EXPERT ADVICE H2OPEN ASKS…
Sometimes we want to ask our own questions of the top swimmers… This month: Duncan Goodhew
HOW DO YOU COPE WITH LIFE AFTER COMPETITIVE SWIMMING?
“It took me a while to uncouple my competitive instincts from swimming. In fact, I had to get out of the swimming
pool for a year and spend a long time in a gym riding an incumbent exercise bike while reading the newspaper. You can’t compete when you’re reading a newspaper. Before that everything had to be harder and faster. I was in my late 30s or early 40s when I did that on purpose to uncouple my competitive drive. “A good day is when I swim: a bad day is when I don’t. It’s not just because of the Zen of the water. I think it’s the child in me. I have to take a moment to admire the water, how it sparkles and moves. Then, when I dive in, like every experience, it’s governed by the senses. You have an explosion of sensory experiences, the coolness, the smell. If you want to go beyond that, astronauts train in the water. You’ve got the closest to an off -world experience when you dive in. You’re weightless in the water. It’s a very special moment. “Quite apart from that, over every other
exercise, you just feel a whole cleansed process. The blood fl ows bet er, the endorphins work easier, you don’t have to pump the blood up from your legs against gravity. It’s all fl owing. Then you’ve got the compression eff ect from all the water pressing against you so the capillaries are bet er held and the whole circulation is bet er. Then you have to breathe by displacing the water and all of those things…” “Some years ago, I had a sort of mid-life crisis so I did a course with PricewaterhouseCoopers. It was all about work-life balance and it really helped me evaluate why I do things. I decided the reason that I wanted to carry on exercising was to try to get a square end of life. You know, you get to mid-life and the graph, on average, will start to taper down, you get more and more immobile, and it will tinker along into your 70s, maybe your 80s or 90s whatever, and then you have the worst day of your life.
DUNCAN GOODHEW Duncan Goodhew won gold in the 100m Breast Stroke at the 1980 Olympics. He is now a swimming ambassador and oſt en takes part in Great Swim Series events but usually fi nishes several minutes behind the winners. How does he cope with not being on the leader board?
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“There no reason why, if you keep fi t and you’re lucky enough not to have any major illnesses or accidents, you can't stay incredibly active into your later life and then hopefully you will just fall off the perch at the end rather than wilt away to nothing. And so when I analysed that – what do I have to do – I need to stretch, I need some core strength work and some endurance work, so swimming is absolutely right for me.” ○
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