On a Dirty Little Secret

January 4th-6th, 2010: Training Trip Days -2 – 0

I am currently sitting in the Akron/Canton airport while writing this, our first stop on our long trip down to Key Largo. Despite the snowy weather, our flight is still scheduled to depart on time, although the smart money is on a delay in Atlanta. (Message from the future: we didn’t get delayed.)

Instead of getting back one night and leaving the following morning, we arrived at Oberlin a few days ago, practiced a bit, and are now departing today. Why?

Well, that’s a little secret I have to share with you.

You see, in order to “make it back to campus”, we need to be away from campus. And when people who have been working hard all semester take a break from school, their first instinct isn’t to continue practicing. After all, practicing over break is difficult. The practices don’t get easier, but you have to find a way to get yourself up, find a place to swim (usually one’s old high school team, which gets strange when you get to be a senior and even the freshman you’ve swam with have graduated), and make it through the practice all by yourself. It’s difficult, it’s unfun, and it’s competing with Christmas and New Years. So, unsurprisingly, a number of swimmers, when they are faced with this prospect, choose to not do the full allotment of practices. Some take it even further and do no practices over break.

You can imagine how well this goes over with Mark Fino.

Sometimes I feel pity for the man who has put me through so much misery. You create a plan that hopefully, if your swimmers stick to it, will help them achieve better and better results. Then, when they get out of your insidious grasp for a few weeks, some of them choose to not stick to the plan and then come back complaining of being out of shape, sore, or unable to do the practices in Florida. Well, duh.

I imagine that being a coach is something like making a series of endless compromises, each one having to balance your plans in some way with the plans of 30-odd college kids, each of whom gets unhappy when things don’t turn out their way.

Anyways, because the status of the team is so variable after coming back from break, and the practices in Florida are so intense, Fino decided this year to have everyone on the team travel back to Oberlin before training trip in order to gauge the levels of everyone on the team to be able to better plan the practices in Florida. We’ll see how it works out.

(Now I’m sitting in my hotel room at the Ocean Pointe Suites, taking a break from looking up Beanie Babies prices online. Training trip is a weird mix of the horribly difficult and the surprisingly mundane.)

Well that’s it for pre-Florida stuff. In my next entry I’ll talk about new experiences while traveling (hint: I get to drive) and new experiences while swimming (hint: It’s cold).