Caitlin Leverenz [Photo: Aniko Kovacs; inset, CAL]

In the next part of our series on the betterment of swimming and winning approaches to success in sport from the World Aquatic Development Conference, Caitlin Leverenz considers the nature of failure 

One of the most moving stories from Olympic swimming history is that of Pablo Morales. The offspring of Cuban immigrants to the USA, he was born in Chicago and showed promise at 15 when he broke Mark Spitz’s then 16-year-old 100 yard butterfly High School record. At 19, he set his first ow world record and a year later took silver in the 100m butterfly and 200IM and gold as a member of the US 4x100m medley relay at his Olympic debut in Los Angeles.

On June 23, 1986, he clocked 52.84 to take the 100m ‘fly flat-stone-on-water-skimming into uncharted waters. Two years on, he finished third by a whisker at US Olympic trials, his dream over; he quit swimming and entered law school but in 1991 after the death of his mother Blanca from cancer he felt he had more to give and that she would have wanted him to give it.

He did just that – and how. At 27 in Barcelona at the 1992 Olympic Games, he claimed gold and dedicated his achievement to his mother.

On Barcelona that day, I watched at the back of the pack a relative cub on the job as some reporters struggled to take notes through the tears welling in their eyes as Morales spoke of his mother, of calling, of passion, of unfinished business and the inner voice that told him that failure was not final. It wasWinston Churchill who once said:

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

The spirit of that message and that fine day back in Barcelona was in the room when Caitlin Leverenz got up to speak to coaches at the World Aquatic Development Conference in Lund. There were no guns blazing, no lights and high emotions from the Olympic podium placer from London 2012. Her pitch was as perfect as the humility of her message on the nature of ‘failure’.

“Failure. What is it? And how do we handle it? I fail on a daily basis if you take into that definition not eating the right food, the stuff of daily life,” said Leverenz.

“In a sporting context, failure is bound to happen, it happens all the time.”

She took us back to 2008. She had three great shots at making the Olympic team for the US that year. Beijing beckoned.  She finished fourth in three races, the 200m breaststroke and the 200 and 400m medley, the latter two finals producing lifetime best swims that would have placed her 5th and 6th respectively on the virtual clock in Beijing. Leverenz recalled leaving trials broken:

“I literally thought my world had fallen down.”

“So, this is how it was, kind of, before what I’ve learned since,” she explained. “I didn’t know how to handle it. I shut down. I thought that not thinking about it would solve it, help me handle failure.”

Enter the blessing of an oxymoron to new learning and a way of being over five years at University of California, Berkeley with coach Teri McKeever and her group.

“There is a way to fail successfully; it is not just about the negative connotation of failing,” said Leverenz. She looked back to 2011 and a presentation given by coach Jim Steen, whose Kenyon College swimmers have won around 50 N.C.A.A. Division III men’s and women’s team titles down the years.

I once read an article by the New York Times sports writer Karen Crouse in which she noted a mass e-mail he sent out to his squad. It read:

“Find a place within yourself where success and failure don’t matter, a place where you can engage in battle without compromise.”

His signpost to his charges was Luke 14:11 – For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

The talk from Steen heard by Leverenz to a graduate class was a recasting of ‘failure’ to what he called “Failing Forward’. She said: ”At CAL, we call it failing successfully. It is a process and a way of being that gives you room for growth and learning.”

Leverenz invited her audience to consider Scott Adams and his Dilbertcartoons that encapsulate the artist’s cynical take on management ideas, the effectiveness of bosses, and “cubicle life: in offices. A recurring theme is the frequency of failure.

All relevant to thinking about the nature of failure because “if you take risks and you probably should you can find yourself failing 90% of the time”, she noted with a smile. “What you have to keep in mind is that the process of failure of what leads to success.”

She explained: “I would not be here, where I am today, had I not missed the Olympic team in 2008. Teri McKeever was not my coach at the time and shortly after I arrived at CAL she told me that not making the team was a blessing.

“I was like ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about lady because that sucks’. But in time, it turned out she was right.

“Not making it instilled in me much more hunger. In 2008 my goal was to go to the Olympics. By London [2012], my goal was to come home with something in my hands.” She claimed her place in history with a bronze in the 200m medley as one of four women on 2:10 in a fight for the wall.

Leverenz noted that it was not just a simple case of shifting from ‘failure’ to acceptance immediately after disappointment. “The thing about failure is that it also gave me time to reflect away from the sport. That was really important to me and helped to put things in perspective and eventually come to an an understanding of what it was that I wanted.”

Mini Failures

Leverenz went as far as to advocate small-scale failure as a building block to progress. She explained: ”It helps to create an environment for mini failures to happen. Its about having to deal with those, overcome them and in doing so you build skills to handle failure. If you do that on a daily basis as part of your preparation, you can learn from that in a safe environment through lots of small failures along the way.

“Its about putting more tools in the toolbox. If you know what failure looks like and you know what to do and not have it throw you, you can use it as a strength.”

So how to build failure into practice? She went through her check list:

Complexity

“Design a training set with many components to it, a set in which it is challenging to understand and to perform all the pieces correctly”. (Think away from 100x100s, think loops and circuits, different paces, speeds, breaks in the stream of stroke, an obstacle course for the mind as much as the body).

Pressure

“We all face that from the environment we’re in because we want to succeed.” she said. “Children are applauded for trying hard but there’s a healthy balance to achieve on trying hard and then also succeeding in that as well. Trying hard is not enough – you also need to want to succeed. So harness pressure, recognise it, use it.”

Racing

“There is something so powerful about racing. I started racing when I was 7 or 8 years old. I would say to my brother ‘race ya to the third marker … …go!’ There’s something so pure about racing. You watch kids and they do it a lot. When you ask high-end athletes what they like to do, it is racing. Those memories of racing as a little kid have nothing to do with times. It is about pure competition, the thrill of that challenge. So, race, race in practice, lots of ways and in lots of different circumstances.”

Leverenz concluded by reminding coaches that “throughout this conference you have been given a lot of tools to work with to build complexity into your programmes”. She cited Nelmsing exercises (more on that later in our series) and other moments when “there is no clock on it”.

“Those things provide room for swimmers to experiment and mess up a little bit without judgment,” said Leverenz. “It could be that they fail to do a task but its an everyday situation that allows the athlete time to try again and get it right next time by learning from it without looking at failure as a reason to give in. Its a reason to try again.”

She recalled the London 2012 100m butterfly final in which her US and CAL teammate Dana Vollmer’s cap started to come off on the way home. Vollmer did not freeze, did not panic, did not even appear to try to compensate or react. She knew what to do, handling the unexpected and the chaotic one of the tools in her toolbox. Said Leverenz:

“Things just don’t always go right, there’ll be bumps along the way so you better condition yourself for that. When her cap started coming off she said ‘I’m gonna figure it out and keep moving’.”

All the way to a world record and gold eight years after her Olympic debut and four years after the ‘failure’ of missing the 2008 US team just as Leverenz had done that same year.