The First Ten Minutes
It took two blown legs of the Trans Tahoe Relay, and one hyperventilating mess, before I stopped mistaking a fast start for a good one.
Two years in a row, I did the exact same dumb thing in the same cold lake.
The Trans Tahoe Relay is a 10+ mile open water swim across Lake Tahoe, from Sand Harbor on the Nevada side to Skylandia Beach on the California side, hosted every year by the Olympic Club out of San Francisco. Six swimmers to a team. Cold water, high altitude, and a format that sounds simple until you’re standing on the side of a boat trying to talk yourself into jumping into it. Each swimmer takes one 30-minute leg to start, and then the team rotates through 10-minute legs the rest of the way until somebody touches the sand on the other side.
This past weekend was my fifth year in a row doing it with the same group of Notre Dame teammates, and this year happened to be the relay’s 50th anniversary, which meant the club let over 300 boats onto the water instead of the usual smaller field. It was a good scene. But the scene isn’t really the story this time.
The story is what I did wrong on my 30-minute leg for two years running, and what I finally did differently this year.
In year three, I led off. Twenty minutes into my thirty, I realized I’d gone out way too fast, the kind of fast where your stroke count climbs and your breathing gets ragged and you start doing math you shouldn’t have to do mid-lake about how much lake is left. I tapped out with ten minutes still on the clock. Handed it off early. Told myself it was a one-time thing, bad day, whatever swimmers tell themselves.
Then last year, on my 30-minute leg, I did it again. Same mistake, worse result. I went out too fast, started hyperventilating about fifteen minutes in, and had to cut the leg short a second time. Two years, same lake, same leg length, same failure. At some point that stops being a bad day and starts being a pattern, and I’m supposed to be the guy who notices patterns for a living.
This year, before I jumped in, I made myself do one thing differently. I eased into the first ten minutes, didn’t chase the boat next to us, didn’t try to prove anything in the first quarter mile. Just found a pace I could actually hold and let the rest of the leg build from there. It was the first year in three that I handed my leg off on time instead of early.
That’s my piece of it, and only my piece. Five other guys had to swim their legs well too, and they did, all the way across. Whatever pace we found this year, we found it together, leg after leg. We finished 5th in the men’s 300-plus division, which is exactly what it sounds like: our six combined ages added up to more than 300 years. We also landed in the top third of the entire field, every age group included, twenty-somethings and all. Final time was 4:23:26, three minutes faster than any previous year we’ve done this.
That record belongs to six people, not to one leg of it.
I should also mention, since I’m not trying to oversell any of this, that we remembered to charge the phone running the GPS on the escort boat this time, which meant our line across the lake was a lot straighter than the year we forgot. Some of those three minutes probably came out of an outlet, not out of anybody’s stroke.
But the pacing is the part I can’t stop turning over. I coached college swimmers for years. I spent whole seasons telling eighteen-year-olds not to go out too fast. Told them the first fifty yards don’t win the race, that the swimmer still in control at the two-thirds mark beats the one who was ahead early and empty at the end. I knew this. I’d said it out loud, probably a thousand times, to other people. And I still couldn’t make myself do it, two years running, when it was my own turn in the water.
I think that’s because going out fast doesn’t feel like a mistake while you’re doing it. It feels like effort. It feels like you’re taking the thing seriously, like you’re showing everyone, including yourself, that you’re still capable of the pace you used to hold. Slowing down on purpose, at the exact moment you want to prove something, feels like the opposite of trying hard. It isn’t. It’s just harder to see that from inside the first two minutes.
I see some version of this constantly in the leaders I work with, and in myself outside the lake too. New role, new initiative, new team, and the instinct is to go out at a pace that feels like proof, answering every email in an hour, taking every meeting, chasing the fastest turnaround and the most visible hustle in the first month. It works for a while, the same way it worked for me for the first fifteen or twenty minutes both of those years. Then the pace catches up, and instead of a strong finish, you’re handing off something early that you didn’t get to finish the way you wanted to.
The uncomfortable part is that knowing this doesn’t seem to be enough on its own. I knew it. I’d taught it. I still had to blow up twice, in front of a lake full of people who know exactly what a swimmer in trouble looks like, before I actually changed what I did with my own arms and legs.
I don’t know that I’ve fully learned it, even now. One good leg doesn’t erase two bad ones, it just means I got the timing right one time. I’ll find out next year, or in whatever version of this shows up at work between now and then, whether easing into the first ten minutes was a real change or just what happened to work once.
About Brian Vogel
Brian is a leadership coach with more than 25 years of HR executive experience at Indeed, USAA, Verizon, and LogicMonitor. He helps leaders delegate with confidence, build team ownership, and make time for the decisions only they can make.
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