USA Swimming’s high performance manager, Russell Mark, competed at the University of Virginia and was a part of the school’s first three ACC titles in a streak of eight consecutive championships from 1999 through 2006. He studied aerospace engineering, with the dream of working for NASA. After graduating in 2001, he took a job at Pratt & Whitney, a leading manufacturer of aircraft engines.
Less than a year on that job, however, Mark applied for a yearlong USA Swimming coaching fellowship. That position evolved into a full-time role supporting the national team with video and data analysis. He started with the tedious job of logging—wait for it—VHS tapes. That has, of course, evolved into more advanced video and his own self-fashioned statistical breakdowns. One of the projects that Mark has helped develop is the Butterfly Revolution. In just a couple years, USA Swimming has already seen a marked improvement in the depth of talent in its butterfly events.
SportTechie recently caught up with Mark, 39, to talk about the future of his sport, including the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and a major automated advancement that’s on the horizon. Mark is also an advisor to Aspiricx, which counts Olympic legend Natalie Coughlin among its team; the technology company is expected to release its first product, LaneVision, next month.
SPORTTECHIE: How has your engineering background applied to your work at USA Swimming?
RUSSELL MARK: I’m not from a traditional biomechanics background or sport biomechanics. I was an engineer. I thought I’d be an astronaut. That was the goal when I first got to school, and that clearly didn’t happen. And I went on to engineering. I was aerospace by degree, but when I was at Pratt & Whitney, I was doing mostly mechanical—just basically loop systems for their military engines.
My fluid dynamics and my physics education and, really, my swimming background helped. Anyone that does a sport in college is basically double-majoring in their academics and their athletics. When I was swimming, I never applied the thought that I put into school and my academics into my sport. When I was swimming, I just kind of turned my brain off and went.
I wish that I had used a little bit more thinking in my swimming and been a lot smarter about it. There’s so much information now that can be used, and our best athletes are probably our most thoughtful athletes when it comes to their mechanics, when it comes to their recovery, when it comes to just using information and data now.
It’s remarkable how much they can apply things in a motion that takes less than a second sometimes. They’re making fine adjustments with that information while they’re swimming in the middle of a race sometimes—being able to think but also act at the same time. I would say a lot of my ability to translate my engineering background is being able to relate to the athlete, relate to the coach, relate to what’s happening in the water, even though I physically, personally have never been able to perform at that level. Just to be able to explain it, visualize it, and then help other people visualize it.
SPORTTECHIE: How did your swimming career at Virginia help?
MARK: I swam breaststroke, and there was a great breaststroke group there. I didn’t actually swim my first year. I wasn’t good enough. That’s how not good I was.
Basically I talked my way on my second year. That was Ed Moses’s first year. That was 1999, and then in 2000, he went on to win a silver medal and a gold medal in the Sydney Olympics. I swam my last three years of school, and that was the first three titles that we won in the ACC championship run. I was very fortunate to be a part of it and that’s really all I was—a part of it. I got to see this high level of swimming up close and experience it. Athletes like Ed, they seemed so natural when they swam through the water. But when I think about and reflect on it now, I realized how much thought and care he was putting into his work.
SPORTTECHIE: How much do we know about the biomechanics of swimming on the cusp of the Tokyo Olympics?
MARK: We know so much more. In the 17 years I’ve been here, the technology to just look at underwater video is so much easier. I mean you can put your phone in the water, and in 2000, phones weren’t waterproof. We didn’t have an underwater camera when I was at Virginia. Now it’s pretty common for college teams and club teams all around the country to have an underwater camera accessible. Just go to the store and you can buy a GoPro or any other sport camera—or, like I said, your phone.
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I would say the field of swimming mechanics is still evolving just because having a human in water is an unnatural state, an unnatural environment, and everyone moves through it a little bit differently. Even amongst the very best in history, there are some differences. So you’re constantly learning. I would say my job is to sort through what can apply to most people and what are the exceptions that make the best go. It’s such an evolving field, and I don’t know if we’ll ever find the full answers, which is good job security for me.
SPORTTECHIE: On USA Swimming’s Kick Set podcast, you essentially said that no one over the age of 30 was taught to do the backstroke correctly. What else might surprise the average recreational swimmer about what you’ve learned?
MARK: Its technique is way simpler, and I don’t think it’s just because of how much I’m immersed in it. I really do believe it’s way simpler than what we’ve been taught for all these years in textbooks and from the knowledge being passed down from generations. One of the things I’ve done is helped the American Red Cross revamp their learn-to-swim curriculum so that all of this knowledge can hopefully start trickling up from the lower levels so we don’t have to re-teach people how to swim when they get to older ages and club teams.
Occasionally, I talk to masters groups and it just blows their minds sometimes how simple it is. I’m all about, ‘If you want to move forward, you push water backwards.’ You don’t have to move your hand from side to side or up or down if you’re swimming backstroke. Just get your hand facing your feet behind you and just push that away from you and then you move forward. So it’s a lot simpler now, and a lot easier on your body and your shoulders. I’m all about healthy technique. I’m all about propulsive technique, and luckily the two overlap and coincide.
SPORTTECHIE: You told The Washington Post that you’re breaking 50-meter laps into increments of the first 15 meters, the middle 20, and the final 15. What insights have you started unlocking?
MARK: Over the course of a 50-meter length, you’re talking around 30 seconds and you’re also talking 40 strokes, so each arm is moving 20 times. And over those 20 strokes, you’re pushing against water, and your stroke is changing. You’re getting fatigued within those 30 seconds, from your first stroke to your 40th stroke and within each length. I think understanding how the speed changes within 50 meters is important, not just for the entire length, but for different segments that people can train and be diligent purposely focusing on a certain part when they get fatigued.
The easiest thing for us to measure—and for people to practice—is the first 15 meters. That’s obviously the fastest cause you’re pushing off the wall. Towards the end [of the world championships], we had this 17-year-old girl, Reagan Smith, break the world record in the 100 back and the 200 back. Since February, her and I and her coach have been working really hard on these first 15 meters, fixing her start—really just monthly checking in on how she was doing. Her total improvement in the first 15 meters was 0.4 seconds [of the 0.9 seconds by which she improved her personal best].
We don’t have any automated technology to really measure it. It’s very tedious the way that we do it. I’m putting into a video software, Dartfish, which is used for other sports too, and basically syncing up the video to the official time using the reaction time of when the athlete’s feet leave the blocks.
Then, frame by frame, getting to the point where the athlete’s head is crossing 15 meters and crossing 35 meters and I’m typing in that time. So it’s nothing automated and nothing fancy and it takes a lot of time, but it’s so worth it just because of what we can learn from it. More than ever—because of my familiarity with the data and athletes’ and coaches’ familiarity with the data—at this past world championships, we were able to make changes within a race from prelims to semis or semis to finals within these different kinds of segments. It is very, very cool that changes are measurable, and we can do it.
SPORTTECHIE: What are some of the technologies available now or showing potential to help in your line of work?
MARK: I do get a lot of swimming technology that comes across my radar every year. Integrating technology into swimming is really hard. This is what I tell people: the only technology that has stood the test of time is a stopwatch. There are so many programs and teams that don’t use video in general—not even analyzing video but just taking it with your phone or an iPad or a video camera and watching it.
There’s still a gap in technology and swimming. I think that’s partially kind of what brings me value is that I’ll show up to a team or a national team athlete, and I just have my camera. Let alone analyzing race data or taking measurements and analytics from a video—just to watch it subjectively is of huge value.
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As for other tools and wearables, people can use their Apple Watch or Fitbit and trackers like that, but I don’t think most of our athletes are using it for training competitively. Heart rate is definitely important, but most people are still putting their fingers up to their neck and taking their pulse manually for 10 seconds. There’s still a huge opportunity.
A lot of it is just the communication of the technology. Water isn’t a great medium for information to pass through wirelessly So even with video, I stick my camera in the pool and then to watch the video, I have to pull the camera out of the pool. I can’t have a wireless stream right now very conveniently.
SPORTTECHIE: What can you tell us about the potential of Aspiricx?
MARK: The company is developing an app to use computer vision to take the data that I take—the number of cycles, the stroke rate. I just saw the demo today, and I think it’s awesome. I am excited to get my hands on it and to test the accuracy. From what I’ve seen, it looks pretty good and I’m pretty excited to have something that’s a little bit more automated. Right now it’s not really ready for an eight-swimmer race, but it does pretty well one-on-one.
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There’s a huge gap in what performance looks like in practice and what it looks like in a competition. It is kind of astounding to say that, but that’s why there’s so much opportunity in swimming. That’s one of my challenges, to try to bridge that gap and to help people understand what they’re doing in training every day and how that will relate to what they’re going to do in a race. And it’s hard because, in a two-hour workout, maybe 5% of it is at a race effort. The other 95% is that a less-than-race effort, so how does all of this relate to the way you’re going to do it in a race.
SPORTTECHIE: Earlier in your career, you contributed to a lot of research. How much of your job is dedicated to research as compared to the daily work of helping USA Swimming athletes directly?
MARK: I would say very close to zero percent now. When I first got here, our performance group was more focused on developing technologies and research and information in science. We were doing work trying to quantify fluid dynamics.
Really what it comes down to is, it was so hard to apply the information in a timely manner and also across a broad population that I’ve kind of gone away from all that. I’m still interested in it. I really want to stay on the cutting edge, but good research takes a lot of time and money and those are things that are hard to come by.
SPORTTECHIE: How would you assess the progress of the Butterfly Revolution?
MARK: I think it’s going well. A lot of it is a social, cultural shift and getting people motivated. We launched this campaign, and really, I wanted to motivate people to want to be better at it—whether it’s through training or technique. Then it was also a challenge to myself to come up with new information that I could help maybe inspire some people to do things a little bit differently—whether it’s sharing video or talking about technique and me doing my research on how races are swum, how they’re split, what are the tempos that go into it and help dissect a great butterfly performance.
Two years is a very short time. The results we’ve seen in this short time is a great tribute to our coaching and athlete populations on how they mobilized and how motivated they are to get better. A great reward would be seeing results next year at the Olympics in more than just one event and more than just Caleb Dressel in the 100 fly. We’ve been waiting 20 years for a female 200 fly to medal at the Olympics.
I give most credit to just how easy information flows now and how easy it is for people to access it. We started this Facebook group, and I can post something up there and everyone in the group gets it right away and will do something with it. It was basically a call to action and our swimming population has taken action—and I appreciate that.
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