption without letting it take over.

Disruption isn’t a sign something has gone wrong.

It’s a sign you’re at a championship meet.

They’re not.

Here’s a story that shows the difference. One swimmer was anchoring a relay at a championship meet. The moment she dove in, she felt like she’d just taken off her paddles. Her hands suddenly felt too small — like she couldn’t catch any water.

That’s pressure.

Fear feels different.

Fear sounds like:

• What if I die during the last 50?

• What if my training doesn’t pay off?

• What if I get DQed?

• What if I embarrass myself?

Your mind starts scanning for everything that could go wrong.

Pressure doesn’t scan. It fixates — on one outcome you feel like you have to produce:

• I have to make the cut.

• I have to win.

• I have to get a PB.

Here’s the simplest way I’ve found to describe the difference:

Fear expands. Pressure shrinks.

They often show up together, which is exactly why they’re easy to confuse. A swimmer standing behind the blocks might be scanning for danger and fixating on one outcome, both at once, and it just feels like a jumble of “I’m freaking out.”

That’s normal.

The skill isn’t feeling one cleanly instead of the other — it’s learning to notice which one has the wheel in a given moment, because they pull you in different directions.

When fear takes over, a swimmer often goes into protection mode — playing it safe, abandoning the plan they trained. When pressure takes over, it’s the opposite: swimmers tighten up, rush their stroke, over-try. What should be automatic becomes forced.

One thing I’ve been realizing while building the Swim Mindset Collective is that we often jump straight to solutions before we’ve named the problem. But you can’t pick the right tool for a jumble. You have to know whether what’s showing up is fear or pressure.

Different problem. Different approach.

While I was looking at the map something stood out to me visually - everyone thinks about mindset while racing, but when you look at the map you see that racing is actually a small part of the overall meet experience.

So then I started doing some math. A 3½-day championship meet lasts about 5,040 minutes from start to finish. That includes everything: travel back and forth from the pool, warm-ups, waiting for events, prelims, finals, recovery, team meetings, meals and everything in between.

So how much of that time does a swimmer actually spend racing?

Less than 1%.

That’s true even if you’re swimming distance events and racing prelims and finals every day. Racing make up a tiny fraction of the meet - but 100% of the outcome.

Why is this interesting? Because performance is influenced by everything that happens before you step behind the blocks. Every one of those 5,040 minutes has the potential to affect attention, execution, and ultimately performance. Those surrounding minutes aren’t just time between races. They are where mindset is either built up or worn down before you ever hit the water.

That’s exactly what the Championship Meet Map helps swimmers see.

How the Championship Meet Map changes the conversation

The Championship Meet Map can look busy but the goal of the map isn’t to add complexity - it’s to create clarity. The map breaks a championship meet into individual moments a swimmer can actually prepare for.

Without the map, championship meets can feel overwhelming. Once a swimmer sees it laid out visually, they can pinpoint the specific moments that challenge them.

Instead of being overwhelmed they start saying things like:

“Actually, I’m fine through most of the meet. I really struggle between trials and finals.”

Or:

“Warm-up is where I start getting inside my own head.”

Now they don’t have a vague mindset problem - they have a specific moment they can train. That’s what I like about the map — it turns an overwhelming experience into a series of manageable moments.

Building the Swim Mindset Collective

One of my goals with this series is to share not only what I’m building, but also some of the thinking behind it.

Sometimes it's a framework I'm developing. Sometimes it's a question I'm wrestling with. And sometimes it's a simple observation like this one that helps me see championship performance a little differently.

I welcome your thoughts and feedback.

This is the first post in a new series where I’ll share what I’m building, the ideas I’m wrestling with, what’s changing, and the occasional behind-the-scenes look at creating a swim-specific mindset framework from scratch.

A few thoughts on what stood out to me and why it connects to some of the ideas I’ve been writing about lately.

Every swim coach I know already believes mindset matters. If you are a coach, you have undoubtedly watched a swimmer who kills it all season in training come undone behind the blocks at a championship meet. You’ve seen a swimmer back off in the last fifteen yards when the pain hits or spiral in between trials and finals when the stakes are high. As a coach, you know the mental side is real, and that it can make a real difference between dropping time and a season filled with frustration.

This isn’t going to be a piece trying to convince you that mindset is important. I want to talk about something else — the gap between knowing it matters and actually being able to train it.

We train everything else like it matters

As a coach, think about how much of your week goes into the things you can train directly – starts, turns, stroke technique, pacing, aerobic base, race strategy. As a sport, we are obsessive about the details. We film, we analyze, we adjust. We’ll spend an entire season chasing a tenth of a second off a wall. Nothing about how we train the physical and technical side of swimming is left to chance.

And then there’s mindset — which everyone agrees decides races — and look at how we actually handle it:

• A pep talk before the big meet

• A motivational quote saved on a phone

• A sports psych who comes in once or twice a year

• An influencer the swimmers follow on Instagram

Some of that is genuinely good. But none of it is training. It’s not daily, it’s not integrated, it’s not built. It’s the thing we reach for in the last two weeks and hope it’s enough.

Here’s the comparison I keep coming back to: we’d never let an athlete skip strength training all season and then start bench pressing the week before championships. Of course not — we’d know it was far too late to matter. But that’s almost exactly how the sport treats mindset. We ignore it for months, then expect a pep talk or a saved quote to hold up under the most pressure a swimmer faces all year.

It doesn’t work that way. Mindset cannot be ignored and then summoned in a crisis. It is a skill, and skills are trained — repeated, integrated, built over a season.

So why doesn’t mindset get trained?

Mindset doesn’t get trained as a skill — but not because coaches don’t care, are unwilling, or don’t think it matters. I believe it comes down to two factors:

1. Bandwidth

2. Expertise

Coaches are busy so bandwidth is a real factor. Day to day, coaches are already writing workouts, running practices, managing meets, talking to parents and holding the culture of the whole team together. Even a coach who fully believes in training mindset doesn’t have a free block in the week to design a season-long mindset curriculum from scratch, build all the materials and then deliver them in a way their swimmers will actually use.

The second factor is expertise. To be clear, I am not saying coaches aren’t smart enough – that’s certainly not the case. I am referring to the specific expertise of taking something big, abstract and intangible — mindset — and breaking it into parts a swimmer can recognize, name, practice, and reach for in the exact moment they need it. That’s a particular skill. It isn’t the same skill as coaching swimming, any more than coaching swimming is the same skill as being a fast swimmer.

How I apply my specific expertise to mindset

I have a background that is pretty unique in the swimming world. I’m not a coach in the traditional sense but I have spent fifty years in this sport — as a swimmer, a swim parent and a masters swimmer. I’ve seen swimming from multiple angles over many decades. I also spent twenty-four years at IBM where I specialized in taking complex concepts - like quantum computing, cybersecurity risk and mainframe hosting - and making them simple enough so that our clients could understand and ultimately buy our solutions. That was the job - translate complexity into something usable.

For a long time my swimming life and my work life felt like two separate things – then it clicked that the one part of swimming nobody had built a real system for — mindset — was a complexity-translation problem. It was exactly the thing I’d spent my career doing, just pointed at a different subject.

It became clear to me that the reason most mindset content stays a pile of disconnected tips is that turning it into a system that hangs together is hard, specialized work. It has taken me over a year of obsessive focus to build something that actually holds together across a whole season and makes sense to swimmers in the moment.

Here is a concrete example. I recently saw a social media post from someone who talks about swimming mindset. Her point was that swimmers tighten up at big meets because they feel this matters, so I have to give 110%. She’s not wrong — but on its own, that’s a disconnected tip a swimmer will nod at and forget before the next meet.

Here’s the same idea inside a system. In my framework, what she described is one of four specific challenges showing up: pressure. Swimmers learn that pressure pulls their attention toward the outcome — this matters — and that’s what makes them tighten. Then they learn specific tools for that specific challenge, and they practice them. Same insight. But now it has a name, a cause, and a tool attached — so it sticks, and it actually changes what a swimmer does on the blocks. That’s the difference between a swimmer nodding along and a swimmer actually doing something different when the pressure hits.

If you are a coach who believes in the power of mindset but struggles with how to integrate it into your program I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Championship meets are complicated environments. Swimmers move through taper, travel, warm up, waiting, racing, recovery, prelims, finals and everything in between. That was part of what led me to build the Championship Meet Map. The goal was simple: make something that often feels chaotic easier to understand.

The map helps swimmers better understand the championship meet, but it cannot capture everything they encounter along the way. Think of a championship meet like a long road trip. During the drive, conditions change and obstacles arise – traffic, construction, weather, unexpected detours. Championship meets work the same way, just with a different set of obstacles – crowded warm up lanes, unfamiliar food, noisy hotels, long waits between events, ripped tech suits, unexpected race dynamics. Some are predictable. Some are not.

Just like two drivers can react differently to road conditions, different swimmers can react differently to what they encounter during a championship meet. The four challenges grew out of that observation.

The Four Challenges of Championship Meets

As I observed how swimmers responded while navigating championship meets, I identified four broad patterns:

1. They get caught up in predicting the future

2. They try to force a specific result

3. They get distracted by everything happening around them

4. They start reacting to the physical intensity of racing

These patterns became the four challenges of the championship meet – fear, pressure, disruption and discomfort.

These challenges tend to become more pronounced in championship meets, where uncertainty is amplified and outcomes carry more weight. Swimmers never fully know how a race will unfold, how they will feel, how others will perform or whether they will be able to execute when it matters most. Uncertainty itself is not the challenge. It’s when swimmers try to remove, escape, predict or otherwise control uncertainty that the challenges arise.

Recognizing these common challenge patterns changes everything. Instead of assuming something is wrong with them, swimmers can see challenges as predictable parts of the championship meet environment. This allows swimmers to develop effective responses tuned to the specific challenge that shows up for them.

Let’s explore each in more detail.

Fear

In championship meets, fear shows up when the mind starts trying to predict or solve the future. Fear tends to pull attention into a series of what ifs:

• “What if my training doesn’t pay off?”

• “What if I can’t keep up?”

• “What if I don’t get a PB?”

Fear can hit a swimmer at various times during a championship meet: the night before a race, between trials and finals, in warm up or behind the blocks. Fear can affect sleep, appetite, the ability to stay calm or to focus.

Fear is why a swimmer can’t sleep, eat or feels mentally drained before they even get to the pool.

Pressure

In swimming pressure is about meaning - it’s when something is important to the swimmer and they try to control the result. When pressure shows up, the swimmer’s attention is pulled towards the outcome:

• “This counts.”

• “I have to get the cut.”

• “I have to win.”

Pressure tends to show more loudly closer to the race. When it does, swimmers may tighten up, rush their stroke, lose rhythm or over try. Things that should be automatic become forced, often leading to sub optimal performance.

Disruption

Disruption happens when the environment doesn’t match expectation. When this happens, attention gets pulled outward.

With multiple days of racing, trials/finals, dozens of events and hundreds of swimmers and heats, it’s rare for championship meets to go off without a glitch. Swimmers can get disrupted by many things – a bad warm up, meet delays, a competitor in an early heat dropping a huge PB - before they even dive in the water. During the race itself, unexpected race dynamics can also become disruptive. For example, a competitor going out faster than expected or a swimmer feeling “off” from the first 50.

Disruption can cause swimmers to decide they can’t swim well before they even step on the blocks or to abandon a race plan when a swim doesn’t go as expected.

Discomfort

In swimming, discomfort comes from the physical intensity of racing – the body’s natural response to working at high effort. It shows up as burning arms, heavy legs and lungs on fire. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s normal. It’s part of the sport.

The challenge arises when a swimmer develops a negative attitude towards discomfort and fixates on the uncomfortable sensations in their body:

• “This hurts too much”

• “I’m dying”

• “I can’t hold this pace”

When the swimmer’s attention goes into the body, perception of effort increases making the race feel more difficult. A swimmer may “blow up” and fall off pace even though physiologically they still have more available.

Why the Attention Pattern Matters

What makes this framework useful is that each challenge has a very distinct pattern:

• Fear pulls attention into “what ifs”

• Pressure pulls attention toward the outcome

• Disruption pulls attention into the environment

• Discomfort pulls attention into the body

Swimmers do not need to become experts in psychology to use this. They simply need enough awareness to recognize where their attention went. That recognition alone can help swimmers better understand the challenge they are dealing with and how it is affecting performance.

Once they have this clarity, swimmers can develop specific strategies for dealing with the challenge they are facing in the specific moment they face it. In my work with swimmers, I provide a toolbox for each challenge and have them experiment with different strategies to determine what works best for them.

The goal is not removing the challenges -- swimmers cannot remove them any more than they can remove construction on a road trip, but over time they can learn how to navigate through them.

A few weeks ago I introduced the concept of the Championship Meet Map^TM. If you missed that article, go back and read it here.

Today, I want to go a level deeper and get more specific about:

1. Why I map the championship meet this way

2. How coaches can use this map with swimmers

Why Map out the Whole Experience?

A lot of conversations about mindset in swimming focus on a single moment — the seconds behind the blocks. But any coach or swimmer who has spent time on a championship pool deck knows performance is shaped long before that moment arrives.

A championship meet is not defined by a single moment -- it is a complex environment that swimmers must navigate across many days of racing.

Swimmers know this. Coaches know this.

Nothing at a championship meet happens in isolation. Performance is heavily influenced by everything that happens around the race. But when it’s viewed as a series of isolated moments rather than a connected system, something important gets missed.

When we instead view the championship meet as a complete system we see all the moments that a swimmer must successfully navigate before they get behind the blocks. It becomes clear that much of what happens during a championship meet is predictable.

The sequence of events is predictable — and so are the challenges swimmers face.

As a swimmer navigates through the map, four challenges can reliably show up and derail a swimmer:

👉 fear
👉 pressure
👉 pain
👉 disruption

How challenges show up will vary for each swimmer – but when swimmers have awareness of when and where a challenge is likely to show up for them they can be prepared instead of reacting in real time.

That’s where this becomes practical — challenges don’t exist on their own, they show up in specific moments.

A story from the Spring 2026 edition of SwimSwam illustrates this well.

Italian swimmer Simone Cerasuolo, who won the world title in the men’s 50-meter breaststroke in Singapore, described himself as someone with “little adaptability.” He prefers familiar pools, familiar food — structure and routine are his anchors.

When he qualified for the championship, he felt both excited and concerned about racing far from home.

His primary challenge wasn’t physical — it was disruption.

And importantly, this wasn’t something that showed up behind the blocks. It started before he even arrived — in the travel, the change in environment and the early stages of the meet.

Going through the full championship meet experience far from home was going to be difficult for someone wired this way.

So what allowed him to adapt and perform in this situation?

1. He identified where he was likely to have a problem — during the meet lead-up and race preparation

2. He recognized the challenge ahead of time — disruption caused by a new environment

3. He adjusted his strategy — narrowing his focus and letting go of what he couldn’t control

This is exactly the kind of moment the Championship Meet Map is designed to surface — identifying where a challenge is likely to show up so it can be addressed before it interferes with performance.

How Coaches Can Use This Map With Swimmers

As a coach, you can use the Championship Meet Map with your swimmers to help them better prepare for championship meets. This map is most useful when swimmers don’t just look at it — but use it to prepare for specific moments they will face during a meet.

Here are a few specific actions you can take:

Step 1 - Build Awareness

Share the map with your swimmers and have them compare it to their actual meet experience. Most will recognize these moments immediately.

Step 2 - Identify Patterns

Have each swimmer identify:

• 2-3 strengths - moments they feel confident in

• 2-3 “hot spots” - moments that tend to interfere with performance

For each “hot spot” moment, identify the primary challenge that shows up:
👉 fear, pressure, pain, or disruption

Step 3 - Prepare for Key Moments

Before the next meet, have swimmers choose ONE specific hot spot to focus on (e.g., warm up, waiting between events, processing results) and ONE strategy to use.

Keep it simple — the goal is not to fix everything at once.

Step 4 - Reflect and Refine

After the meet, revisit the map with your swimmers:

• What happened?

• What worked?

• What will they adjust next time?

Over time, swimmers learn how to handle these moments more consistently — and begin to build their own approach to racing. That’s where the Championship Meet Map^TM and the Formula for One^TM come together.

And that’s really the point – helping swimmers understand the environment they are competing in, where challenges might show up, and developing a personal success formula.

If you didn’t see her post-race interview with Torri Huske after her 100 fly win, I highly recommend you watch it. Why? Because it highlights a great lesson: “one swimmer, one strategy.”

During the interview, Elizabeth said, “your coaches told me that you swim your best when the lights are the brightest and you go somewhere about 20 minutes before your race” — then she asked Torri what she thinks about in those moments and in the ready room leading up to the race.

Torri explained that she uses that time to do a mental checklist of her body — making sure everything feels good and “shaking it out one by one.”

Does that mean every athlete should go off on their own to prepare for a race? No!

Let’s look at another Olympian, Katie Meili. There’s a great story about her in the book 30 Days to Confident by Christen Shefchunas.

Before her first international competition representing the U.S., Katie started panicking. What is interesting is that her strategy for dealing with nerves was very different from Torri’s.

Katie didn’t need to go off and be alone – she needed to say her fears out loud. So, as she walked to the blocks, she asked a teammate to come with her.

She told her teammate she just needed her to listen, then Katie spoke her fears:

• What if my work doesn’t pay off?

• What if I disappoint everyone?

• What if I don’t win?

Her teammate said, “ok!” and walked away. Katie got on the blocks and won gold, swimming the fastest time in the world that year.

So what’s interesting about these two stories?

To go back to the title: One Swimmer, One Strategy.

Both Torri and Katie developed strong self-awareness of how they process information and regulate their nervous systems. Because that’s different for each of them, their strategies look different too.

• Torri processes internally → then performs

• Katie processes externally → then performs

I call this the Formula for One^TM — the idea that every swimmer needs to develop their own personal strategy for how they prepare, focus, respond, and reset in competition.

When swimmers have that, it becomes a real source of confidence. Not because someone told them what to do, but because it’s something they’ve tested and know they can rely on — especially in the chaos of a championship meet.

What I see a lot in articles and on social media is the opposite: a one-size-fits-all approach.

Things like:

• “Here is the exact visualization routine used by Michael Phelps”

• “Here’s how elite swimmers handle pressure”

These kinds of approaches can actually do swimmers a disservice because there isn’t one way elite athletes prepare. Trying to use someone else’s strategy usually doesn’t work.

Instead of pushing generic solutions, we should be helping swimmers understand themselves and build their own approach.

When swimmers understand their patterns — what fuels them, what distracts them, what helps them lock in — they can develop a mindset strategy that actually fits.

What is your Formula for One^TM?

Today I want to take that idea one step further by examining the environment where swimmers are asked to perform at their best: the championship meet.

A lot of conversations about mindset in swimming focus on a single moment — the seconds behind the blocks before a race. But any coach or swimmer who has spent time on a championship pool deck knows performance is shaped long before that moment arrives.

A championship meet is not defined by a single moment -- it is a complex environment that swimmers must navigate across several days of racing. To make that clearer, I developed a framework I call The Championship Meet Map™.

The map illustrates the environment swimmers move through during a championship meet and highlights the many moments that can influence an athlete’s mindset and performance.

At first glance, the map may look busy. That’s intentional.

Championship meets are complex environments and swimmers must navigate changing conditions, emotions, expectations, and decisions across multiple days of racing. The goal of this map is not to simplify that environment, but to make it visible.

When you step back and look at the map, one thing becomes clear very quickly:

The race itself occupies only a small portion of the championship meet environment.

There are many mindset moments swimmers must navigate in the lead up before the race and after the race and the whole cycle can happen 5, 10 or even 15 or more times during a championship meet. Let’s walk through the key regions of the map.

The Backdrop: What the Swimmer Brings to the Meet

Before the meet even begins, swimmers arrive carrying a narrative about themselves and their season.

Have they been swimming best times all year or has it been a frustrating season filled with near misses? Do they typically perform well at championship meets — or do they struggle when the stakes rise?

All of that history becomes the backdrop against which the meet unfolds. Long before the swimmer steps onto the pool deck, their mindset has already been shaped by their past experiences and expectations.

Meet Lead-Up: When the Meet Starts to Feel Real

One to two weeks before the meet, attention begins to shift. Taper begins. The water starts to feel different. Training shifts from heavy work to sharpening race details.

Coaches begin talking about pacing, strategy, and race execution.

Then the psych sheet drops. For many swimmers, this moment carries more weight than people realize. Seeing their seed times, competitors, and heat placements can trigger excitement, confidence, doubt, or comparison.

Championship meets often involve travel which can be challenging and unpredictable. Was the travel seamless or did flight delays result in a 3 a.m arrival?

Race Preparation: The Environment on Deck

Any travel issues aside, the swimmer eventually arrives at the pool.

They warm up. They check the heat sheet again. They talk with teammates and coaches. They begin putting on their tech suit. During this time, a surprising number of variables can influence mindset.

• Is the pool familiar or unfamiliar?

• Did warm-up feel good or strangely flat?

• How crowded is the warm-up lane?

• Are they in what they perceive to be a “good” heat?

• How long will they have between events?

• Did their tech suit rip at the worst possible moment?

Each of these factors may seem small in isolation. But together they create a cognitive load that swimmers must manage before they ever reach the blocks.

The Pre-Race Window

Eventually the meet session begins.

The first event is called, and the swimmer enters what I think of as the pre-race window — the period between the start of the session and the moment they step onto the blocks. Depending on the event order, this window could last five minutes or several hours.

As the race approaches, preparation becomes more focused. About 10–15 minutes before racing, swimmers begin their final routines. They may fuel, do a short secondary warm-up, talk with their coach, or head to the ready room if the meet requires one.

This phase ends when the swimmer steps onto the blocks.

Race Execution

Now we arrive at the moment most people associate with mindset: the race itself.

I often think about races in segments. Regardless of length, each race can be divided into quarters, followed by the last 15 yards/meters and the finish.

In every event, swimmers must manage several demands simultaneously:

• execution of technique

• pacing decisions

• increasing fatigue

• maintaining focus

• committing to the finish

These demands look very different depending on the event. The mental demands of a 50 are very different from those of a 400 IM or a 1,650. The better a swimmer understands and prepares for the unique demands of their particular race, the more successful they will be.

Post-Race Processing

After the swimmer touches the wall, they look up at the scoreboard and instantly process their results.

Relief.
Excitement.
Frustration.
Disappointment.

Any experienced coach has seen the full spectrum of reactions play out in that moment.

The swimmer climbs out of the pool, speaks with teammates and/or coaches, warms down and begins the process of resetting mentally.

And then something important happens - they do it all again.

Unlike many sports, swimmers often repeat this entire cycle multiple times in a single day. Over the course of a championship meet weekend, a swimmer might race anywhere from six to eighteen times, including relays.

That means this entire sequence — preparation, racing, emotional processing, and reset — repeats over and over again.

Why This Matters for Mindset Training

So what is the point of mapping the meet this way?

If mindset training is going to be effective for swimmers, it needs to reflect the environment in which swimmers actually compete.

Championship meets are not defined by a single moment behind the blocks. They are defined by dozens of moments that unfold across days of racing — moments where expectations, emotions, distractions, and decisions all interact.

When swimmers learn how to navigate those moments effectively, mindset becomes more than motivational advice. It becomes a practical performance skill.

What do you think?

From your perspective as a coach, parent or swimmer does this map match your experience of the championship meet?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I’m convinced that for mindset training to be truly effective it needs to be tailored to the specifics of the sport you’re in. I see way too many generic “all sports” solutions out there, and I don’t buy that they work. Recently I got an email about a course that promises “unshakable confidence” in 30 days. The testimonials came from soccer, volleyball, handball, gymnastics, esports—you name it. The claim was that this one course was designed for athletes across all sports.

For me, that’s a red flag.

Yes, there are principles that carry across sports. But athletes respond better when you talk their language so they don’t have to mentally translate everything. Swimmers don’t want to hear about “the field” or “playing time.” That’s not our world. If I’m a swimmer and that’s the language being used, I’m tuning out.

There are also real differences between sports that are primarily skill‑based (golf, gymnastics, figure skating, fencing) and those that are endurance‑based (swimming, running, cross‑country skiing, speed skating). In endurance sports, skill matters, but the outcome is ultimately about who gets from point A to point B faster. When endurance is part of the equation, everything about mindset shifts.

Swimming adds another layer of complexity because of the range of events. From a 50 to a 1,650 and everything in between, the mental approach cannot be one‑size‑fits‑all. How you prepare your mind for a 50 is radically different from how you prepare for a mile. You have almost no time to think in a 50—and arguably too much time to think in a 1,650.

And then there’s the most important piece: swimmers compete in a literal bubble.

Unlike athletes in other sports, swimmers compete in an isolation chamber. You don’t know where you are until you finish and have that iconic “look at the clock and react” moment. If you’re a swimmer, coach, or swim parent, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

During a race, a swimmer’s mind is naturally going to try to assess, “How am I doing?”—but there’s no reliable data. You might be way ahead of someone you’ve never beaten before, or behind someone seeded ten seconds slower. You might feel amazing. You might feel terrible. Any of those scenarios can flip your mindset in an instant.

In every other sport I can think of, the athlete gets some kind of live feedback: the score, the field, the opponent right in front of them. Swimming doesn’t give you that. That’s precisely why I believe mindset training for swimmers has to be swim‑specific, not borrowed and repackaged from everywhere else.

So I’m curious: are you comfortable with “for all athletes” mindset approaches, or do you believe swimmers deserve something designed specifically for the way we race?

Except how we approach mindset.

Mindset training is still largely reactive, individual, and episodic. We address it when something breaks, before championships, or when confidence dips.

But what if that model is flawed?

Here, I’ll challenge the status quo and explore what it would look like to make mindset training proactive, embedded in team culture, and adaptable to individual differences.

If you’re a coach or swim parent who believes we need to do things differently, this is for you.