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.