#276: Terry Laughlin, The Master Who Changed My Life

This episode will forever have special meaning for me. While I didn't know it at the time, this ended up being the final long-form interview with Terry Laughlin (@TISWIM https://twitter.com/TISWIM). Terry passed away from cancer complications on October 20, just two weeks after we recorded this interview. Terry was the founder of Total Immersion Swimming http://www.totalimmersion.net/ and co-author of Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way To Swim Better, Faster, and Easier http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743253434/offsitoftimfe-20. He had a profound impact on me -- teaching me to overcome a lifelong fear of water and swimming (read all about it here https://tim.blog/2008/08/13/total-immersion-how-i-learned-to-swim-effortlessly-in-10-days-and-you-can-too/). But more than that, he's been an inspiration for the way I've done anything since. Terry coached three college and two USA Swimming club teams from 1973 to 1988, improving each team dramatically. In that time, he developed 24 national champions at all strokes and distances -- the first national champions produced by four different teams. In 1989, Terry founded Total Immersion and turned his focus from working with young, accomplished swimmers to adults with little experience or skill (like me). But it's not just about swimming; Terry's elegant method of deconstruction and logical progression is the epitome of what I strive to do when I'm talking about learning any skill -- from investing to learning languages. It's with a heavy heart but much gratitude that I was able to interview Terry before he passed. Please enjoy, savor, and digest what Terry had to impart. And be sure to check out Terry's gift for listeners to this podcast: a free seven-day membership to the Total Immersion Academy online training center https://www.totalimmersionacademy.com/pages/tim. *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor http://tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  No, we're just in an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, friends. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is by far the most difficult podcast intro that I've ever recorded. I've already tried to do it six or seven times and have failed, so I'm just gonna run with it. And the reason for the difficulty will become super clear quickly. The guest is Terry Lachlan, who completely changed my life. He became a friend, a mentor. He taught me how to swim and did it remotely at first through his book, Total Immersion, when I was in my 30s. And fixing that helped me to address one of my lifelong

• 1:09Tim Ferriss?

  largest insecurities and something that really caused a lot of humiliation for me, which was growing up on Long Island, being close to water, having a few traumatic experiences, and never learning to swim until my 30s. And Terry, you can learn all about Total Immersion everywhere. Just search Total Immersion Swimming, totalimmersion.net, TI Swim on Twitter, etc.

• 1:33Tim Ferriss?

  It's really a revolutionary way of learning and teaching. And he was introduced to me, or the method Total Immersion was introduced to me by Chris Sacca, who's another friend who's been on the podcast, billionaire investor, all-around hilarious and intelligent guy who said to me at a barbecue, "I have the answer to your prayers," as it related to not being able to swim. And it turned out to be Terry Lachlan and Total Immersion. The reason this is so hard... Is that I grew to really care for Terry and we did this interview October 2nd. Terry had at that time metastasized pancreatic cancer.

• 2:18Tim Ferriss?

  That was October 2nd. On October 10th, he had a stroke and was hospitalized. And then on October 20th, 10 days later, he passed away. I just found out about this yesterday afternoon. After getting back from being off the grid, I turned on my phone and a barrage of texts came in and the first one that I saw was from a friend who said, "Did you see the news about Terry?" And that makes this, what you're about to hear, the last long-form interview that Terry ever did in his life. And it's intended to be inspiring and to showcase a tactically brilliant and sincere

• 3:01Tim Ferriss?

  teacher. He developed 24 national champions, but then turned his eye to the adult population, people who had given up on themselves, who had accepted partial completeness, who thought that learning to swim, or X, Y, and Z, whatever you might have in your mind, was impossible and taught them to overcome that. And I really view him as the epitome of what I try to do myself as a teacher, whether it is looking at accelerated learning or deconstructing something, logically sequencing it. He cares so fucking much and that will come across in this interview.

• 3:46Tim Ferriss?

  Even if you don't care about swimming at all, I encourage you to listen to this for a few different reasons. Number one, this is, like I said, the last long-form interview Terry did in his life. And when you listen to this, you will hear that he is, sounds incredibly vibrant.

• 4:05Tim Ferriss?

  And was.

• 4:08Tim Ferriss?

  What I also did, and I owe sincere thanks to his family for sending this to me.

• 4:17Tim Ferriss?

  It's included audio at the end of the interview. And these are clips that, within the first few days after his stroke in the hospital, so a week before he died or so, his daughters Fiona, Carrie, and Betsy

• 4:38Tim Ferriss?

  recorded audio, interviewed him following his stroke because he was extremely focused the entire time on the mission of finishing his current book. So they were asking him questions and pulling out these philosophies of life and so on in this environment of hospitalized medicine where you have beepers and you have footsteps and you have staff moving around. And I want you to listen to it because it's fucking heart wrenching and I want you to surrender yourself to that sadness and to let it envelop you and to really listen to it.

• 5:22Tim Ferriss?

  It's not intended to impart a ton of super tactical information. It's intended to make you feel just how painful it is to have time running out. And I want you to ask yourselves, because I've written five books now,

• 5:40Tim Ferriss?

  and many people have changed their lives by testing assumptions and finally doing the things that they have put off.

• 5:49Tim Ferriss?

  Whether it's quitting something, starting something, taking a trip, forming a company, quitting a job, ending a relationship, proposing to someone, whatever it might be. I've seen that, but I've also seen thousands of people sitting on the sidelines with a deferred life plan of some type, something that they are deferring to someday when it's going to be more convenient, which it never will be, generally speaking. There's never a good time to do the things that are most important.

• 6:19Tim Ferriss?

  And so I want you to listen not only to the interview, but to the clips at the end that were recorded in the hospital, because I want you to extremely acutely feel in your viscera.

• 6:33Tim Ferriss?

  The reality, which is we are not guaranteed a long life. And I've had several friends die in the last year. I don't know what's going around in the air, but several friends die in the last year, young and old. And people do not die of old age. They die of disease. They die of accident. They die from violence. There are so many things that can take you out before you think your lifespan will end. So hopefully this interview, this conversation with the incredible Terry Lachlan can serve as a catalyst for you to get up off your ass physically or metaphorically

• 7:17Tim Ferriss?

  speaking and do what it is you really want to do so that you don't die with a bucket list of things that have not been checked off. And that certainly was not Terry. Terry squeezed every drop out of his life up until the very, very last moments. And you get to hear some of those moments.

• 7:40Tim Ferriss?

  So this

• 7:44Tim Ferriss?

  is really surreal for me.

• 7:47Tim Ferriss?

  And I miss him already. So Terry, thank you for changing my life. And

• 7:58Tim Ferriss?

  I hope you're swimming far and wide up in heaven. And you know, he kept in good spirits until the very, very closing bell. And there's actually a piece in Outside Magazine written by Kristi Ashwanda, and I hope I'm getting the pronunciation right, who's a lead or the lead science writer at FiveThirtyEight. And she describes how

• 8:27Tim Ferriss?

  At the very end, you know, the last time that his daughter Fiona saw him laugh was him telling this joke about baseball because he loved baseball. And the joke related to two friends who had a pact. The first of them to die would return to tell the other whether there was baseball in heaven. So the first guy dies and he appears to his friend. The good news, he says, is that there's baseball in heaven. The bad news is that you're pitching tomorrow. Terry thought that was hilarious. And he was able to find the glimmers of hope and optimism even when he was literally on his deathbed. So for the things that you

• 9:10Tim Ferriss?

  want to do, for the things you feel compelled to do, for the things that you've dreamed up for so long, what is your excuse for not doing them? Think about it very, very carefully and meditate on it because we're all gonna die. It's just a question of when. And in any case, my apologies for the long introduction. This has been really difficult for me and this is the best job I can do with this one, guys. So please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with none other than the incredible, much beloved and much missed Terry Lachlan. Terry, welcome to the show.

• 9:55Terry Laughlin?

  Thank you for having me on, Tim. I've really wanted to do this for quite a while.

• 9:59Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I've wanted to have you on for many, many years. And I thought I would start before we get into the backstory. And there's so many different things that we should cover in this conversation. But I think the most sensible place for a lot of my listeners is where I came in contact with Total Immersion. And I should start by saying I grew up on Long Island, for those people who don't know.

• 10:30Terry Laughlin?

  As did I.

• 10:31Tim Ferriss?

  And I was a townie out in East Hampton, of all places, worked in the lobster rolls, bus points on. And I was minutes from the beach my whole life and never learned how to swim properly until my 30s. And

• 10:49Tim Ferriss?

  The, I suppose the trigger for preventing me to swim were a handful of near drowning experiences, one at a summer camp. And it was always one of my largest sources of embarrassment and one of my greatest insecurities. And then something happened. And what happened was, this was several, of course, several years ago now, I just turned 40. But at the end of a January, I want to say in, I'm not exactly sure when it was, 2007, 2008, around there, a friend and I decided to issue each other New Year's resolutions.

• 11:34Tim Ferriss?

  Because we realized that without someone to hold you accountable, very little tends to get done with New Year's resolutions. So Chris Ashenden, who's known as the Kiwi, because he's from New Zealand, said that I had to finish an open water one kilometer race. And that was going to be in 2008, so it must have been the very beginning of 2008. And I then challenged him to go a year without coffee or stimulants, because he fed himself different types of stimulants to stay awake and then used booze to go to sleep and so on, which is very, very normal. But I failed is the short story.

• 12:16Tim Ferriss?

  I, at least in the first, say, half or three quarters of the year, tried kickboards, barely moved at all, and it was extremely humiliating. And I had left a number of classes, hand paddles, tried those, my shoulders felt like they were going to break, which led me to believe that swimming could not be low impact. And I'd effectively conceded defeat. And then I met someone named Chris Saka for the first time, who's been on this podcast. And he is now a very, very famous investor. At the time, he was just starting his sort of ascension, his hockey stick.

• 12:56Tim Ferriss?

  And he was training for a triathlon and we met at a barbecue organized by a guy named Kevin Rose, who was the first episode of this podcast. And I told him about how I was failing with swimming. When he asked me what I was up to, I didn't start there, but we got there. And he said, I have the answer to your prayers. It revolutionized how I swim. And that was his, this was opening sales pitch. And that's what got me to TI, Total Immersion. And in the span of, I'd say around, you know, between seven to 10 days with a book, and this is without even the video,

• 13:38Tim Ferriss?

  went from about a like one to two length maximum in swimming in a small kind of home pool to more than 40 lengths per workout and sets of two to four. And now, fast forward, I swim for relaxation. And part of how I chose where I wanted to live here where I'm recording in Austin, Texas, was its proximity to swimming, which just is insane. If you were to try to express that to my, say, 15-year-old self, 20-year-old self, even 30-year-old self. So, thank you. That's a very long-winded intro, but I wanted to give people the context

• 14:21Tim Ferriss?

  because as Chris, my friend, pointed out, it's a life skill. It's not just a throwaway decorative skill. And every time I was on a boat, I had low-grade anxiety. Every time I was near water or going into water, I had low-grade anxiety and I no longer have that. So, thank you very kindly, sir. That's...

• 14:43Terry Laughlin?

  Well, certainly, I'm most gratified. And let me just, I'll bet you're familiar with Deep Eddy Pool.

• 14:52Tim Ferriss?

  I am familiar with Deep Eddy Pool. I am.

• 14:54Terry Laughlin?

  And just down the road from the Magnolia Cafe.

• 14:58Tim Ferriss?

  Which is run by your friends.

• 14:59Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah. And Barton Springs, two wonderful places. I love to swim when I visit Austin.

• 15:07Terry Laughlin?

  And the fact that you can enjoy them so is that's that's the best part. It's not that you can swim 1K, but that you can take advantage of these lovely swimming halls that are really unique places and in a complete way.

• 15:21Tim Ferriss?

  And and to do it as something that I enjoy, I mean, it's something that I seek out. And I actually wanted to talk to you more about a couple of plans I have for swimming after this podcast perhaps, but the the punchline also I didn't provide for people. So I improved my swimming and then I was not able to find an open water race that was one kilometer. So instead I swam open water in the ocean on Long Island on the beach where I grew up going, but really going up to kind of my waist most of the time.

• 16:01Tim Ferriss?

  And simply went offshore after asking a lifeguard how far away a given house was and swam parallel to shore in the ocean, which is pretty murky on that side of things, pretty sharky too, and swam almost a mile. So that's a lot longer than one kilometer and probably the most successful I've ever felt in my entire life.

• 16:26Terry Laughlin?

  And that is that is a put you in really rarified company, Tim. I mean, there are not very many people who can swim a mile in a pool, but to swim a mile in an ocean and it really, really takes it up another notch. Only only 2% is a pretty, a pretty authoritative estimate that only 2% of American adults can swim as much as a quarter mile nonstop. So you're in rarified company swimming a mile in the ocean.

• 16:54Tim Ferriss?

  I've a lot of room to improve, but I think that the example of swimming is one for me of a partial completeness that I accepted. And it was an assumption, i.e. I can't swim, I don't swim.

• 17:14Tim Ferriss?

  That I didn't test for a very, very long time. And many people accept partial completeness, whether it's being, say, overweight. Well, that's just the way it is. That's just the way I am. I'm good at some things. I'm just not able to lose weight, whatever it might be. Or in this case, say, swimming or playing basketball. Could be anything, learning to read. And I wanted to ask you about, just to give an example of how late you can test these assumptions. Paul Lurie, or Lurie, I guess it is.

• 17:47Terry Laughlin?

  Lurie, Paul Lurie, yeah. Dr. Paul Lurie.

• 17:50Tim Ferriss?

  Can you explain for the people listening, who Paul Lurie is? Dr. Paul Lurie?

• 17:56Terry Laughlin?

  Paul is a pretty amazing person. To give you an idea, he retired from, he was one of the real pioneering pediatric cardiologists in the field of medicine. He was a giant in the field.

• 18:13Terry Laughlin?

  And he retired from practice as a pediatric cardiologist at age 68 and moved to Albany from Los Angeles to be close to his daughter. And this is at age 68. And for the next 25 years, he was an emeritus professor at Albany Medical College. So he taught his final seminar in pediatric cardiology at the age of 93, which will give you an idea of how unusual he is. He moved to New Paltz, where I live, into a senior living center called Woodland Pond, and it had a pool. It not only had a pool, it had a chorus, it had a wood shop.

• 18:57Terry Laughlin?

  And Paul just decided he was going to take complete advantage of everything that they had there. And he had never been very serious about swimming in his life. So he ordered one of our DVDs at age 93 and taught himself a pretty serviceable freestyle. And then at 94, he happened to knock on our door. We have an endless pool in our basement. We call it the swim studio and we teach people from all over the world. And Alice answered the door, my wife Alice answered the door. And she said, this very slight...

• 19:37Terry Laughlin?

  Man drew himself up and says, "I'm Dr. Paul Lurie. Can someone here teach me an effortless butterfly?"

• 19:50Terry Laughlin?

  So Alice told me about it and our daughter Betsy was gonna teach the lesson. So I showed up, I had to watch this. And I saw Paul swim freestyle, it was pretty nice. And then he tried a few strokes of backstroke, a butterfly, excuse me. And after watching him swim for about 10 seconds, I said, "Paul, I think your second stroke should be backstroke." And I said, "I'll offer, I offered him the ultimate senior discount. I'll come to the pool at Woodland Pond at no charge and teach you." And I ended up teaching him about three or four lessons. And when he was 95, we shot, we shot a video of Paul and I swimming together.

• 20:33Terry Laughlin?

  We were doing what we call sync swimming, where I synchronized my stroke to his. And I posed the question on the video, "Can you tell which swimmer is 62 and which is 95?"

• 20:45Terry Laughlin?

  Because we looked identical, just exactly alike. And I was so proud of him. And to, to take this a little further, November, November 18th, I will be attending his 100th birthday party and he's still swimming 20 lanes a day.

• 21:03Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 21:04Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, so it's never too late to start.

• 21:08Tim Ferriss?

  And I mean, it's such a wonderful, I only knew about 10% of that story. I definitely didn't know about he showing up at the door. "I'm Dr. Paul Lurie, can you teach me an effortless butterfly?"

• 21:24Terry Laughlin?

  He swims freestyle and backstroke, that's, he's happy with those two strokes. Now, I'll tell you something else that's really remarkable about Paul. So he took his first lesson at 94. He was still gaining speed at 97. I, I don't know if there's another example.

• 21:43Terry Laughlin?

  In physical capability of someone improving between age ninety-six and ninety-seven. The way he timed it was he swam a twenty-length routine, which he continues to this day. In the fifty-foot pool at Woodland Pond, he does a twenty-length routine where he swims two laps of free and one of back until he's done twenty lengths. And his time for that twenty-length routine improved incredibly in the first year or so, but it was still getting faster between age ninety-six and ninety-seven. In fact, the day he improved his time at ninety-seven, I got a text message from his

• 22:27Terry Laughlin?

  friend Marilyn Bell, who's another fantastic story. And she said, "Paul improved, I think his time, I think he improved it from thirteen minutes and change to twelve fifty-three this morning." And, you know, so I immediately texted back to both of them, saying how thrilled I was about that. And then Paul texted me back, and he says, "Yes, I went in with a plan to improve my time." Now, how many people are going to the pool at age ninety-seven with a plan and a strategy to improve his time?

• 23:09Terry Laughlin?

  And his strategy was that he was gonna swim even more quietly than before. And you go faster by swimming more quietly. I mean, it's just the whole unexpected nature of what he did and the unexpected nature of his strategy. A very great, cool story.

• 23:27Tim Ferriss?

  How did you personally start swimming?

• 23:31Terry Laughlin?

  Ah, yes. Well, my dad started me when I was about eight or nine. And my very first serious swimming experience was swimming at Bar Beach on Long Island. You were on the South Shore, I was on the North Shore. So, in Hempstead Harbor on Long Island Sound, Bar Beach, and they had a raft anchored, I would guess, maybe thirty feet offshore, ten yards or so.

• 24:01Terry Laughlin?

  And I used to watch with with great envy, I I used to watch my dad swim out to the yacht uh to the to the raft and beyond. And he would he would come back and he would have me do dead man's float and move my arms in circles and and I would sort of practice in the shallows. And then one day I just screwed up my courage and decided I was gonna make a try for the for the raft and I, you know, swam as we all do when we take that first swim in deep water, which is frantically. And I I got to the raft gratefully, pulled myself out and then called a lifeguard to bring me back, escort me back safely, as my mother tells me.

• 24:46Terry Laughlin?

  Um, so that was my start and then I uh a pool opened. We didn't have a pool at that time in Williston Park where I grew up and they opened a pool in nineteen sixty-three when I was twelve and I took the Red Cross swimmer course and got my Red Cross swimmer badge and joined the the pool, the the swim team at the pool. And then in eighth grade, uh, at Saint Aidan's School, my Catholic grammar school, I uh, they announced a tryout for the swimming team and there is not a lower, more grassroots level of swimming than Catholic diocese and Catholic diocese and once a, once a year meet. So they were gonna have a few practices and then swim in the diocese and annual meet.

• 25:31Terry Laughlin?

  So I tried out, but I didn't even have to swim the length of the pool. It was the width of the the Farmingdale Community College, uh, six-lane pool. And when I, when I got across the pool, there was a coach in full clothing, uh, in the water next to me, who had jumped in, jumped in to escort me across, not sure I would make it under my own power. So needless to say, I didn't make the cut, not an auspicious start. And the guy who cut me is still alive, friend of my parents, and we still laugh about that. But then I, they had the Red Cross 50 mile swim chart at the pool, as all pools did

• 26:14Terry Laughlin?

  in those days, and you could get a badge for swimming 50 miles. And I had 11 weeks in the summer to swim 50 miles. So at age 13, I decided I was going to earn that. And I discovered I really loved the solitude of doing laps. And I, you know, just through doing the laps to earn the 50 mile badge, which I did, I turned myself into an okay swimmer, certainly not one with any sort of efficient technique, but one who could swim a mile a day. Not many people can, and I managed to turn myself into a mile a day swimmer at age 13.

• 26:51Tim Ferriss?

  So let's flash forward, and we can certainly pick up anything in between, but if we look at, say, 1972, so you, at that time, my understanding, is begin coaching at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.

• 27:07Terry Laughlin?

  Correct.

• 27:08Tim Ferriss?

  And it was there that you had an epiphany, or sort of observed something that would later very much influence your teaching style. Can you tell us about what you learned?

• 27:24Terry Laughlin?

  Sure.

• 27:25Tim Ferriss?

  While you were coaching?

• 27:26Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, this is, it's such, it's a foreshadowing, and an unbelievable foreshadowing of how I would spend the next 40 odd years. You know, first of all, to preface it, I have to take note that I had swum for eight years before I became a coach. And I was a very hardworking, very frustrated swimmer. And during those eight years, I can remember one occasion when a coach said anything to me about technique. So I got, if, you know, if you take your cues from what your coaches do, they put workouts on the board and then said, ready, go. And nobody said a word about technique, except for this one time where the, one of

• 28:11Terry Laughlin?

  my coaches said, Lachlan, you'll never swim fast if you don't move your arms slower. That was the only input. I got, because I was just, I was such a high turnover swimmer. And I, you know, as far as I knew, how else do you swim fast except by moving your arms faster? So, um, so I'd gone through eight years with not a word about technique, except that one time. And then I was the coach of the Merchant Marine Academy. I think I had 12 men in a four lane pool. And I gave them a garden variety warm up of 800 yards of freestyle. Takes about 10 to 12 minutes to do. And I watched them from the end of the pool. And it's the first time I'm ever watching swimmers.

• 28:56Terry Laughlin?

  And, you know, where I'm in the situation or the responsibility of, of, well, being responsible for their performance. And I must have been watching with a keener eye than I ever had before, because I noticed that every swimmer in the pool was asymmetrical. Those who breathed to the left torqued and twisted in that direction and those who breathed to the right likewise. Um, and it just occurred to me that, you know, if the object is to move to the, to the other end by, presumably by a laser line, that it's not good in every single stroke to be diverting momentum and energy off to the side.

• 29:38Terry Laughlin?

  So I went home that night pondering what I'd, what I'd seen and what I might do about it. And I decided that the next more, the next day for warm up, uh, we were gonna, I was gonna ask them, since it was related to their breathing. I, I gave them 800 yards of freestyle, but I said, I, I'd like you all to breathe on the wrong side. And because we all start our swimming with a right side, a side on which we are naturally more comfortable. And the other side, we don't breathe to it because it feels more awkward and uncomfortable. So for the next 10 to 12 minutes, I had a markedly more symmetrical team. And I said, that can't be a bad thing.

• 30:20Terry Laughlin?

  I didn't know the first thing about biomechanics at the time. It just seemed evident to me aesthetically that anything that moved you straight ahead was better than something that kept diverting you to the side. And I, you know, I was just so gratified by the. Positive response to my first seat of the pants experiment in stroke work that I thought, I'm just gonna carry on. And I did. And it was, it was not difficult, you know, and I had never been an assistant coach. I had never taken a coaching course or anything even remotely related to sports

• 30:59Terry Laughlin?

  science, or swimming, or biomechanics, or any of that. But I really trusted my aesthetic judgment. I trusted that what looked good was good. And I had, I had an example of that. I had a four lane pool, and there was a hierarchy where the fast swimmers were in lane one, and the slow swimmers were in lane four. And as I cast my eye across the pool, the swimmers in lane one, the fast swimmers, looked more taller in the water. They looked longer as they stroked, and they were markedly smoother. And the swimmers in lane four were shorter, and more choppy, and more rough. And I thought, I'm just gonna experiment with, with them and try different

• 31:40Terry Laughlin?

  things to see if I can make them look more like the swimmers in lane one. And another interesting thing happened when I started engaging with them. And as I said, the coaching I got was all ready go coaching, where the coach would give you a set that lasted thirty minutes and then just sit and watch you. But when I was, when I was working with them on technique, I, I was engaging with them in a much more intimate manner. And I pretty quickly noticed that there was another difference between movement form, between quality of form, and speed, which was that Kings Point was a little bit different from a lot of colleges, and that there were no athletic

• 32:22Terry Laughlin?

  scholarships. And so your reason for swimming came down to, you got, you got excused from unwelcome, unpleasant duties, like, like cleaning out the latrine, and marching in reviews, and stuff like that during the, during the length of the season. Or, or you really wanted to swim. And I, I saw there was a big overlap between want to swim, and good form, and faster swimming in lane one, and escapism, and poor form.

• 32:57Terry Laughlin?

  And and slow times in lane four. So, you know, then I it was a matter of how to engage them as well. And I found that these, you know, these tech, the technique challenges that I was giving them and the little puzzles to solve and so on.

• 33:14Terry Laughlin?

  Brought out in them a certain zest for the workouts that had not been there before.

• 33:20Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm really curious to know the first where what would later become total immersion kind of entered the picture. And I want to just make a couple of footnotes because it's related to a number of things you said. For instance, the perhaps very in retrospect,

• 33:43Tim Ferriss?

  sensible and obvious advice to, for instance, do what I do now, which is breathe every third stroke, which means I'm going right, left, right, left, right, left. In a very symmetrical way, that's, you know, one of the points that you you mentioned. And then the the importance of, and this is something that I think applies to just about everything. Just about, not everything, but just about everything. And that is when you get in the pool, and I remember this, this had a huge impact on me, and I still have that very initial Total Immersion book somewhere. It got wet a lot.

• 34:26Tim Ferriss?

  So it's it's not in pristine condition, but the idea that you're, say, getting in the pool to practice not to do a workout. And at least in the beginning, the idea that if it feels like a workout, you're not doing it correctly, was really difficult for me to first accept because I'm used to, or at least at that point, in physical training, I thought that your results were a direct output from an input, which was effort, right? And it was a huge mental shift for me to gauge my practice, the quality, the success

• 35:09Tim Ferriss?

  of a practice, based on how little effort I expended during, say, thirty minutes in the pool.

• 35:19Tim Ferriss?

  It was just, it was a huge shift for me, and I think that applies to. Producing quality in many, many different areas, at least in my experience, somewhat counterintuitively. So when did the sort of the bones of what would later become total immersion start to coalesce or start to appear?

• 35:45Terry Laughlin?

  Well, the powerful impact of working on technique and not neglecting conditioning whatsoever. My swimmers were very well-conditioned everywhere I coached.

• 35:58Terry Laughlin?

  But the conditioning was always subordinate to the form. In other words, I would stop a set if I wasn't satisfied with the form. They might be swimming fast, they might be swimming their hearts out. But if I was not satisfied with the form, I would stop the set, redirect and restart the set and say, "You must maintain your form." The beginning of my conviction that that was an absolute, that swimming success is based on superior form, came that first season at Kings Point. I had swum in that conference for four years.

• 36:38Terry Laughlin?

  I swam for St. John's University and we swam against Kings Point for four years. We swam in the conference championship each year. And I took my team, after doing all this technique work and radically reshaping their strokes, I have to say, to the conference championship at the end of the season. And we just set the place on fire. I just could not, even having coached them the whole season, I just was, my mind was kind of boggled by the times they swam, simply because nothing in my experience prepared me to see swimmers improve that much

• 37:22Terry Laughlin?

  and swim that fast compared to the previous year. I'll give you one example. Sort of the premier event in college swimming is the four by 100 freestyle relay. It's always the final event in a collegiate championship meet. And as for as four swimmers each swimming 100 yards or 100 meters.

• 37:45Terry Laughlin?

  And in the four years that I was in the conference, the the conference record for that event improved from 325 to 323. And as it happened, I was fortunate that the when I was a senior, the record of 323.8 was set by my by by King's Point relay. So I inherited the the championship and and record holding relay. Well, they they came back my first year of coaching and went 316.

• 38:17Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 38:18Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah. In one in one night, they improved seven seconds of what had, you know, what it improves two seconds in four years. And everybody's jaws were hanging around the pool. And I realized, oh, my goodness, what what have I wrought? I had never done anything that you, you know, would suggest distinction of any sort in my life prior to that night.

• 38:40Tim Ferriss?

  What what year do you recall the year on that?

• 38:44Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, that was March of 1973.

• 38:46Tim Ferriss?

  OK.

• 38:47Terry Laughlin?

  And I was I was still 21 years old, for goodness sakes.

• 38:52Terry Laughlin?

  I was the youngest coach in the NCAA.

• 38:54Tim Ferriss?

  And now you ended up producing, and I want to sort of qualify my earlier statement also, 24 national club and college champions.

• 39:04Terry Laughlin?

  Right.

• 39:05Tim Ferriss?

  If if I'm getting my facts straight. So I don't want to imply that conditioning isn't a piece of successfully coaching a competitive team, certainly, but that it's necessary but not sufficient. Right? I mean, to produce the improvement that you did in the relay, you can't just have them train harder or expend more calories in the pool. It was a it was a technical improvement. And I think that

• 39:35Terry Laughlin?

  Right, right. There's no way any change in conditioning, anything I could have done in workouts could have produced that improvement. No way at all.

• 39:43Tim Ferriss?

  No. Tell me, tell me about Bill Boomer.

• 39:49Tim Ferriss?

  Where did Bill enter the picture? And what effect did he have?

• 39:54Terry Laughlin?

  So I actually met Bill Bummer in 1988. And I was just ready to step away from coaching. I had gotten burned out. I still love coaching. I love teaching. But I had gotten a little burned out on dealing with parents.

• 40:10Tim Ferriss?

  Before we just gloss over that.

• 40:14Tim Ferriss?

  Can you give us an example of what type of stuff burned you with parents?

• 40:19Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, well, there was one time where I had these two really sensational 12-year-old boys. And when I had really good swimmers, I would make things a little more challenging for them. I didn't want it to come too easily because at age 12, when you're a dominant swimmer, you're not used to being challenged. So we got to our season, our state age group championships. And I said to the 12-year-old boys, "Out of the eight events you're going to swim, you can choose six, but I'm going to choose two." And they both knew what it would be. It was going to be that they were both going to swim breaststroke events because that was

• 41:04Terry Laughlin?

  their weakest event. And I wanted them to have at least, you know, one or two races where they really had to race and not just race each other. And one of the boys, their parents came to me and complained bitterly about my forcing their son to do that. He had no problem with it. He didn't have an objection or had not raised an objection, but because it was going to hurt his chances of winning the high point award. And, you know, and I'm thinking about his long-term development, not whether he wins the trophy at age 12. And in the end, the other boy, his parents were fully supportive. He and his parents were fully supportive.

• 41:49Terry Laughlin?

  And he swam the breaststroke events. And I decided it wasn't worth fighting that battle, that if it was that important, I'd let him not swim breaststroke. But the other boy swam the breaststroke and ended up winning the high point award.

• 42:02Tim Ferriss?

  So you were burning out because of overzealous or maybe over-involved, overvocal parents?

• 42:11Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, they had just lost their sense of perspective in it.

• 42:15Tim Ferriss?

  And Bill Boomer came into the picture around that time.

• 42:21Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, so I'm 37 years old and I have more money in the bank. I also had a 14-year-old daughter who I was thinking of, got college costs coming up and coaching just didn't pay well. I was one of the most successful, most respected coaches in the United States in the age group ranks and I had never earned more than $15,000 in a season and had no money in the bank. So I just decided I was gonna cast about and see what else my native

• 42:59Terry Laughlin?

  abilities might allow me to do that might pay better. But I still wanted to coach. I still wanted to keep my hand in it. I was invited to the American Swimming Coaches Association World Clinic. It's the top coaching clinic in the world. And I was invited to talk on a topic related to age group swimming. And then immediately after I finished my talk, I was sitting in the back of the room, sort of decompressing with some coaching friends. And I had intended to go see Randy Reese, the head coach of the University of Florida

• 43:41Terry Laughlin?

  at the time, and a guy who had coached many Olympians and world record holders. And by the way, the brother of Eddie Reese, who's a coach at University of Texas at Austin, and probably the most successful coach we have in the United States. So I was gonna go see Randy Reese and learn how to coach world record holders. And Bill Boomer, a completely unheralded, little-known coach with a really unconventional approach to things. He was a coach at the University of Rochester, New York, and he got up and started speaking. And he just, right from his opening sentences, it blew my mind. He was talking about things I had never heard. And the most...

• 44:24Terry Laughlin?

  The thing that he said that has stuck with me ever since, I'll, I'll, I'll stay, I'll quote, two quotes of his, but the first was, he says, "The shape of the engine is more important than the," I'm sorry, "The shape of the vessel is more important than the size of the engine in swimming." And every, every coaching talk I had been to over the, over the previous 16 years of going to coaching clinics, everyone had been about engine building, not a single talk about vessel shaping. What do we really mean by this? That, well, Boomer says that a human body moving through the water should be treated

• 45:06Terry Laughlin?

  like any vessel and should be designed to move through the water with as little drag and as little turbulence as, as possible. And engine building referred to both building the aerobic engine through, through cardiovascular conditioning and emphasizing how powerful the pull and kick is. So I, by doing what I call arms department, legs department training, where you, you tie your legs together, you, you, you know, you put a buoy between them and a, and a band around them, take them out of the picture and then to put a pair of big paddles on your hands and, and muscle your way up and down the pool with your arm muscles, or you

• 45:46Terry Laughlin?

  immobilize your arms and, and possibly put on fins for more, more power and muscle your way up and down the pool and separating the arms from the legs in, in training, disintegrating the body, in other words. So, so the two types of engine building is, is really all that I had ever heard emphasized. Uh, and, and that was the first thing, and I'll come back with another anecdote later to tell you why this resonated with me. But the other thing that he said, uh, was that, um, conditioning is something that happens to you while you build, refine and imprint skills.

• 46:33Terry Laughlin?

  And just the fact that, you know, you would first look at the skill component, first look at the skill impact of any training set or task you give. And that the metabolic component, the conditioning component would be a factor of the difficulty of the skill task. As opposed to just say to the swimmer, I want your heart rate above 170 for, you know, for the next 20 minutes. Ready, go.

• 47:10Tim Ferriss?

  And, you know, before, before we keep moving ahead with the chronology, I'd love to talk about your experience, which I think was, maybe it was just before this. You could clarify when exactly it happened, but the, the break that you took from coaching. Can you tell us a bit about that experience? When you started, when you were testing other avenues for making a living?

• 47:41Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, it ended up being writing. I had started doing just a little bit of writing while I was still coaching. I wrote one article for Swimming World Magazine and wrote a few other things for newsletters. I always wrote a piece for our club newsletter, you know, from the coach's perspective. And I found I enjoyed communicating by writing and I thought I would try. So my wife, Allison, I started a marketing communications, very tiny little mom and pop agency called Main Street Communications. We lived on Main Street in Gosha, New York. And, and we wrote speeches and PR stuff and things like that for small businesses in the area.

• 48:25Terry Laughlin?

  At the same time, I started writing articles for, for small local magazines. And then I happened to go to my 23th high school reunion. And one of my classmates was the editor of a magazine.

• 48:42Terry Laughlin?

  On corporate hedging, on how multinational companies hedge their currency risk, which was much greater in those days before the unification of the Eurozone. There were all those currencies in Europe and so they were at great risk of currency moves and interest rate risk and political risk and commodity risk, all these forms of risks that you undertake. And so, you know, he said, "What are you doing?" And I said, "Well, I'm doing a little bit of magazine writing." He said, "Why don't you send me a clip?" And he ended up giving me assignment. And I, you know, it turned out I was pretty good at interviewing and distilling the information

• 49:25Terry Laughlin?

  and writing about it, even though I knew nothing about puts and calls and all these hedging strategies. And so I ended up, I earned my living primarily through writing about international corporate finance, which is kind of a crazy thing during the time that I wasn't coaching. Why did you come back to coaching? Well, I, you know, I wasn't away from coaching very long. I actually was an assistant coach at West Point with the responsibility to be the, my portfolio was coaching technique for everybody on the team.

• 50:05Terry Laughlin?

  My good friend Ray Bossi had just taken over as head coach and he asked me to help him make the transition during his first year. So I did, that was 1988, 89, when I had started the writing and stuff. And I enjoyed just working on tech, always had enjoyed teaching technique. And in 1988, in August of 1988, I resumed swimming. I had not swum in 17 years since college. And I saw that Masters Nationals were going to be in Buffalo, not far from my house. So I thought, "Well, I'll start swimming again and I'll go to that Masters Nationals and see how I like it."

• 50:49Terry Laughlin?

  So the takeaways I got was that everybody seemed to be having great fun.

• 50:56Terry Laughlin?

  And I was super impressed by the people in the fifty-five and over age groups, how fit they were and how fast they were. Uh, and I thought, I wanna be like them when I get to be that age. So, um, so I was, I was introduced to master swimming and I thought, well, if I, if I coached these folks, I probably won't have any parent problems. And, uh, so the next summer I decided I was gonna hold a summer camp. The summer camps for kids were a common thing, you know, like other sports. There were week-long and longer summer camps for different sports. So, summer camps for swimmers were, were, were something I knew well. Uh, and I thought I'd offer one for adults.

• 51:40Terry Laughlin?

  And, uh, so I did. And I, uh, nineteen, uh, uh, June of nineteen eighty-nine at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, I, I had the first ever total immersion camp. Where did I get the name total immersion? Cause I didn't wanna call it Terry Lachlan Swim Camp. To me, that was like calling it some guy's swim camp. I thought I needed a better, a better name than just my name. So I was, I was reading a magazine one day and I came across an ad for Berlitz Language Schools and they, they were offering what they called total immersion language courses. And I said, that certainly works as well for swimming as it does for, for language. So I, I chose that name and then waited about five years for a letter from their lawyers telling me to cease and desist

• 52:23Terry Laughlin?

  before I went to a lawyer and found it, oh, I could, I could trademark total immersion swimming, which I, I did finally. Uh, so I had total immersion swim camp, uh, in the summer of eighty-nine and I had six swimmers the first week and nine the second. I had, uh, I had an Olympic swimmer, a nineteen forty-eight Olympian from, from Holland, who was now a resident of Canada, uh, of Ottawa, uh, and, and came to the camp. And so I I taught I taught those people what I had been teaching for twenty years, or not twenty years, but eighteen years, seventeen years.

• 53:02Terry Laughlin?

  I what I had been teaching to age group swimmers because these people were all very conversant with swimming. A lot of them had swum when they were kids, you know, not to mention having an Olympian. And they were all very comfortable in the water and, you know, everything. Everything that I did worked well with them and, you know, a couple of them said I improved more in five days than I have in the last ten years. So that was something that I I found I enjoyed, I found worked well with the with the people. And I continued doing that for the next for the next several years. But I I had master swimmers the first year and the third year I had my first triathlete.

• 53:43Terry Laughlin?

  Come come to one of these four stroke camps and first of all, they were mainly interested in in freestyle, not in the other three strokes. And secondly, when we finished a pool session, we had two pool sessions a day, one morning, one afternoon. And I I wanted them to rest up for the afternoon. They would go out for a bike ride or a run and come back all sweaty. So I wasn't thrilled. But the the proportion of triathletes grew so rapidly that by about the fourth or fifth year, it was seventy percent triathletes and we were doing just freestyle.

• 54:18Tim Ferriss?

  Now, where if if we're gonna, let's, if you don't mind, flash forward as you're so you're forming. Total immersion, you're developing and testing different methods. If we look back at our experience that we shared in Hawaii with Sarah. Who was very much novice swimmer, uncomfortable putting her face underwater.

• 54:43Terry Laughlin?

  Right.

• 54:44Tim Ferriss?

  Mother of, I think, two at the time.

• 54:46Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah.

• 54:47Tim Ferriss?

  And for the Tim Ferriss Experiment, a TV show at the time.

• 54:53Tim Ferriss?

  We wanted to show, demonstrate that it wasn't just an anomaly that I had learned to swim in this way and that in fact it could be replicated. So we brought Sarah to Hawaii and I'm going to back into the technique, but started with kind of coughing and having a lot of trouble really just submerging her face to a few days later. And keeping in mind that for those people who watch nonfiction TV or reality TV, if it's actually reality TV, which this was, meaning it's not highly scripted, we're actually capturing someone as they progress from zero to hopefully open water swimmer.

• 55:36Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah.

• 55:36Tim Ferriss?

  There's a lot.

• 55:38Terry Laughlin?

  You're really on the line. You're putting it on the.

• 55:40Tim Ferriss?

  You're really on the line and also you have audio issues, you have camera reframing. So you might think that with say Sarah, we had four or five days of training, but in reality, we had a much shortened period of time. It was probably half of that time that we had to work.

• 55:59Terry Laughlin?

  Very, very complicated and challenging instructional environment with all the, all the technical people around and all the cameras and the reshoots and all of that.

• 56:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it really, but it worked and she ended up swimming in very deep water, open water, sink swimming with both of us and breathing in freestyle stroke. It was just tremendous. But where do you take someone like a Sarah and begin? Where do you start? Because I think this is where a lot of people who try to learn to swim and you know, they swallow their pride and go to the pool or find a coach, where things go sideways. And certainly that was true for me. Where do you start? Do you start by getting into the deep end and trying to learn how to breathe while you swim freestyle?

• 56:49Terry Laughlin?

  No, no. Very, very small bits, very what I call mini skills and micro skills. We, we always teach in a step by step fashion where each step leads naturally to the next and is a scaffold. Uh, for, for the next step. So, so I meet Sarah uh at the, at the pool on, on Monday morning. We, we began the shoot on Monday morning and we, I said, okay, well, let's see what you can do. Uh, and the cameras are rolling and Sarah swims about six or eight strokes furiously, just, just flailing away.

• 57:31Terry Laughlin?

  Uh, with her head out of the water, head, head just whipping back and forth. Uh, and then she needs a breath and what does she do? She stops.

• 57:41Terry Laughlin?

  She can't breathe and swim, so she, she had to stop and she did that a few times. Uh, and I, I, I knew, you know, I had a pretty good idea what, what I was gonna see and you, you probably recognize that from your own experience, Tim.

• 57:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, sure.

• 57:57Terry Laughlin?

  You know, the way she was swimming and survival swimming.

• 58:00Tim Ferriss?

  The, the drowning monkey technique.

• 58:02Terry Laughlin?

  Right. Well, you know, here, I, I cited the statistic earlier of, of only 2% of American adults can swim 400 meters non-stop. Only 30% can swim 25 yards, just one, you know, one length of, of your local, local pool. Uh, only 30% can, uh, can swim one lap non-stop. So that was you, Tim, as I recall. Your story was you're in a, in a 20-yard pool and swimming about two-thirds of the way, the way down and not being able to get past that two-thirds, two-thirds point. So it, what is it? It's an inability to breathe. If you can't get air, you can't carry on. Uh, but you can't just start in with breathing, uh, because there's, there's a series of skills that you have to learn first.

• 58:46Terry Laughlin?

  So what did we have Sarah do first? Um, doing a glide, a, a very, very simple glide with arms extended at shoulder width. We call it Superman. Uh, it's Superman. Uh, I, just as instructing, instructing Sarah to just glide, to just, um, hang her head between her shoulders, which is an

• 59:13Terry Laughlin?

  It's a non instinctive thing, but exceptionally important. In fact, it's counterintuitive. What was Sarah's instinct was to hold her head up to avoid choking. And here I was telling her, Sarah, I want you to hang your head in the water. I want you to let it go. And she discovered when she let her head hang in the water, that she could glide and her body didn't sink. And she could just glide effortlessly, maybe five or six yards. And that's kind of, that's a life changing experience for someone who's always felt that they were sinker.

• 59:54Tim Ferriss?

  Right, well, you're showing the, how the shape of the vessel, right? The hydrodynamics changes the whole game.

• 1:00:02Terry Laughlin?

  We in fact were shaping the vessel to, so that she could glide five or six yards without any effort. So that she could just look down and see the pool bottom passing under her without her doing anything. And at the same time feel this incredible sense of support, almost weightlessness from the water.

• 1:00:25Tim Ferriss?

  And I just want to highlight something here or a few things. The first is that this is happening in, let's call it four feet of water, right? So Sarah can stand up at any time if she wants to. So it's removing that fear factor. Second, she's not kicking, she's not pulling with her hands. She's simply gliding, right?

• 1:00:44Terry Laughlin?

  Gliding and shaping the vessel.

• 1:00:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so you're isolating that prerequisite

• 1:00:53Tim Ferriss?

  skill or component that leads to the rest. And one thing that really struck me, and this is true in my experience with all really, really profound instruction, whether it's music or say recently for me tennis with a coach named Lorenzo Beltrame, who just blew my mind with teaching me how to serve properly.

• 1:01:18Tim Ferriss?

  And I just want to draw a parallel, if you don't mind the digression. Because, or Josh Waitzkin has been on this podcast and how he teaches chess, which is very much what you would not expect. And what you find is that Almost by definition, really profound instruction is very different from what you would expect, because what you expect gets very mediocre results. And for instance, you know, Josh starts with, and I think we'll come back to this, but first principles, right? He wants, he wants someone to understand the principles of chess in this case. And for those people that don't know the name, he was the basis for the book and the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer.

• 1:01:59Tim Ferriss?

  And he'll take all of the pieces off the chessboard and start with a, I think it's just king versus king and pawn, to teach very, very flexible principles that then apply to the rest of the game. So he'll start with the endgame in order to demonstrate those principles. But perhaps a more direct parallel would be Lorenzo, when he was teaching me, I'd never been able to serve in tennis, or really, I never had learned how to play tennis, period. But what he started me with is, he said, "All right, you're going to hold the tennis ball in your left hand, and you want your hand sideways, all right, so that, so that you're not whipping the ball backwards.

• 1:02:44Tim Ferriss?

  And I want you to just practice throwing the ball up and having it land a few inches in front of your feet. That's all I want you to do." So I'm just throwing the tennis ball up, having it land in front of my feet, so that I'm not throwing it behind me or too far ahead of me. And he goes, "Okay, great." Actually, I take it back. That was step two. Step one was practice lightly and loosely throwing a tennis ball over the net, just like a, just like a soft baseball throw. Second was with my left hand, throwing the ball up and having it land in front of me, just a few inches in front of my foot. Then the next step was throwing the first ball up and then trying to hit it with the tennis ball that I'm throwing with my rear hand. And then literally, he just said, okay, here's a tennis racket.

• 1:03:28Tim Ferriss?

  Try to hit the tennis ball and boom, right into the zone on the other side of the net. And it just was one of those moments that just made my head kind of explode, which was also the case with total immersion and with this logical progression. That's what I want to underscore is that you're building on each of these skills. And it just gets me so excited when people ask me, you know, why are you trying to learn the gamelan from Indonesia? Why are you trying to learn this or that? It's these aha moments where you do something for say Sarah, and she goes, holy shit, for lack of a better, more elegant way to put it, I could actually do this.

• 1:04:10Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:12Tim Ferriss?

  And so you have Sarah gliding. What are some of the other important initial skills or exercises that you layer on top of that?

• 1:04:24Terry Laughlin?

  Well, one of the things that you have written in your, you know, when you write about meta learning, one of the principles that you have cited for that is avoid error points.

• 1:04:37Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:04:38Terry Laughlin?

  And as soon as I read that, I recognized, oh yeah, we did that, you know? Tim's got it. And what are the two error points? And you know, from your experience, what are the two error points for swimmers?

• 1:04:51Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, boy, you know what? I'm caught on the spot. I would say, well, number one is just fear of not being able to touch the bottom, at least for me. I'll just name, and for those people who are wondering what I mean. So if we're looking at failure points.

• 1:05:07Terry Laughlin?

  I can tell you the two you cited when you wrote about it. Kicking and breathing.

• 1:05:13Tim Ferriss?

  Kicking and breathing, right.

• 1:05:14Terry Laughlin?

  Kicking and breathing, because every time somebody handed you a kickboard, as you said, your feet just sliced through the water like razor blades and you went nowhere.

• 1:05:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:22Terry Laughlin?

  That's everybody's experience. Nobody can propel on a kickboard except really people who are already really good swimmers.

• 1:05:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:29Terry Laughlin?

  So that's a totally useless tool to learn to swim. But everybody, what do they do? What does everybody do? They hand you a kickboard to try to strengthen your legs so your legs won't sink. That's not the problem. Having weak legs is not the problem. So the problem, the first problem we solved with Sarah was fear of, fear of sinking. And we took out the breathing component. We said, we're going to add that later. When, when you are ready, when you have, when you have a, um, a, a platform of skills so that you can control something about how you breathe, then we'll introduce that. And, you know, we're, we're going to not even make kicking part of it at all, but, um,

• 1:06:09Terry Laughlin?

  teach you, as you have written, Tim, to have the legs draft behind the upper body. So, so we had her do exactly that with it, with the, the Superman glide, which is just let out a pearl sized string of bubbles so that you're not holding your breath. Uh, and don't kick. Press your legs lightly together and just feel your body, body gliding. That was, that was step one. The second step was to teach her to shape her body for the most hydrodynamic position in the crawl stroke and the most hydrodynamic position, the one where you experience the

• 1:06:51Terry Laughlin?

  least drag, uh, is the fully extended position. So when you've reached forward with one arm and, and pressed back with the other arm and you're fully extended and rotated just a little bit off your stomach. So we call that skate position because it brings to mind, or I would like to bring to mind, the blade of a speed skate. And to shape your body to be as long and sleek and balanced as, as it, as it can be. And so what, what we did there was The Superman glide does not occur in freestyle. So, we just use that to get her comfortable in the water, to give her

• 1:07:34Terry Laughlin?

  a sense that she had control of her body position. Very important to feel that you're in control. And then, and then the very next step was to put her in the most hydrodynamic position. So, we started with the most important moment in the stroke and, and let her become very, very familiar with all the fine details of that moment. Where should your hand be? Uh, your extended hand be? It should be in a particular place. It should be below your body. Uh, and it should be on, on a track with the, the whole right side of your body. If it's your right arm. Uh, and your left shoulder should be barely above the surface. You should be looking straight down.

• 1:08:16Terry Laughlin?

  You should be, uh, kicking very, very minimally. And so, we taught her that position. I would say we spent a good part of an entire pool session just letting Sarah, Sarah become familiar with and in control of that, that position.

• 1:08:33Tim Ferriss?

  No, definitely. And I, I, a couple of things that, that come to mind that I also want to bring up that were particularly helpful for me. Number one was having a, and I'm very quantified in the sense that I, I like to have a number I can use for tracking improvement, but when you're just learning how to swim, looking at say lap speed is, is, is going to encourage bad behavior, right? It's going to encourage, at least in me, the thrashing and overexertion that we want to avoid. But the, looking at the, uh, sort of stroke count per length

• 1:09:17Tim Ferriss?

  ended up being really helpful for me. So, for instance, you know, I went from in about four workouts. Uh, this is again by myself, just self-coaching with the book. More than 25 strokes per 20 yard length to an average of around 11 strokes. Uh, so I had, I had doubled my sort of efficiency, right? And I'll, I'll just run through a couple of quick notes that I have here. So, the first is more of a meta-comment, which is people think of swimming, and I thought of swimming as something you do on top of the water. Uh, and I'll just list a few of these and then we can, we can dig into, dig into them. But whereas in fact, Your body is denser than, or very often denser than water, or you're going to be mostly submerged.

• 1:10:01Tim Ferriss?

  So if you think of freestyle as having, say, ninety percent, you could give you probably a more accurate percentage, but like ninety percent of your body underwater, then when you are swimming, say freestyle, your body is going to be mostly underwater. And just accepting that removes a huge fear factor. Because if you're accustomed to thinking, I have to swim in order to breathe, I have to keep my body on top of the water, you're on a suicide mission. It's just not going to work. The physics don't provide for it.

• 1:10:32Terry Laughlin?

  Gravity will always win that battle.

• 1:10:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, gravity's always going to win. So when you, but when you're taught from the very outset, or the expectation is set, all right, your body's going to be ninety-five, ninety, ninety-five percent underwater. And your goal, and let's start by kicking off a wall in four feet of water, is to glide from, say, sort of fuselage right to fuselage left, right? So if we think of freestyle not as swimming on your stomach, but from alternating from one extended position to the other, just like you would go from, say, right speed skate to left speed skate, like you were mentioning earlier, in that extended position, things change really, really quickly. And thinking of, these are just a couple of the counterintuitive things I want to mention for people

• 1:11:19Tim Ferriss?

  that really helped me. Another was focusing on driving your arm through the water as opposed to pulling in order to encourage that position. The looking straight down, which you mentioned, also, I think, very counterintuitive for folks. And having your arm, when you are in that fully extended position, a good deal underwater, not on top of the water. And what that does is helps to apply water pressure on the arm and raise the legs, right? So my issue, or what I thought was my issue-

• 1:11:54Terry Laughlin?

  I call that the trim tab effect. So the way should the the trim tabs on an airplane airplane work to raise or lower the nose? If you have something in front, hydrodynamics and aerodynamics are work exactly the same. And if you have something in front of the vessel that is angled down, it's going to lift the rear. And and that's so the arm is acting as a trim tab for your body and effortlessly lifting your legs to the surface, meaning two two really important things. One is you save on the energy of kicking and the second is you you save a huge amount of turbulence and drag. So just, you know, using the arm in that way. Who would ever think that that's more important than pushing water back?

• 1:12:38Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the the drills or exercises that you've found most helpful for translating or translating to most of the components you want to emphasize into one exercise? So one that I found just really, really tremendously helpful was hand swapping. So if you talk to perhaps, you know, front quadrant swimming a little bit, but the idea that, you know, what what when in doubt, if I feel like I'm I'm getting a little panicky or getting tired or whatever it might be, I think of of hand swapping. Could you could you describe what that means for people?

• 1:13:23Terry Laughlin?

  Sure. So our innate primal instinct when we start swimming is to windmill the arms heedlessly, just just churn away with the arms, meaning generally the arms are going to be 180 degrees apart or or close to it. And not only are you not

• 1:13:47Terry Laughlin?

  Creating much propulsion by windmilling your arms, you're also creating a whole lot of drag. That's a sort of a fatal prescription for getting anywhere. And so, we always have prioritized what we call vessel shaping, or shaping your human swimming body to minimize drag during all moments in the stroke. And so, the first thing you can do to minimize drag is use your arm to lengthen your body. The longer the body is, the less drag there is. And then, you need to think a little bit about stroke timing in terms of that, because you want to keep the body long for a bit more of the recovery.

• 1:14:29Terry Laughlin?

  Recovery is when you're bringing your arm forward. So, essentially, we're teaching people to leave the extended arm forward until the other arm is just about to re-enter the water after completing its recovery. And not simply to leave it there, but to hold your place, to actively use your hand to hold your place, because you're going to spear the other hand, once you enter the water, you're going to spear it past your grip, and use power from the high side of the body to move past your grip. So, instead of propelling with just your arm and shoulder muscles, you're propelling with your whole body.

• 1:15:13Tim Ferriss?

  So, this is, I mean, what we're really deconstructing, in a way, is progressive mastery of a given skill.

• 1:15:24Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:25Tim Ferriss?

  It would seem to me. And you, I know, are a big fan of a book titled Mastery by George Leonard.

• 1:15:33Terry Laughlin?

  Right.

• 1:15:34Tim Ferriss?

  Can you tell us about how you found that book, and your experience in reading it? I'd like to dig into it just a little bit, because I think it's widely applicable.

• 1:15:46Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah. Sometime in the 1990s...

• 1:15:51Terry Laughlin?

  Somebody, someone brought to my attention a magazine article he had, he had written for, I believe Esquire, uh, the, in, in the late eighties and it was, more reprints were requested of that article than any other article they, they had ever printed and, and it was about mastery. And the story George was telling was that of taking up Aikido at age forty-seven, very advanced age, and then becoming the latest starter ever to reach the, to reach the master teacher level in Aikido. Uh, and, and how did he manage, uh, manage to accomplish that?

• 1:16:34Terry Laughlin?

  And it was, it was just a set of, um, a set of prescriptions or principles, uh, for, for attaining mastery and, and, you know, the, the essential idea of, of this is that life is not designed to make things easy for us, but to present us with challenges that help us grow.

• 1:16:57Terry Laughlin?

  Uh, and that we should embrace these challenges and, uh, and, you know, something you've done for many years, Tim. Um, that we should embrace these challenges and if we apply certain behaviors, we're gonna, we're gonna experience a lot more success. And, and so the behaviors he cited were first of all, always be focused on improving the skill itself. And anytime you are doing it, you're focused on improving the skill. Uh, the, the amount of time you spend, what your heart rate is or any of that is secondary to doing things that improve the skill. Uh, a second is to focus on weak points. Uh, don't focus on your strengths.

• 1:17:40Terry Laughlin?

  A third, and I really love this one, this one is my favorite, is to love the plateau. In anything we learn, we initially, as we're working our way through the most basic and easiest skills, we learn pretty rapidly. And then things start to slow down. And then things may slow down to the point where you only experience a breakthrough every six to 12 months or so. And George Leonard wrote that when you practice with guided by the principles of mastery, there is always positive change taking place at the cellular level below your threshold of awareness.

• 1:18:25Terry Laughlin?

  And that periodically this change consolidates into a thrilling leap forward, which was very much my own experience. I proved it to myself with my own experience where by the time I had been swimming 50 years, in other words, I'm in my mid 60s, and I've really been swimming 50 years, maybe even 51, 52 years, I was still learning things that thrilled me. I was still getting insights about my own stroke that were literally thrilling, and they were coming at really, really long intervals. And so having read George Leonard, you know, long before I was in my 60s, I was really prepared for that eventuality.

• 1:19:09Tim Ferriss?

  Can you teach people to love the plateau? Are there ingredients that help people to persist through a plateau?

• 1:19:21Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:22Tim Ferriss?

  And if so, what are they? Because I think that this is such a common quitting point for a lot of people where they are, myself included, I'm not immune to this, will get the sort of the sugar high of the initial aha moments and making rapid progress and experiencing rapid change. And then, uh-oh, now it's very, very incremental. Now it's barely perceptible, and I feel like I'm not making progress or even backsliding. How do you, how would you help someone to?

• 1:20:01Tim Ferriss?

  Persist through that plateau and I suppose learn to love it if possible.

• 1:20:09Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, well, I think there's a couple of things. You know, I think one of the things you want to do is give them enough of the right sort of information about the foundations of excellence in what they have taken up that they become curious to learn more. So first you need to stimulate their curiosity and eventually you get to what I hope for, you know, for everyone I teach, I hope becomes passionate curiosity. Where, you know, so you move from curiosity to being really intrigued, to wanting to really solve this, to becoming passionate about it. And it's that hierarchy, you've got to love what you're doing.

• 1:20:53Terry Laughlin?

  And there, you know, there's a good deal, there's a good deal of evidence about what causes people to love what they're doing. And one of the most important is simply the goal of enjoying, enjoy it today. If I'm going to work out for an hour, my goal is to enjoy my hour of workout. At the beginning of the year, health clubs all over see a flock of people signing up and they sign up far more people than they can actually serve because they know that about two thirds of them are going to not use their membership. They're gonna, you know, they're gonna start out with all a fire and then lose it and stop going to the gym.

• 1:21:36Terry Laughlin?

  And there's been, there's been a pretty authoritative study that showed the main difference between the people who continued using their membership and those who did not was that those who were used, were not, stopped using their membership had in mind some benefit they might receive in six months' time, while the people who used their membership and stayed with it just enjoyed going to the gym every day. They did things that brought them pleasure in the moment. So I think pleasure in the moment is really important. And the other thing is you've got to be really engaged with it and it's. If I see people on the aerobic equipment at my gym, what do I see?

• 1:22:20Terry Laughlin?

  Well, some of them are reading books and disassociating from what they're doing. And others are really paying attention to what they're doing. They may be using an elliptical machine, or a running treadmill, or something for the umpteenth time, but they're still finding details about how they use that machine that are worth their attention.

• 1:22:40Tim Ferriss?

  So what might some of those details be? And I'll add a few that I've found helpful for persisting in the face of a potential, say, technical plateau.

• 1:22:57Terry Laughlin?

  Right.

• 1:22:58Tim Ferriss?

  Or even a strength plateau, for instance, in the case of strength training. So a few things that help me to continue. Number one is, in the case of swimming, recognizing the sort of beneficial mental shift and emotional, psychological shift that takes place in me, even if I am not swimming more laps or improving times. My state coming out of the pool is almost always better than it was going into the pool. I just feel better. And so that has benefits, even if I'm not, say, developing towards being a top competitive swimmer.

• 1:23:38Tim Ferriss?

  The second, and this is true for me in almost everything, but I have measurables. And it doesn't mean that I'm tracking my measurables from workout to workout, but it gives me, I find the act of counting very meditative. So the fact that I have, for instance, in weight training, usually there's a cadence, let's say it's two seconds up, four seconds down, or yesterday I did a workout where I was doing five seconds up, five seconds down. So there's a tempo counting, and then there's a repetition counting, and then I'm logging the sets. And I find, for whatever reason, that increases my adherence to something. If I have a quantification, in the case of swimming, I have the one, two, three, one,

• 1:24:17Tim Ferriss?

  two, three of breathing on alternate sides, and then I also have the strokes per length that I can focus on, or the hand-swapping drill. And the last that comes to mind is specifically as it relates to swimming, because there is, I think, still a tiny part of me in the back of my head that is afraid of drowning. I mean, there's a tiny part that still has the fear accumulated over thirty years. And I'm comfortable in the water, but what I think helps me to continue to want to go back to the pool is always doing less than what I feel capable of doing,

• 1:25:00Tim Ferriss?

  which is very much the opposite of what I've done almost every, in almost every other place. Not everywhere, but in the case of swimming, there are a few other places where you have fine motor skill, tennis also true. Doing less than I feel is possible. So in other words, stopping before my technique really deteriorates.

• 1:25:23Terry Laughlin?

  Tim, how long do you usually swim?

• 1:25:25Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I swim for very short periods of time. I would say typically less than forty-five minutes.

• 1:25:33Terry Laughlin?

  Very good, very good. That's what I, that's what I'd recommend to most people.

• 1:25:37Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, got it. Yeah, I mean, I would say very often I'll go in and I'll do twenty to thirty minutes. It's not, it's not a, it's not a long workout, and I try not to view it as a workout. It's really a, a practice of moving meditation for me. And if I want to smash my body in some type of other training, that's fine, but in the pool, I view it much more as a practice in elegance and efficiency, to the, to the greatest extent possible.

• 1:26:10Terry Laughlin?

  You're moving, you're moving through a fluid. What could be better than flow in your own movement?

• 1:26:14Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right. Now, I, you know, there's, there's a, I see, I took a note here, and I don't know the story, so I'll bring it up. This is, it looks like from two thousand, and the story of Phil Cruz. Can you?

• 1:26:34Tim Ferriss?

  Tell me who Phil Cruz is and what happened in 2000.

• 1:26:40Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, I think, well, I think maybe 1999, I did a workshop in Chapel Hill. We had maybe 20, 20 attendees. And we had one in particular, who was the most challenged student that, that I had yet seen. He did what Sarah did during our first videotaping, thrashed about five strokes and stood up to breathe and, and that was it. And by the end of the two day workshop on Sunday afternoon, it was a triumph for him to, to navigate one lane to the pool continuously with, with a hybrid between, between drilling

• 1:27:25Terry Laughlin?

  and swimming. It wasn't even whole stroke.

• 1:27:29Terry Laughlin?

  So fast forward 18 months and I'm teaching what we call a kaizen camp in Florida. And it's a four stroke camp if you want to learn all four strokes. And

• 1:27:45Tim Ferriss?

  Four strokes being freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly?

• 1:27:50Terry Laughlin?

  And butterfly, correct. And they didn't have to do four strokes, but they could do any number of the four that they wanted. And we videotaped everybody in the first session to get a before, a before picture, any, any of the strokes that you wanted. And while we were videotaping freestyle, one of these, one of these camp participants swam the most in unbelievably beautiful freestyle at the, at the level of our best coaches. Just that, that sort of grace and fluency and ease.

• 1:28:27Terry Laughlin?

  And so, you know, afterward, I said, where did you learn that? And he said, from you. It became, it became clear that he was the person who had attended, you know, he'd been at that, at such a, such a challenge swimmer 18 months earlier in Chapel Hill. And not only that, but he was a soybean farmer. He, he had previously worked in a management position and then became a gentleman farmer after, after retiring from that. But he, he farmed soybeans in coastal North Carolina. And he was 25 miles from the nearest pool. So in that intervening 18 months, I mean, everybody we teach improves.

• 1:29:12Terry Laughlin?

  Okay, so I'm not, that's not the standard. It's just I, my mind was blown by the degree to which he improved. And then I found out he did it entirely on his own. He had no other resources or help or anything. And, you know, was just driving himself to the YMCA 25 miles away and did it in nine, in, in a year and a half on his own. And I became, what that stimulated in me was a curiosity. When someone shows absolutely no knack for something, how did they get that good? That was, that was something that really intrigued me.

• 1:29:47Tim Ferriss?

  So what was the, what were the, what were the components? What were, what went into his practice? What did he do, do you think, that led to that degree of improvement?

• 1:30:00Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, you know, I'd, I'd say, first of all, not everybody is, is as good as he is or as you were at self coaching.

• 1:30:10Terry Laughlin?

  So he started out, he, he did start it out with some coaching, but it was just two days of coaching and then 18 months on his own. So I, I suppose he probably had probably pretty, pretty well acquainted with his body for whatever reason. That's, that's one thing. But the, the second thing is he, I think he probably just faithfully followed through on practicing the drills very patiently. Very attentively until he really understood them and constantly refined his form in the drills and then taking whatever he learned from the drills and putting it into whole stroke practice.

• 1:30:52Terry Laughlin?

  He probably gave not a moment's thought to speed or how far he was swimming. I'll bet he did what you did, Tim, which was to only practice for as long as he felt the practice was fruitful.

• 1:31:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there were, I mean, a handful of things that I think in any practice, for me at least, help with self-coaching. The first would be, whenever possible, having a, as they would say in the startup world, a key performance indicator. So what is the number that you're trying to improve week on week? And there's actually a very famous, for lack of, or to keep it simple, I'll say a startup incubator called Y Combinator, nicknamed YC, based in Silicon Valley,

• 1:31:43Tim Ferriss?

  that can be thought of as the Harvard meets SEAL Team Six of startup training. And they bring in a very, very small percentage of people who apply and work them into the ground 24/7. These people don't really need help to do that, they'll do it on their own. And at the end, they have a business that they pitch to investors and so on. And during that period, they almost all choose a KPI, a key performance indicator, and the goal is to, say, improve it 10% week on week. So for me, in swimming, I decided early on, with the help of Total Immersion in book form,

• 1:32:28Tim Ferriss?

  and then later I got the DVDs, was the stroke count, the number of strokes per lap. And that was my true north. Like, anything that I did that hurt that, I ended up either fixing or discarding. And anything I did that improved that, I would continue practicing. And then on top of that...

• 1:32:53Tim Ferriss?

  I would test all of these various drills and realized for myself that the hand swapping drill, I'm not saying it's true for everyone, but in my case focusing on that front quadrant swimming and the hand swapping was what most quickly returned me to a very optimal for me in my skill level stroke per lap, if that made sense. And then last, and this is actually much easier now, at the time GoPro either didn't exist or was very, very early in a kind of version one, V1 type technology, but having

• 1:33:32Tim Ferriss?

  some means of video observation or correction, I just think is so incredibly helpful. And I've used that in swimming to a lesser extent, but only when we had the gear in Hawaii to do so. And of course, in my head, I've been practicing total immersion for a while at that point. I was like, okay, you know, I've, I feel like my, my technique's pretty good. And then you see it on camera and you just want to cringe. And that was also true when I was in Argentina in 2004, 2005 and ended up competing in Tango. And I mean, I ended up going to the world championships and making it to the semifinals, but about, I would say three months prior to that, I remember I was two or three months

• 1:34:16Tim Ferriss?

  into practicing Tango, felt like I'd really made a lot of progress. I had been taking video of different instructors, different dancers. I'd been cataloging technique, I'd been writing down my specific goals for each, as I viewed it, practice session slash workout. And then I would have one or two things each day that I would work on in the uncontrolled environment of a Melonga, which is a dance hall. So I thought I was, not hot shit, but I thought that I was really... On my road to being a fantastic dancer and then I remember I went and I bought a video camera. This is on Avenida Florida in Buenos Aires where they have a lot of electronics

• 1:34:59Tim Ferriss?

  stores. So I bought this camera, took it to practice, had somebody record me dancing with this woman and it was horrible. It just looked, it looked what I was doing in my head and what I was doing on the camera were so different that they would have been unrec- I mean, you would never have paired my video to what I would have described myself doing. And that is what allowed me though, that sort of harsh reality is what allowed me to really, really, really improve after that point. Are there any other types of practice

• 1:35:36Tim Ferriss?

  or types of self-talk, any types of planning or journaling or anything that you have seen helpful or that you've observed in people who self-coach well? Because I think this is such an important skill. If you're trying to get, if you want to be an autodidact and most of the time, even if you have access to good coaches, you will be without a coach. What are, what are some of the things that you've seen contribute to good self-coaching?

• 1:36:09Terry Laughlin?

  Um, yes, a video, very, very important tool, very helpful tool for anything more movement oriented. There has never been a time that I have been videotaped that I was satisfied with what I saw to this day. But, you know, if I can cite my own experience, because I've been my own total immersion coach all along. I, I got into, you know, once I- I have to step back a little bit and talk about how my mind was open to how how much how much potential improvement was available to me that I had not realized at

• 1:36:50Terry Laughlin?

  all. Going back to Bill Boomer, after I heard him talk at that clinic, I I drove up to Rochester to watch him coach and see him put into practice the things he talked about and pick his brain.

• 1:37:03Terry Laughlin?

  And one of the things that he talked about was that the keystone skill of swimming was balance. Now, I had never even heard of balance as a skill of swimming, and he was saying it was the keystone to efficiency. So he talked about balance during the during the clinic thing. And then when I went up, I said, Bill, would you teach me something about balance? So he he taught me a drill that he called pressing the buoy or pressing the T, excuse me. He called it pressing the T, where you would have your arms at your sides and be flutter kicking with your head in line with your spine and lean on your chest as you do. So

• 1:37:43Terry Laughlin?

  so I did that. And I had spent 25 years thinking I had the misfortune to be born with heavy legs. It's a bad thing as a swimmer to be born with heavy legs. And I spent a quarter century thinking I was doomed. And in 10 seconds, doing this drill, that that whole concept was exploded because my legs were light. And I never realized that I could, you know, I had the power to do something to change that.

• 1:38:11Tim Ferriss?

  Can you explain the drill one more time, please?

• 1:38:14Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, yeah, we we teach it today, we call it torpedo, but we do it without the flutter kick. But but essentially, you put your arms at your sides, and you glide with your head in line with your spine, kicking gently and and lean a little bit on your chest. And what you feel is your hips and legs become lighter. They're lifted by the by a lever effect.

• 1:38:38Terry Laughlin?

  You know, a lever effect of leaning, what's the most buoyant part of your body is your chest. You've got you've got about you've got a your lungs in there that hold six liters of air. That's the most buoyant part of the body. And so when you lean, it's like pressing pressing a volleyball into the water, press down on a volleyball, it's going to push back. So if you keep pressing, it's going to push back somewhere else, and it lifts up your hips and legs.

• 1:39:09Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:39:10Terry Laughlin?

  And that's, he called that pressing the T because the T was the intersection of your spine. And if you stretch your arms out to the side, that's where you press.

• 1:39:21Tim Ferriss?

  So I, there's, I was, I was planning on maybe talking about this earlier, but I want to be respectful of your time and I also want to make sure that we chat about your cancer diagnosis and I have, I have some questions about that, but could you tell people the, the origin of the cancer diagnosis and perhaps just explain the circumstances?

• 1:39:52Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, yeah. Just about two years ago, I went with two friends to Sardinia. And we swam from Corsego, which is in France, to Sardinia and I had an unbelievably great swim. I had, you know, I had been not training exceptionally hard for it. It's a, it's a 10 mile swim. The water temperature was 64, 65, and it took us four and a half hours. And that was stopping every 30 minutes. So there were seven stops for, for, to have a feed, which happened to be blueberry soup. One of my co-swimmers was from Sweden and

• 1:40:33Terry Laughlin?

  brought blueberry, blueberry sopa. And just an incredible swim, one of the best swims of my life. And so I came home and within a week of coming home, I, I got, I had my annual physical and my, my doctor found some irregularities when he examined my prostate. And he said, you need to get a biopsy from a urologist. I went very quickly to get the biopsy and the biopsy turned out to be positive for cancer and it was what's called a Gleason score of four plus three or seven. And what's significant about that is the number four indicates how aggressive the

• 1:41:18Terry Laughlin?

  cancer is. And four indicated it was an aggressive cancer. So it was one that needed to be treated. A lot of times today, what they try to do is just watch and wait as much as possible because they over treated for quite a while. But in my case, it was clear that I needed to get treatment. I went to, I found a surgeon to do a robotic, radical robotic prostatectomy. It's called a Da Vinci surgery. And was scheduled for surgery. And, but beforehand, he said to get some scans done. And one of the scans showed that I was, I was already in stage four, that the cancer had already metastasized to my bones. So no surgery. Since then, it's been treat the systemic.

• 1:42:03Terry Laughlin?

  So it's two years since my diagnosis. And this, this variety of cancer I have is called metastatic castration resistant cancer, which is sort of a nasty term. Just means that the first, the first treatment they give you is hormones. And the hormones are meant to suppress testosterone. So I have the testosterone of a 66 year old woman now. But it's, it's a very nasty form of cancer and typically 24 to 30 months survival time after you are diagnosed. So that was pretty sobering news.

• 1:42:36Tim Ferriss?

  How are you? What have you seen in yourself? I mean, in our interactions, at least via email, text and so on, and certainly even speaking with you, I mean, you, you seem very upbeat and optimistic and very engaged with total immersion, for instance. What changes have you observed in yourself just mentally or psychologically since the diagnosis?

• 1:43:11Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, I, you know, I went through a roller coaster the first six to eight months afterward, where, you know, first I felt sorry for myself and then the news kept getting worse. Like, I didn't find out that I had the worst variety of prostate cancer right away. It took a while for the failure of my hormone treatment failed in two months. The cancer started growing again and they usually look for two years of cancer suppression from that. And, you know, my oncologist, I said to be straight with me on this doc, and he said, "It's the far side of bad news." So, you know, I was going through a roller coaster where the news kept getting more

• 1:43:52Terry Laughlin?

  sobering and I was feeling anger, anxiety, not depression ever, never, yeah, never depression, but I felt quite a bit of anxiety to the point where it, you know, it was out of control and I sought treatment for anxiety, which I'd never thought I would ever need in my life. So, the first six to eight months were like that, but then with the help of the anti-anxiety medication, I'm on Lexapro and Abilify and I don't mind, I don't mind admitting it, it's worked. It's enabled me to reclaim who I always was, which is a person who's driven by a purpose

• 1:44:36Terry Laughlin?

  and the purpose is to change, change the way people swim. I mean, literally, to change the way swimming is taught and practiced in this world. I've always had such a powerful sense of purpose and I wake up with that sense of purpose every day. And I have to say that in the past, probably 16 months now, I haven't experienced any anxiety, I haven't experienced any depression. I wake up, I still wake up every morning fired up to do what I'm gonna do that day, which today is your podcast.

• 1:45:11Tim Ferriss?

  And which, which I couldn't be happier about and I'm thrilled to have you on. I mean, I wish we could spend some more time together, so I hope to. I mean, we had a chance, which was really exciting for me, after learning TI through the book and seeing freeze frames of you with all of the diagrams showing correct direction and so on, to actually... Get in the water in Hawaii with Sarah and to swim with you is just such a highlight for me, such a wonderful experience.

• 1:45:48Terry Laughlin?

  Tim, it was for me as well, and I really feel the need to say this, but that I, you know, knowing all you have on your plate, and especially in the midst of that TV production, and knowing what I know about your hunger to learn new things, I just had always assumed, because you know, we were friends from a distance, and we met for dinner in San Francisco one time, but you know, we were friends from a distance with periodic contacts, when you wanted to make another mention, thank you, of Total Immersion in one of your books, when I arrived in Hawaii, I was so impressed as to see how strong your hunger remained

• 1:46:32Terry Laughlin?

  to improve your swimming. And I thought, you know, it's not a box he wanted to check off at all, he really cares about this. So I saw that, and I was really impressed and happy about that.

• 1:46:43Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. Yeah, it's really been a foundational skill for changing my life for the better. And furthermore, I mean, it's given me this toolkit, which is very clear, very counterintuitive, but very clear, with which I've been able to take part, of course, just drafting on what you're doing, but in, say, helping Sarah and watching that complete transformation take place, and helping some of my friends who I've run into who say the

• 1:47:24Tim Ferriss?

  same thing that I said when I was, say, 25. They say, "Oh yeah, I just don't swim. No, I'm just not comfortable in the water." And usually what I'll say to that is, "Well, why don't we just take an afternoon and come with me to a pool, and we'll just find a lane that's four feet deep, and let's fix that?" And they're like, "What? What do you mean, fix it?"

• 1:47:45Terry Laughlin?

  What's nice is that you feel empowered to teach others. I love that. There's nothing I like better.

• 1:47:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and it's really just getting them to that point that I experienced with Total Immersion after the first day of training, which is, "Oh my God, I can actually do this," which is, I mean, similar to the experience you had with The drill you did with pressing down that you now teaches torpedo where you realize, oh my God, this story that I've been telling myself, my legs are heavy, I'm just cursed with heavy legs, is completely, it's either unfounded or completely fixable.

• 1:48:24Terry Laughlin?

  Right, and what else am I, what else am I capable of changing about my swimming? And it's turned out, there's nothing I can't change.

• 1:48:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, or your life, right?

• 1:48:33Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:48:34Tim Ferriss?

  If this impossible is not just possible, right, like Tim Ferriss cannot swim, is not only possible to fix, but in fact, easy to fix with the proper counterintuitive teaching and progression, in this case, which is total immersion. I mean, it's such, it's such a demonstration, it's such a profound demonstration of possibility for me, that I really encourage anyone who's listening to this, and I'll say this also in the intro, who is unable to swim, or views themselves as being unable to swim, or is

• 1:49:19Tim Ferriss?

  a poor swimmer, to just try this, because it will open your eyes in such a way that you not only look at swimming and water differently, but you will, you will look at other skills in your life differently as well. I mean, after total immersion, that's when I started asking myself, what are the other impossibles? What are the other things I've told myself I just can't do? Like play basketball, or shoot a basketball was another one. Let me reexamine that. And then I found a method that is sort of a corollary, in a sense, to total immersion, but for basketball. It turns out, I think I might be getting the name wrong, but I think it's Rick Torbit, teaches

• 1:50:04Tim Ferriss?

  Basketball shooting in a way that you would find very much a close cousin to TI. And it just makes sense. And I was like, okay, wow. Okay, that's two for two now. What else is there?

• 1:50:15Terry Laughlin?

  I thought, I thought the same thing when you, when you described your, your first tennis lesson. Exactly.

• 1:50:21Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. Lorenzo, same story.

• 1:50:23Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:24Tim Ferriss?

  The way that he teaches, like, okay, this immediately makes sense. It is, it is perfectly sensible. And yet I've never seen anyone teach this way. Uh, it's, uh, it's, it's really a gift that you've given and continue to give to the world. So on behalf.

• 1:50:43Terry Laughlin?

  It's a crazy thing. No one, no one else is still teaching this way. I, you know, we've been doing it for 30 years with incredible success and we're still the only ones teaching this way.

• 1:50:53Tim Ferriss?

  Why is that? Why is that? Why do you think that is?

• 1:50:56Terry Laughlin?

  I think there's just a lot of, a lot of built in, um, resistance to change in the world, as many as there are in, in many, many places. And, you know, they, they believe what matters is how many laps you do and how strong your pull and kick is. They, they persist in believing that. And so what is the first thing you learn? Uh, when, when you take your beginner's lesson is how to kick and how to pull. And that's, that's really putting the cart before the horse. If you're not comfortable in the water.

• 1:51:26Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, that's just do, that'll just guarantee, at least in my case, that you need to breathe 10 times more urgently than you did otherwise.

• 1:51:37Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, no, we've, we've, uh, you know, cracked the code, so to speak, and, and it works. It just works every single time.

• 1:51:45Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, well, well, Terry, um,

• 1:51:49Tim Ferriss?

  what, uh, I want to, uh, I want to make sure that, uh, we, we wrap up in the next couple of minutes, but,

• 1:51:59Tim Ferriss?

  What would you like to share with people who are listening? In other words, if there were recommendations you have, certainly checking out Total Immersion is a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned. And we can get to where they can find more on that and so on in a second. But is there anything else you'd like to convey? Anything you would encourage people to ask themselves or suggest that they do, since we have quite a few people listening, I am sure at this point?

• 1:52:35Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah. We haven't gotten too much into the how-to. Maybe I can share a few how-to suggestions that people can try.

• 1:52:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 1:52:46Terry Laughlin?

  And some principles. I always like to go back to first principles as the basis for anything that matters, anything we care about doing well. And so I'll share five first principles of intelligent, improvement-oriented swimming. First is to recognize that as a human swimmer, you are an energy-wasting machine. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in designing a swim foil for the Navy

• 1:53:24Terry Laughlin?

  SEALs back in 2005, they did an efficiency estimation for a group of lap swimmers. These were not tutored or coach swimmers, but people who think they're pretty okay, that they swim laps a lot. And they found they were only 3% efficient. 97% of their energy was going into something other than locomotion. So as a human swimmer, you are naturally an energy-wasting machine. And in everything you do, focus on saving energy before you focus on increasing fitness. That goes back to what Bill Boomer said, conditioning is something that happens while you build refine or imprint skills.

• 1:54:09Terry Laughlin?

  So that's principle number one.

• 1:54:12Terry Laughlin?

  Principle number two, most of what we know about swimming is wrong. All our primal instincts about swimming lead us astray and most of what we hear are not helpful. So you really have to exercise critical thinking. If someone suggests you try something and it doesn't seem to work, well, maybe it wasn't a good idea. If they suggest you try something, or Tim asks you to go to the pool with them in a four-foot shallow area, and you experience something thereby that works, then trust in your own intuition about things and don't feel that you have to believe what you hear from authoritative sources.

• 1:54:56Terry Laughlin?

  Principle number three, it's obvious that efficiency is not natural for humans. Inefficiency is natural, but is entirely learnable, as Tim discovered in a period of eight weeks where he went from swimming 20 yards in a pool and being exhausted to swimming a mile in the ocean. It's learnable. Anyone, anyone can learn to swim with great efficiency and then improve on it continuously by applying the principles of mastery, including Love the Plateau. Principle number four, if you want to swim with more ease or more efficiency, think about what you can do to make your vessel sleeker.

• 1:55:40Terry Laughlin?

  And when I finish with the five principles, I'll just mention three or four simple action items for the next time you go to the pool, but strive for a sleeker vessel. It's a universally unquestioned truth among naval architects and scientists who study fish, so why should it be different for your body?

• 1:56:03Terry Laughlin?

  And then finally strive, strive to swim in a way that you, you use your body as a whole. Resist any suggestions someone tells you to just pull or kick, or separate the pull and kick in your training. Uh, strive for a seamlessly integrated movement that is based in, in the core. So those are five first principles, principles worth, uh, worth listening to again and writing down, I think.

• 1:56:34Tim Ferriss?

  And on number five, just before we get to the action items, just to give an example of that integration that was one of these aha moments that we've been talking about, for me at least, was the idea that, uh, that you not use your legs for propulsion. So if you don't think about your legs and swimming as a propeller, but instead use a very small flick of each leg to turn the hips and therefore turn the shoulders so that you're going from that fuselage right to fuselage left and back and forth, it changes the entire nature of swimming, right?

• 1:57:14Tim Ferriss?

  So, um, that was, uh, that was just one example of integration that I found hugely helpful.

• 1:57:21Terry Laughlin?

  Well, the, the toe flick illustrates three other principles that I just mentioned. Human swimmers are energy wasting machines. So what are you focusing on with, with a toe flick instead of leg turn, saving energy?

• 1:57:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:32Terry Laughlin?

  Uh, and, um, principle number two, most of what we know about swimming is wrong. What did you know about swimming before you learned TI? What did you know about the kick? Put no in quotes.

• 1:57:45Tim Ferriss?

  Had to use it as a propeller to, to push me forward.

• 1:57:49Terry Laughlin?

  All right. And, and principle number five, uh, as you, uh, principle number four, strive for a sleeker vessel. So rather than focusing on, on propulsion and a bigger, bigger, stronger kick, you lose, use the smaller lighter kick and it really worked.

• 1:58:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's wild.

• 1:58:05Terry Laughlin?

  So four of the five principles were illustrated by that, that one thing. And you know, the same thing with your hand swapping. You know, you were, what you were accomplishing there was a pull that was a little more patient, a little slower probably, but, but by you were using your arms to reduce drag.

• 1:58:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yep, definitely.

• 1:58:27Terry Laughlin?

  And it also, it also helps pull together the pieces in terms of integrating your stroke. Just that timing is, is one of the things, stopping the kick, which is interrupting your natural rhythm, but also having that timing in your arms naturally promotes an integrated technique that where all the parts are working together.

• 1:58:53Tim Ferriss?

  So what action items would you have for people who want to try something at the pool?

• 1:58:59Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, so action item, and I would suggest that you don't swim long distances while trying these. If you can swim anywhere from just about five strokes to a half a lap and feel that you're doing it, that's, that's good. You don't have to, you don't have to leave one end with, with an feeling that you're obligated to go to the other end. So the very first of these would be hang or align your head. Most important, the most fundamental thing, the first thing we always teach is hang or align your head.

• 1:59:39Terry Laughlin?

  You could, you could visualize perhaps that there's a toe line attached to the top of your head, pulling your spine directly forward while, while you, you know, while you do everything, the stroking part of it, that your spine is always moving forward. So get your head aligned would be number one. Number two, use your arms to lengthen your body, not to push water back. You're still going to push water back, but by using your arms to lengthen your body, you're promoting two things, a lower drag profile and a complete movement. You're, you're focused on completing the movement.

• 2:00:21Terry Laughlin?

  A lot of people think about finishing the stroke back by the hip, finish it to the front instead.

• 2:00:28Terry Laughlin?

  The third is what Tim just mentioned, which is you cannot go wrong by kicking less. Just always keep that in mind. You cannot go wrong by kicking less. It's kicking is a great way to burn energy and a great way to create drag. It's a very poor way to create propulsion. So those would be, oh, and one more, one more. Anything you do more quietly is more effective and efficient. So whatever you're doing at a given moment, in the next lap, strive to do it more quietly and it will be better. So align your head, lengthen your body, kick less, swim more quietly. Four action items.

• 2:01:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the swimming quietly is one that if I find myself getting prematurely tired, which I take as an indication that I'm being inefficient, that's usually what I'll focus on. I'll stop, I'll just rest outside of the pool for whether it is 30 seconds, 60 seconds, and then for the next handful of laps, just try to be as silent as possible. So no splashing with the feet, with the hands, really trying to glide the arm in at an angle and to do it as silently as possible is also one of those exercises that just checks so many different boxes, it seems.

• 2:01:54Terry Laughlin?

  Yep.

• 2:01:56Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Terry, this has been great. I'm glad that we were able to find the time to do this. And of course, people can find Total Immersion online at totalimmersion.net where they can find videos and instruction and everything else. Is there anything that you would like people to check out or anywhere else that people should say hello?

• 2:02:19Terry Laughlin?

  Well, first of all, I want to say thank you, and I want to say you are a masterful and artful podcast host.

• 2:02:26Tim Ferriss?

  I'm working on it. Work in progress, but thank you.

• 2:02:29Terry Laughlin?

  I felt very well guided. I would like to do a podcast and I hope to be a fraction as good as you are when I do it. So, well, yeah, I would like to offer all your podcast listeners of seven day free trial of our online swim academy.

• 2:02:46Tim Ferriss?

  Great.

• 2:02:47Terry Laughlin?

  Where there's a tremendous amount of information and you will have access to every bit of it, including streaming video and eBooks and all kinds of information. It's all free. Everything we have produced is available. And all they have to do is go to totalimmersionacademy.com/tim. Totalimmersionacademy.com/tim to learn more and take advantage of that offer.

• 2:03:24Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect. And to everybody listening, I will also put that in the show notes. So if you want to find links to that and everything else we've talked about, you can find that at tim.blog/podcast and just search Terry's name. If you just search Terry, since I believe you are the only Terry I've interviewed so far, then you will pop right up. And Terry, it's been such an honor and a privilege to have you on. And as far as your podcasting, hosting progress goes, I think it's important to, if you want

• 2:04:01Tim Ferriss?

  a good laugh, listen to my first episode that I did as a host and you'll realize just how much one can improve.

• 2:04:12Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah. Any skill is improvable.

• 2:04:16Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:04:17Terry Laughlin?

  With practice.

• 2:04:18Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. So I think that if you use my first episode as a hurdle, I think that you'll clear it with flying colors. You're already much better than I was then. So don't be daunted by that. And I hope to hear your podcast soon myself. But Terry, thank you so much for taking the time. I really, really appreciate it.

• 2:04:38Terry Laughlin?

  And thank you so much for inviting me. It's a pleasure and a privilege I've really looked forward to.

• 2:04:45Tim Ferriss?

  And to everybody listening, try out Total Immersion. Honestly, whether you're a swimmer or a non-swimmer, or someone who's never quite been as comfortable as you would like, I am not, if you've seen photos of me, what you would think of as built-for-swimming. And I told myself all sorts of handicapping stories and accepted all types of partial completeness until my 30s, when I used accountability by having a friend assign me a New Year's resolution. I knew he would bust my balls forever if I didn't do it, to get me to finally take it seriously. And taking it seriously meant I took all sorts of classes and so on,

• 2:05:29Tim Ferriss?

  and wasted a lot of time trying things that were really, really, really hard, like kickboards and everything else. It doesn't have to be hard. And in fact, good instruction should seem very, very clear, and it should make a lot of sense. And that's what I got from Total Immersion. And I can go down a long list of my friends who have since learned how to swim. So definitely check it out. And Terry, you mentioned it already, but totalimmersionacademy.com/tim. I really hope people give it a test and share their experiences, because it can really be revelatory. And to everyone listening, as always, and until next time, thank you for tuning in.

• 2:06:14Tim Ferriss?

  Be safe out there, question assumptions, and never stop learning. Okay, guys, that's the end of the first interview. And from this point forward, you will hear several clips of Terry's daughters, Fiona, Carrie, and Betsy, interviewing him in the hospital in the days before his passing. Thanks for listening.

• 2:06:40Speaker 04

  What do you want to make sure that's not written down yet?

• 2:06:42Terry Laughlin?

  So what we're talking about is what makes total immersion distinctive?

• 2:06:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I got that. Yeah.

• 2:06:50Terry Laughlin?

  Is teaching balance as the keystone skill of swimming. No one else even recognizes balance as a skill.

• 2:07:03Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:07:04Terry Laughlin?

  Let alone the keystone skill of swimming efficiently. Or not just swimming efficiently, of being able to enjoy swimming.

• 2:07:16Terry Laughlin?

  Being able to swim with ease, grace, and enjoyment. And we will approach it to demonstrate that the total immersion way is uniquely

• 2:07:32Terry Laughlin?

  unique in promoting all those ancillary benefits because we do it consciously. Because we're trying to develop the whole person, not just the swimmer.

• 2:07:45Terry Laughlin?

  We're trying to grow the whole person.

• 2:07:52Terry Laughlin?

  Brain, psyche, and body.

• 2:07:54Speaker 04

  Done. Let me ask you a question. Is there anything you want to convey to other people about how swimming, your approach, is helping you right now, like the interval training with this, the mindfulness with this?

• 2:08:08Terry Laughlin?

  Sure. Sure, everything I've practiced and taught has helped prepare me for this crisis moment in my life.

• 2:08:17Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  Can you give some examples?

• 2:08:20Terry Laughlin?

  Sure.

• 2:08:23Terry Laughlin?

  Mindfulness?

• 2:08:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:08:26Terry Laughlin?

  Process orientation.

• 2:08:34Speaker 01

  Like the way that you're drinking?

• 2:08:35Terry Laughlin?

  Right.

• 2:08:36Speaker 01

  Focus points?

• 2:08:37Terry Laughlin?

  Focal points.

• 2:08:38Speaker 01

  You wanna say what your focus points for drinking are?

• 2:08:40Terry Laughlin?

  That's what mindfulness, I meant by mindfulness. I'm used to doing things guided by focal points. And attentive to focal points.

• 2:08:51Speaker 01

  Talk about your experience with learning to drink.

• 2:08:55Terry Laughlin?

  But I have to learn, after my stroke, I have to learn to drink all over again. And I'm applying the same process to learning, reteaching myself how to drink. That applied to teaching myself how to breathe seamlessly while swimming freestyle.

• 2:09:12Speaker 04

  So, let's break it down. Does this would be really helpful?

• 2:09:16Terry Laughlin?

  So my focal points for drinking are sip, exhale, relax, swallow, repeat.

• 2:09:32Speaker 01

  And then rest, interval.

• 2:09:34Terry Laughlin?

  And rest, interval.

• 2:09:36Speaker 04

  And you treat those like you treat repeats when you're swimming in the pool?

• 2:09:41Terry Laughlin?

  Yes, I do, exactly. Recognizing that what I'm doing is training my brain. Because parts of my brain have been injured. Parts of my brain that control swallowing properly and not aspirating have been injured. And I have to train new neurons to take over that task.

• 2:10:05Terry Laughlin?

  And the only way to do it is with a conscious process. Where I connect the motor and cognitive neurons that are associated with that activity.

• 2:10:20Speaker 01

  What about the emotional aspect?

• 2:10:22Terry Laughlin?

  I think we've got the important points. Emotional aspects is to be nonjudgmental.

• 2:10:26Speaker 01

  Of this experience.

• 2:10:27Terry Laughlin?

  Making mistakes is, making mistakes is essential to learning. So that when I make a mistake, that I can recognize the mistake, that I can...

• 2:10:40Terry Laughlin?

  I can analyze the mistake. The only way to avoid it in the future is to recognize it, analyze it, and then come up with a strategy to avoid it.

• 2:10:55Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 2:10:56Terry Laughlin?

  Right?

• 2:10:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:57Terry Laughlin?

  Do I do that?

• 2:10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:58Terry Laughlin?

  By saying, recognizing that I have to exhale before swallowing.

• 2:11:03Speaker 01

  Okay, but what about the emotional aspect?

• 2:11:05Terry Laughlin?

  To close the epiglottis.

• 2:11:06Speaker 01

  Yes, that's more technical, though. I mean, like, fear, anxiety, anything like that. Do you feel like your practice in...

• 2:11:17Terry Laughlin?

  I'm just in a detached, almost clinical place.

• 2:11:19Speaker 01

  You are.

• 2:11:20Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:11:20Terry Laughlin?

  In doing this.

• 2:11:21Speaker 04

  So let me, because my metaphor is, you're swimming, right? You're swimming the English Channel. You're swimming around Manhattan, right? And you're in rough water, and you're struggling, right?

• 2:11:34Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, recovering from a stroke. To recover from a stroke is like training to swim around Manhattan.

• 2:11:41Speaker 04

  So when you enter rough water, there's a lot of turbulence around you, which there is in this room.

• 2:11:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:11:46Speaker 04

  Talk slower, I'm recording. There's a lot of turbulence around you. How would you compare that to what's going on in your mind when you're swimming in turbulent water versus being in a room with a lot of...

• 2:11:56Terry Laughlin?

  The rougher the water, the more turbulent my surroundings, the calmer I have to be.

• 2:12:04Speaker 01

  You have to think about how this is going to stop and play back.

• 2:12:06Terry Laughlin?

  External turbulence, internal calm, and there has to be. The more external turbulence I encounter, the more inner calm I must cultivate.

• 2:12:15Speaker 04

  All right, is there anything else you want us to, you want to talk about as far as stuff you want to get there? So you still had to work on...

• 2:12:25Terry Laughlin?

  You know, I think a rare, very important element in this book is the fact that I'm writing the entire book with stage four cancer.

• 2:12:36Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:12:37Terry Laughlin?

  And dealing with things like strokes.

• 2:12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:41Terry Laughlin?

  As I'm, as I'm writing the book.

• 2:12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:44Terry Laughlin?

  That's gonna, that's gonna be in the intro.

• 2:12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:48Terry Laughlin?

  We want that to be prominent.

• 2:12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:50Terry Laughlin?

  We want, we want readers and potential readers to know this as they're thinking about, as they're contemplating whether to...

• 2:12:58Speaker 01

  Because not everybody will have an...

• 2:13:00Terry Laughlin?

  Order and read the book.

• 2:13:01Speaker 01

  And how do you feel like people can apply that?

• 2:13:05Terry Laughlin?

  I want the press, I want that to be in reviews of the book and...

• 2:13:09Speaker 01

  But how do you feel, how do you think that knowledge? People can apply that to themselves, understanding that it's not about ideal circumstances?

• 2:13:18Terry Laughlin?

  I think it'll add an element of drama.

• 2:13:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:13:21Terry Laughlin?

  Right, don't you think? I think of life drama. It'll add an element of life drama.

• 2:13:29Speaker 01

  Okay, hold on.

• 2:13:30Terry Laughlin?

  How am I a different person writing this book than the person that wrote the original book?

• 2:13:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:13:35Terry Laughlin?

  This is a big, this is a big part of it.

• 2:13:37Speaker 01

  How are you a different person?

• 2:13:39Terry Laughlin?

  Well, I'm, I'm sixty-five and sixty-six. I was forty-five then.

• 2:13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:47Terry Laughlin?

  What are my life experiences that I'm bringing to it this time?

• 2:13:52Speaker 04

  So, talk about that.

• 2:13:54Terry Laughlin?

  Stage four cancer and the stuff that's come with it.

• 2:13:59Speaker 01

  And, Dad, I think it's also important to note what is going on right now, which is, is very serious and they've told us is, is, is life-threatening, but you, you know, you said, been saying that this is not the end and you're gonna get through this.

• 2:14:14Terry Laughlin?

  I'm gonna get through this.

• 2:14:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and...

• 2:14:17Terry Laughlin?

  And have many more healthy years.

• 2:14:20Speaker 01

  Good.

• 2:14:24Terry Laughlin?

  And that, my, my, my practice and work and everything I've been teaching have helped prepare me for this, like almost nothing else that I could've done.

• 2:14:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:14:39Terry Laughlin?

  What I'm, what I'm teaching you in this book.

• 2:14:43Speaker 01

  Now, can I interject something, because we talked about this yesterday? You have significant brain swelling. And we were talking about visualizing. You said visualizing a skinny brain, which was a joke, but really, the idea of visualizing, meditating and visualizing on your brain swell decreasing. Do you want to talk about that? Have you been doing that?

• 2:15:03Terry Laughlin?

  The physical process by which that happens. I needed to understand the physical process by which that happens in order to be able to visualize it.

• 2:15:13Speaker 04

  So, did the doctor help you understand that?

• 2:15:15Terry Laughlin?

  Sure.

• 2:15:16Speaker 04

  And that helped you visualize?

• 2:15:17Terry Laughlin?

  Ellen McHugh helped also.

• 2:15:19Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:15:20Terry Laughlin?

  Ellen's been very, very helpful here.

• 2:15:23Speaker 01

  So Doug, can you get to-

• 2:15:25Terry Laughlin?

  In my conversation with the various physicians who come through.

• 2:15:29Speaker 04

  She came specifically to be the medical translator.

• 2:15:32Terry Laughlin?

  I'm not sure.

• 2:15:34Speaker 04

  She did.

• 2:15:35Terry Laughlin?

  Did she?

• 2:15:36Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:15:37Terry Laughlin?

  She said that?

• 2:15:38Speaker 04

  She said, "I'll-"

• 2:15:39Terry Laughlin?

  And she's very, very good at that.

• 2:15:40Speaker 01

  Okay. Let me just finish this thought. Can you describe your, any visualization technique that you have used since you've been here?

• 2:15:49Terry Laughlin?

  Sure I can.

• 2:15:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:15:52Terry Laughlin?

  Which is seeing, seeing blood flow through my brain. And, um, and, uh, excess, excess moisture in my brain tissues being drawn into the bloodstream and carried out of the brain to be excreted.

• 2:16:22Speaker 01

  And how often have you been doing the visualization? Once a day, twice a day?

• 2:16:28Terry Laughlin?

  Oh, um-

• 2:16:29Speaker 01

  On and off?

• 2:16:30Terry Laughlin?

  On and off. Not on a schedule.

• 2:16:33Speaker 01

  Whenever you have a quiet moment?

• 2:16:35Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:36Speaker 04

  What about the value of rest?

• 2:16:38Terry Laughlin?

  Hmm?

• 2:16:39Speaker 04

  What about the value of rest? Quality over quantity and the value of rest? Because you emphasized that with swimming too. It's about quality, a lot of times, not quantity.

• 2:16:48Terry Laughlin?

  I don't know, I haven't thought about it.

• 2:16:49Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:16:53Speaker 04

  Well, remember when you-

• 2:16:54Terry Laughlin?

  They tell me the most important element in my recovery is rest.

• 2:16:59Speaker 04

  And sleep, yeah.

• 2:17:01Speaker 01

  Hey, the doctor's here.

• 2:17:03Speaker 04

  So, I see a connecting thread with that and your other-

• 2:17:08Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:08Speaker 04

  Um, you know the injuries that you had during the year that you broke all those records?

• 2:17:14Speaker 04

  Dad?

• 2:17:14Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:15Speaker 04

  And remember how you weren't able to train as much?

• 2:17:17Terry Laughlin?

  Right.

• 2:17:18Speaker 04

  So, don't you see that as a similarity?

• 2:17:20Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point.

• 2:17:25Speaker 01

  Dad, could you talk towards the phone because it's- the microphone's over here.

• 2:17:29Terry Laughlin?

  Uh, that was enforced rest that year.

• 2:17:31Speaker 04

  Enforced rest actually enabled you-

• 2:17:34Terry Laughlin?

  Right.

• 2:17:34Speaker 04

  -to swim better.

• 2:17:35Terry Laughlin?

  Right.

• 2:17:36Speaker 04

  And here, enforced rest, which we've been making sure that you get enough rest and sleep, you're doing way better today than you were before.

• 2:17:44Terry Laughlin?

  What do you mean?

• 2:17:45Speaker 04

  Meaning...

• 2:17:48Speaker 04

  You see- it see- we can see improvements in you from the other day.

• 2:17:51Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah?

• 2:17:52Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:17:53Terry Laughlin?

  Of what sort?

• 2:17:54Speaker 04

  You're more alert.

• 2:17:56Terry Laughlin?

  Oh.

• 2:17:56Speaker 04

  You're awake for longer periods of time. You can speak at length.

• 2:18:00Speaker 01

  Dad, the first day we could barely wake you up.

• 2:18:03Speaker 04

  So, you needed to rest.

• 2:18:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:05Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:06Speaker 04

  So, there's a connection there.

• 2:18:08Terry Laughlin?

  Yeah, my body needed to rest the first day.

• 2:18:10Speaker 04

  Exactly, enforced rest.

• 2:18:12Terry Laughlin?

  It was...

• 2:18:15Terry Laughlin?

  It had undergone a lot of stress on Tuesday.

• 2:18:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:18:20Speaker 04

  So...

• 2:18:21Terry Laughlin?

  So, it was recovering on Wednesday.

• 2:18:23Speaker 04

  Okay, so the importance of rest and recovery in swim practice.

• 2:18:28Terry Laughlin?

  From the stress of the stroke-

• 2:18:30Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:18:30Terry Laughlin?

  -Tuesday.

• 2:18:33Speaker 04

  Rest and recovery.