Duel in the Pool Update

After a long day of travel (for me, 25 hours) Team USA, tired and somewhat weary, finally made it to the hotel in Manchester. Literally 15 minutes post arrival to the hotel we had once again left on our way to swim. Many of you may be thinking that is a crazy thing to do after so much travel. In some respects it seems that way, but it is important to get our muscles working again to loosen up after sitting for so long. Now I was not looking forward to jumping in the cold water, I never am, what I was looking forward to was letting my body slowly cruise out all the kinks and tightness. Much like many swimmers, being in the pool is very calming to me. There was no question in my mind that as much as I didn’t want to get in the water, I would feel tenfold better after I was done swimming.

Coaches will once again have different philosophies on what they think you should do after travel. There probably is no solid right or wrong answer. What I know from a lot of personal experience is that it is best to take it slow for a while and go probably a bit further than I think I need to. When I dive into the pool after any amount of travel I have one goal in mind, “swim until I feel good.” Certainly ‘good’ is a relative term in this sense. Likely I won’t feel quite as good as I will the day of the race or even the day after travel, but I need to make sure I leave that pool feeling refreshed. For instance, yesterday I got in and swam for about 25 minutes. Probably 7-10 of those minutes were kick, 5-8 were drill and the rest was easy swimming. At the end I did a build 25 free and a build 25 back. The build is up to a percent that feels like I am still gripping the water but not forcing it. I think it’s important to try and always maintain as good of a grip on the water as possible…we don’t want to miss out on any water we could be grabbing.

Finishing the swim was, of course, a nice hot shower. Many times on National team trips we wait until everyone or at least a large group is finished to leave the venue. Last night we were going to wait for everyone to finish before leaving so this gave me a great opportunity to do some much needed stretching. We had dinner directly upon arrival back to the hotel. Let’s just say dinner wasn’t the best meal I’ve had on a national team trip…as I’d heard England is not known for its food. My night finished with a massage.

At about 10:30pm we hit the lights to go to sleep. I was dead tired and was confident I’d have no problem sleeping. I crashed hard. If I had to take a guess I’d say I was probably sleeping within a couple minutes. My mind and body were in one of the deepest sleeps I’d had in a while, but suddenly, I arose. I was wide-awake. My fear was realized. It was 3am…and that was the start of my new day.

Thank you www.SwimNetwork.com for also letting me post this blog to my website as well!