by Olivier Poirier-Leroy. Join his weekly motivational newsletter for competitive swimmers by clicking here.
You can tell a lot about swimmers by watching the last ten minutes of practice.
You’ve got the athletes who sneak out a few minutes early, clipping part of the warm-down on account that they really have to go (“My mom is waiting!”).
There are the swimmers who take the last gasps of the workout to work through a specific part of their technique they are struggling with.
And you have the swimmer who is asking coach what they could have done better so that they can be more successful at the next swim practice.
Lastly, and there are almost always swimmers like this—you have the athletes who bolt for the hot tub or locker room as fast as they can (where was that effort during practice?) so they don’t have to help take down the flags, roll up the lane ropes, or put away the yard sale of kick-boards, pull buoys and assorted gear scattered across the pool deck.
I get it: taking down the equipment after a brutal workout is no one’s idea of a good time.
You’ve got homework, you’ve got to check your phone, and so on and so forth.
But the reality of le situation is this…
You’re never so good that you can’t help with the lane ropes.
In fact, it is to your benefit that you swallow your sense of entitlement and pride and take the lead in doing the little things that some swimmers will deem below them once they get to a certain level.
Here’s a case of how one of the best teams on earth embrace this particular philosophy of never being above doing the dirty work.
Putting Away the Lane Ropes: A Lesson in Humility
New Zealand’s national rugby team, better known as the All Blacks, are one of the most dominant sport teams on the planet.
Since 2003, when world rugby rankings were introduced, the All Blacks have been ranked number one longer than everyone else combined. They have a winning percentage of nearly 80% in test match rugby, and have been named World Rugby Team of the Year ten times since the award came into being just over fifteen years ago.
They also perform a Maori challenge or haka prior to each match that is moderately to severely terrifying:
They are, for lack of a better word, awesome.
With the consistent greatness this program has thrown down year after year you would think that little things, like cleaning up the locker room after a game, would be better left to someone else to deal with.
But this isn’t the case.
In fact, cleaning the locker room, or “sweeping the sheds”, is one of the hallmarks of the team.
After each match, win or loss, a couple of the players will grab brooms and sweep away the dirt, the grass, and the bloodied bandages from the floor. These big, hulking superstars will hunch over and summarily sweep away the garbage and mud.
“It’s not expecting somebody else to do your job for you,” said retired All Black Andrew Mehrtens in the book Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life (Amazon). During Mehrtens’ career, he scored enough points to put him second all-time among All Blacks. “It teaches you not to expect things to be handed to you.”
This kind of humility is a bit of rare commodity these days. There’s a misconception that once we become decent, good, or great that cleaning up after ourselves has somehow become below us.
But there is great value in humility, and the All Blacks view it as essential to their success.
Being humble doesn’t make them weak or “less than”—the opposite, actually: it allows them to connect to true character and leadership and gives them a much better chance at being successful both individually and as a team.
Protect the Team
One of my favorite sayings is by NFL coach Pete Carroll, who during his time as head coach of the USC Trojans (winning three national championships along the way), instructed all his players and coaches to his three part philosophy.
The first part was simply: Protect the team.
This line says so much when you embrace it, from not complaining, to showing up on time, to sorting out your bad body language, to yes, helping with the equipment.
When you help put in the backstroke flags and pull out the lane ropes you are saying that you protect the team.
After all, you don’t pass the responsibility onto others.
You don’t expect others to do the details for you.
You are looking after yourself and the team.
ABOUT OLIVIER POIRIER-LEROY
Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national level swimmer. He’s the publisher of YourSwimBook, a ten-month log book for competitive swimmers.
He’s also the author of the recently published mental training workbook for competitive swimmers, Conquer the Pool: The Swimmer’s Ultimate Guide to a High Performance Mindset.
It combines sport psychology research, worksheets, and anecdotes and examples of Olympians past and present to give swimmers everything they need to conquer the mental side of the sport.
Ready to take your mindset to the next level?
Unrelated to the actual post but: Am I the only one who feels like I’ve seen this post numerous times before?
Yeah they repost it like twice a year, look at the comment dates
I’ve actually never been on a team where we had to change the lane lines or the flags or anything, and we were always required to own our own equipment. I know it was usually the lifeguards who switched our pool from SCY to LCM. I lived in CA though; is this more common on the East Coast?
But regardless, great article in different mentalities and actions after practice!
It probably largely depends on what sort of pools you’ve been in. If you usually swim in pools that are totally dedicated to lap swimming, you may not have had to.
I had to do it quite a bit in a few situations, that may or may not have applied to you:
1) Summer league pools, because they become recreational membership pools after practice
2) Switching from WP to swimming and back
3) If the lifeguards were shortstaffed
In our NorCal pools (3 different locations), pool facilities are fully staffed to handle switch overs for normal operation. However, teams may switch to LCM course for morning practice and restore back to SCY course when done. Notably, kids helping with lane lines allow for additional (team) social time and ~30min nap time for tired parents in the car.
We had a rule in high school where the freshmen put I the lane line. Now a senior, I’m still putting in the lane lines.
You think Phelps ever helped with the lane lines?
Yes
You’re right, you’re never too good not to help, but that’s what the freshman are for!
Dean Farris doesn’t help with the lane lines
Dean Farris does all of the lane lines, singlehandedly amd then puts them back in and takes them back out just for the hell of it
In middl3 and high school at our facility, only lifeguards that worked there were allowed to put away the lane lines. So the members of the team who were lifeguards there would help the on duty lifeguard put away the lane lines. For everything else, we were on assigned roation, so four people would stay to clean up and then the next practice four other people stayed. The team captains always stayed late to help/oversee. If you missed your day, then you would have to swim an extra 500 at the next practice. In college club, it was a free for all. I normally stsyed, but most didn’t.
Can we stop calling them lane ropes?
You mean stop calling them what they are? That would be a weird thing to do.
I have not heard the term lane rope in ages. I do remember swimming with lane ropes but that was decades ago. Today they tend to be a series of plastic buoys stung on steel wires designed to entrap the fingers of unwary swimmers. If they reduce turbulence that is an added benefit.
I guess all the literal-minded swimmers these days don’t use the term “starting block.” It’s clearly not a solid rectangular prism, so they must call it a “starting platform.” Same with the “backstroke flags,” since those clearly should be called “backstroke pennants,” since that is literally the shape of those. When they look up at the finish to see their times, these swimmers are clearly looking at the “results display,” because these aren’t “scoreboards” made out of plywood. Coaches and timers use timing devices that are obviously “START and stop watches,” since you can’t stop a watch that hasn’t been started. Does anyone still call those kick-isolation aids “kick boards?”
I’m sorry for the snark. I had a pretty… Read more »
You mean y’all don’t pull on “lane lines” in backstroke sets? You pull on “lane ropes?”
Sounds weird to me.
They’re lane “ropes” where swimmers don;t make Olympic teams
If we were being super accurate they’d be called lane wires.
I prefer to call them “assistive devices,” especially after the fly leg of an IM set.
Lmao
Pretty sure other countries call them what they are, which is ropes in a lane. They also call the line at the bottom of each lane the “lane line” since it’s… you know, a line in a lane. When I say other countries I mean the Australian commentators from London 2012.
I believe the “lane rope” is actually to be referred to as “LANE LINE”, and the line at the bottom of the pool is referred to as either “The T” or “the black line” (or whatever color it is). Or you can just call it the “left-side” or “right-side” of the pool. These are the official wordings
I kind of interchange mine. I will call them either. Usually when talking to my coaches it’s lane lines when it’s to my teammates or swimmers it’s lane ropes. I do t know why just kinda happens