What a Bad Swim Can Teach You That a Good One Never Will

This week on Life in Lane 4 I sat down with Domingo Gatti, an incoming freshman at Tufts University who I actually met by racing him. We were in adjacent lanes at the EEX Summer Sizzle Meet at Rutgers this past June, congratulated each other after, and just clicked. He's got that rare combination of being genuinely kind and genuinely locked in, and I knew as soon as we started talking that this was going to be a good one. It was.

Bad swims are where the real coaching happens

I asked Domingo how he bounces back after a race doesn't go the way he wanted, and his answer flipped something in my head. He told me it's actually easier for him to recover from a bad swim than a good one, because a good swim can trick you into thinking everything is fine, even when there were mistakes hiding underneath a nice final time. A bad swim, on the other hand, shows you exactly where you slipped, and that clarity is motivating. He put it roughly as: after a good swim it's easy to keep making the same small errors because the result covered for you, but a bad swim forces you to actually fix your strategy. I've never heard it framed that plainly before, and it's going to change how I look at my own splits sheet after a rough mile.

Internal motivation has to be built, not assumed

We talked about competitiveness for a while, and Domingo said something that stuck with me: he'll sometimes swim a genuinely good race and still be upset with himself, to the point where his teammates get confused about why he's not celebrating. That's not him being ungrateful, it's that his standard comes from inside, not from the scoreboard. He credited his dad for instilling this, telling him after every swim, good or bad, that there's always room to improve. Domingo said that mindset carries into school too. When he doesn't feel like doing homework, he thinks about what he wants to achieve down the line instead of waiting for someone else to push him. It's a small thing to say out loud, but building that kind of self-generated drive instead of leaning on parents or coaches or fear of consequences is genuinely hard, and most people never talk about how they got there.

Study habits and phones need constant trial and error

Domingo told me flat out that he's basically useless trying to study after seven at night, especially post-practice, so he shifts his harder work to mornings and weekends instead. What I appreciated was that he didn't present this as some universal hack. He was clear that it took real trial and error to figure out, and that what works for him at seventeen might not work for him at Tufts. He also brought up something I didn't expect: doomscrolling. He talked about knowing he's going to have to cut down on phone time once he's balancing a full college athlete schedule, and honestly, hearing a guest bring that up unprompted for the second episode in a row tells me it's a bigger issue than we give it credit for.

Looking back at the conversation, all three of these threads tie together more than I realized while we were talking. Learning from your worst swims, building a motivation that doesn't depend on anyone else clapping for you, and being willing to actually test and rebuild your own habits instead of copying someone else's routine, that's basically the whole game, in swimming and outside of it. Domingo is heading to Tufts with a strong program and a coach he trusts, but what stood out to me most is that he's already figured out how to be his own toughest and fairest critic. That's a hard thing to learn at eighteen. I think he's going to be just fine.

— Anton