Project Sailfish

We only know what we make

I’m a 57-year-old slow swimmer, and I feel like a kid again.

I just launched Project Sailfish, an experiment to discover how fast I am capable of swimming.

It is easy to understand, intellectually, how people swim fast. Books, videos, coaches, and increasingly artificial intelligence can explain the principles. But knowing how I can swim fast requires something else.

I have to make myself faster.

The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico proposed what became known as the verum factum principle: we only fully know what we make.

Nearly all of my swimming experience has been as a long, slow swimmer—and I love being one.

Over the past six months, I learned how to swim long enough to complete a 10K. I finished in 3:51, twenty-seventh out of thirty swimmers.

No shame.

I became someone capable of swimming ten kilometers. That still feels slightly improbable to me. But now I want to find out whether I can climb out of the bottom ten percent in distance swimming events.

I want to learn how to swim fast.

Project Sailfish is a playful name for a serious experiment. Sailfish are among the fastest creatures in the ocean. I am among the slowest.

The distance between us leaves plenty of room for discovery.

My plan is to spend the next six months training differently. I will swim shorter distances at higher intensities. I will work deliberately on technique for speed. I will add strength training, periodically retest my Critical Swim Speed, track other objective measures of speed, study the results, adjust, and try again.

I am attempting to transform myself from a “long slow swimmer” into what legendary, Hall of Fame coach Dave Salo calls a “long sprinter”—a distance swimmer with speed.

That phrase is a paradigm shift for me. Thinking about it alone changes my energy and thinking about how a long swim should feel.

“Long slow swimmer” describes what I have always been. “Long sprinter” suggests what I aspire to become.

This is partly a training experiment and partly an experiment in identity. The names we give ourselves have weight. If I continue to think of myself as someone who cannot swim fast, I will continue swimming at the speeds that feel familiar.

If I begin thinking like a long sprinter, I may become more willing to tolerate the unfamiliar sensations that speed requires: a pounding heart, burning muscles, labored breathing, and the egoic comparison to other swimmers my age.

Project Sailfish gives me that exciting, blank slate promise of being a beginner. My cup is empty.

That may be what makes me feel like a kid. I don’t know what will happen. I have no guarantee that I can become meaningfully faster. I get to read, ask questions, experiment, fail, adjust, and return to the water to try again.

But the reading and planning are not the project.

The doing is the project.

My current Critical Swim Speed is 1:43 per 100 yards. That number is a starting point—a stake in the ground at the beginning of the experiment.

I am going to get stronger, test myself periodically, and discover how much speed a 57-year-old adult-onset swimmer can develop.

I don’t know how much faster I can become.

That is what makes this a project rather than a proclamation.

Project Sailfish has begun.

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Are you an adult-onset swimmer who can swim long but wants to learn how to swim fast? If you’d like to conduct your own Project Sailfish alongside mine, leave a comment or send me a note. Maybe I’m not the only long slow swimmer ready to become a long sprinter.

Want to join the experiment? I created a Project Sailfish club on Strava for adult-onset swimmers who want to become stronger and faster. Come swim with us.