Coach Tim Brazier

Early July I was in the snow. Ten days later I broke my foot in two places walking the dog.

No fall worth retelling. Just an awkward step and two fractures.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Ski season just getting started, work trips, kids life…

Four weeks in, what’s struck me most is how fast the calf goes. I’ve told athletes that a hundred times. Watching it on my own leg is different.

So: seated ski erg most days. Leg curls, leg extensions. Single leg calf raises on the right side, because there’s a small strength transfer to the injured side even when you can’t load it. Upper body to hold onto something. And as soon as I was allowed, moving the foot up and down to keep the ankle’s range and stop the joint seizing up.

None of it’s exciting. That’s kind of the point.

We work with a lot of athletes rebuilding from lower leg injuries, and the pattern’s always the same.

People either sit still and lose everything, or rush it and go backwards.

I’m going to take you through the rehab properly. Every stage, what I’m doing, what I’m not doing yet, and why.

If you’re rebuilding something too, come along.

Five mistakes I see in adult onset swimmers. I am not telling you this to make you feel bad about your swimming. I am telling you because every one of them is fixable, and most of you are one honest conversation away from a better stroke.

You swim at survival pace and wonder why you have no speed. You reach for the fins the moment it gets hard. You clip the watch on and let a number run the session. None of that makes you a poor swimmer. It just means the work has been dodged, not done.

So here is what I ask of you. Turn up to think. Put the toys down and let the swim be honest, even when it is slow. Get a real hold of the water out front and pull yourself past your hand. Take the watch off once in a while and feel how you are actually moving. That is where the swimming lives.

I will not make your sets boring, and I will not let you hide. If you are ready to stop grinding out lengths and start swimming with intent, come and do the work with us.

coaching

I have been coaching an athlete for a couple of months now. Not a professional, but someone who genuinely wants to get better, and honestly her swimming isn’t as bad as she thinks.

In her first week she came to me with a question I didn’t expect.

How do I do these sets?

They aren’t in fifty meters and I swim in a fifty meter pool. I found that really interesting, because it had never occurred to me that the length of the pool was the thing on their mind.

But it makes sense. We get so caught up in the meters and the round numbers and the long boring swims. I see the same thing across our community on Skool .coaching , my goal there is to unlock a different level of thinking when it comes to swimming in the age group levels.

So here’s my take. I could program you fifty meters on a clock all day long. But what are you really getting out of that? A set is a question, not a distance. Turn up to answer it and you leave a better swimmer than you came.

Becoming a dad changed how I coach. I didn’t expect that, but it did.

Early on, I thought coaching was about holding the line. Set the bar, stay steady, don’t flinch when someone wants you to lower it. That’s real, but it turns out it’s only the first part.

The bigger job, the one that takes longer to see, is slowly working myself out of one.

I notice it with my kid at the playground. The instinct is to hover. Catch them, step in the second something looks risky. But every time I do, their world gets a bit smaller. The harder thing is to stand back far enough that they find out what they can actually do.

Coaching’s the same. Early on I give a lot, the why behind every session, tight structure, the calls made for them. But if I’m still making every call four years in, I haven’t coached them. I’ve trained them to wait for me. And the thing they need most at 30km, when I’m nowhere near them, is the one thing I never let them practise: deciding for themselves.

There’s decades of research that says this in fancier language. Take away someone’s sense of choice and their motivation falls off, they persist less, enjoy it less. Give it back and you get an athlete who’s more durable, races better, and genuinely wants to be there. Control gets you obedience. It doesn’t get you someone who can think on a bad day.

So I measure the job differently now. Not by how much they need me. By how little.

Funny how it works. Coaching taught me to hold the line. Parenting taught me when to drop it.

Three weeks ago we opened the doors on something a bit different.

I’ll be honest, the dates are already a blur. First of May, I think? Either way, three weeks into our .coaching Skool program and it’s been a real change of pace for me.

For years my coaching has lived in one place. One athlete, one plan, a lot of back and forth. What we’ve been trying to do with Cartel is find a way to take some of those same principles and make them reach further. More accessible, without watering down the thinking behind them.

So far that’s looked like six coaching calls, a lot of curious questions, more than a few swim drill conversations, and plenty of learning on the fly.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. Learning is hard. There are always growing pains, and they show up most when you ask people to start thinking for themselves and making their own decisions. That can feel daunting. A bit uncomfortable. But it’s also where the good stuff happens.

Watching this first group, our OGs, start to back themselves has been the best part of these three weeks.

If you’re curious, and you’re after something that sits between one on one coaching and just grabbing a plan off the shelf, come find us on Skool the link is at the top of my page.