FINDING MOTIVATION

After over 30 years of professional coaching and motivating swimmer both young and old, beginners or Olympic medal winners, it is time to for me to find ways to motivate myself big time after the accident and injuries that I have experienced. Thinking of my little son, my family and my friends will give me inspiration and energy to survive and keep on living. But to find motivation to train and build up the strength again despite feeing like a weak injured bird is a different story. This is where I need to use my experience from coaching, where I have always tried to bring out the best in each individual and making people "the best they can be".  How do I do this now? Well, I hope to share this with people in the years to come in some of my seminars and camps, helping and inspiring you. Some of the people I think of have inspired me over the years, ande even more so these days. They are swimmers like the great personality David Lega, Anders Ohlsson (double Paralympic champion 400m freestyle) and young Christoffer Lindhe whom lost both arms and one arm in a train accident and swims beautiful strong freestyle. A role model that my son and I got to know last year and my son gave him the name Anakin Skywalker

Another "triggerpoint" I used was going up on the attic finding my old tracksuit from the 1980 Olympic Games. As some of you know the Moscow Olympic was not a happy event for myself since our gold medal favored 4 x 100m Medley relay was disqualified in the prelims. But it still represents important values for me, like consistency, training hard for ten years with the Olympic dream in mind, never giving up, never stop believing in yourself regardless of setbacks on the way. And in the end some very good things came out of it,  like my 100m breaststroke # 1 ranking in the world the year after, and the call to coach which 16 years later resulted in a coaching position at the Olympic Games in Atlanta where I had my first Olympic medal winning swimmer. So when I put this track suit on I wear it with pride, knowing that if you work hard enough things will turn out good in the end. And this is what I need to remember some of these days. But hopefully it will not take 10 or 16 years :)