I think that sums it all up.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
On Scavenging
January 11th, 2010 – Training Trip Day 4
In my last update, I mentioned that the cold and lack of swimming was driving us all a little stir-crazy. So what is a swim team going to do when they get a little crazy?
I don’t think “have a scavenger hunt” was anyone’s answer to that question, but that’s what we did. With a limited amount of time and space to do the hunt in, we resolved that the best thing to do was to divide the team into freshmen-lead teams and make each team hunt for pictures of things or activities that could be found or done around the hotel. Things to hunt for ranged from the mundane like “take a picture of an iguana” to the esoteric like “get a piece of fruit on the roof of the hotel” or “blow bubbles without using your hand or your mouth” (a task that most of us accomplished with a bowl of water and our noses) to the ones with vast personal effects (a noticeable haircut left Jebran Heddad with a mullet and me with a faux-hawk).
Then, of course, there are the challenges that can’t be mentioned in this blog for appropriateness’s sake. Those were the best ones.
The team, however, proved up to all of these challenges, with the team of Christina Rodriguez, Jebran Haddad, Jane McEntyre, and Jake Wishart winning with some truly outstanding results (Jebran got the aforementioned mullet and prank called Mark Fino as member of hotel staff and Jake shaved “OC” into his leg hair, although this wasn’t as impressive as the “OC” that was shaved into Dimitri Macris’s chest hair). The scavenger hunt was a great way to enjoy the faltering trip’s weather, pass the time, and bring the team together with some great stories and memories.
In order to highlight the ingenuity of my teammates, I’m showing a few pictures from the hunt, thanks to Jenny Meltz and her iPhone.
Lyssa Houser prepares to drop an egg in its peanut butter casing. Will it survive?
Blowing bubbles with your nose. What about the egg?
Danny deftly lobs fruit onto the roof.
Lyssa is widdle enough to fit into a suitcase.
Danny kayaking without a paddle.
Krista, Danny, and Lyssa as a human pyramid.
The egg is safe! Huzzah!
Join me next time where the swim team remembers what swimming is like!
In my last update, I mentioned that the cold and lack of swimming was driving us all a little stir-crazy. So what is a swim team going to do when they get a little crazy?
I don’t think “have a scavenger hunt” was anyone’s answer to that question, but that’s what we did. With a limited amount of time and space to do the hunt in, we resolved that the best thing to do was to divide the team into freshmen-lead teams and make each team hunt for pictures of things or activities that could be found or done around the hotel. Things to hunt for ranged from the mundane like “take a picture of an iguana” to the esoteric like “get a piece of fruit on the roof of the hotel” or “blow bubbles without using your hand or your mouth” (a task that most of us accomplished with a bowl of water and our noses) to the ones with vast personal effects (a noticeable haircut left Jebran Heddad with a mullet and me with a faux-hawk).
Then, of course, there are the challenges that can’t be mentioned in this blog for appropriateness’s sake. Those were the best ones.
The team, however, proved up to all of these challenges, with the team of Christina Rodriguez, Jebran Haddad, Jane McEntyre, and Jake Wishart winning with some truly outstanding results (Jebran got the aforementioned mullet and prank called Mark Fino as member of hotel staff and Jake shaved “OC” into his leg hair, although this wasn’t as impressive as the “OC” that was shaved into Dimitri Macris’s chest hair). The scavenger hunt was a great way to enjoy the faltering trip’s weather, pass the time, and bring the team together with some great stories and memories.
In order to highlight the ingenuity of my teammates, I’m showing a few pictures from the hunt, thanks to Jenny Meltz and her iPhone.
Lyssa Houser prepares to drop an egg in its peanut butter casing. Will it survive?
Blowing bubbles with your nose. What about the egg?
Danny deftly lobs fruit onto the roof. 
Lyssa is widdle enough to fit into a suitcase. 
Danny kayaking without a paddle.
Krista, Danny, and Lyssa as a human pyramid.
The egg is safe! Huzzah!Join me next time where the swim team remembers what swimming is like!
Monday, January 11, 2010
On Situps, Strech Cords, and Shivering
January 8th-10th, 2010: Training Trip Days 2 – 3
You know that little ‘cold’ issue that I brought up in my last post? Well, it turns out that it’s not such a little issue after all.
The temperature of the air dropped to highs in the 40s and 50s over the weekend, and has only been recovering since then. This, however, is not the main problem.
I’d assume that pools in Florida, being mostly outdoors, would need good heaters. After all, outdoor pools need to be constantly regulated in case there are wild swings in temperature, and the cold of nights has more effects on outdoor pools than indoor ones. This, however, seems to not be the case with the pool in Founder’s Park, whose heater seemed to peak with a temperature of 69 degrees, which in layman’s terms is “way too cold to swim in”.
So since Friday, the day after we arrived, we have not been able to swim. What have we been doing instead? Drylands!
To those of you who ask, “what are drylands”, the answer is simple: workouts done outside the pool, dry (when you’re not soaked in rain or sweat) and on land.
Saturday morning, we ran out about 3/4ths of a mile to a park, enduring the cold winds and drizzle in order to do as many variations on situps, pushups, squats, jumps, and using stretch cords as Mark Fino could think of. We did the same thing Sunday afternoon, and this morning.
In a way, this is somewhat of a disappointment. After all, the purpose of a training trip is to train. And while drylands are good and important exercises, the most important exercise for a swimmer is, well… swimming. And for the past few days we’ve only done one drylands session a day, being cooped up into our hotel rooms (remember, it’s still cold outside) is beginning to get to us. Watching football games and movies is fun, but even for swimmers who are afraid of Florida workouts, sitting around and doing very little gets boring enough to wish that you were doing Fishburn right then and there. Well, maybe not that boring.
If only there was some sort of activity we could do, or some place we could go, to get rid of some of this monotony…
TO BE CONTINUED
You know that little ‘cold’ issue that I brought up in my last post? Well, it turns out that it’s not such a little issue after all.
The temperature of the air dropped to highs in the 40s and 50s over the weekend, and has only been recovering since then. This, however, is not the main problem.
I’d assume that pools in Florida, being mostly outdoors, would need good heaters. After all, outdoor pools need to be constantly regulated in case there are wild swings in temperature, and the cold of nights has more effects on outdoor pools than indoor ones. This, however, seems to not be the case with the pool in Founder’s Park, whose heater seemed to peak with a temperature of 69 degrees, which in layman’s terms is “way too cold to swim in”.
So since Friday, the day after we arrived, we have not been able to swim. What have we been doing instead? Drylands!
To those of you who ask, “what are drylands”, the answer is simple: workouts done outside the pool, dry (when you’re not soaked in rain or sweat) and on land.
Saturday morning, we ran out about 3/4ths of a mile to a park, enduring the cold winds and drizzle in order to do as many variations on situps, pushups, squats, jumps, and using stretch cords as Mark Fino could think of. We did the same thing Sunday afternoon, and this morning.
In a way, this is somewhat of a disappointment. After all, the purpose of a training trip is to train. And while drylands are good and important exercises, the most important exercise for a swimmer is, well… swimming. And for the past few days we’ve only done one drylands session a day, being cooped up into our hotel rooms (remember, it’s still cold outside) is beginning to get to us. Watching football games and movies is fun, but even for swimmers who are afraid of Florida workouts, sitting around and doing very little gets boring enough to wish that you were doing Fishburn right then and there. Well, maybe not that boring.
If only there was some sort of activity we could do, or some place we could go, to get rid of some of this monotony…
TO BE CONTINUED
Saturday, January 9, 2010
On Car-Controlling and Coldness
January 6th-7th, 2010: Training Trip Days 0 – 1
I’ve thought to myself about what I’m going to do with this blog. On one hand, I don’t want to keep people from reading this by not focusing on the most important details of the training trip experience. On the other hand, it’s not really fun to rewrite the same stories over and over again. Currently I’m thinking of compromising by linking to last year’s blog, then expanding on details that are new for this year’s training trip.
Two nights ago, when we landed at the Ft. Lauderdale airport, I quickly got to experience the first of these new details: driving.
Every year for training trip, the team rents a fleet of minivans (we rented 7) to take the team from the airport to the hotel, from the hotel to the pool and back, and from the hotel to the grocery store and other vitally important places (like the ultra-tourist trap known as Shell World). Since we only have three coaches with us in Florida, the rest of the minivans have to be driven by swimmers who are legally able to rent cars: those 21 or older. Technically I could have driven last year, but we had enough senior swimmers. This year, however, my services as a driver were definitely required.
In no time whatever, I was handed the keys to a silver Kia Sedona, given a map, and told to drive out the near-100 miles from the airport to our hotel in Tavernier on Key Largo. Mark Fino suggested that we would stay together as a caravan, but those plans fell apart almost immediately as we hit Ft. Lauderdale’s busy traffic.
There is something terrifying about driving a car that you are still getting to learn on a highway you’ve never driven before following directions to a place that, even though you’ve been there before, this is the first time you actually have to worry about getting others there in one piece.
Thanks to the expert navigational help of my co-pilot, Money Mike Sabatka, we made it to the Ocean Point Suites without making a single wrong turn, safe and sound.
Ready to go to practice the next morning.
Just like last year, we’re swimming at the beautiful 50-meter long pool at Founder’s Park in Islamorada, Florida, the next town south of Tavernier. It’s an extremely nice pool, and all last year, we enjoyed the sun while doing our practices.
This year, things were a little different. It turns out that South Florida is having the coldest winter in seven years. And while we still got afternoon temperatures in the 70s, the mornings and evenings were decidedly colder.
I’m no stranger to swimming in the cold. At the beginning of each of my summer seasons, I would be told to jump into the pool at the Haymaker Swim and Racquet Club, despite the fact that it was only 60-odd degrees outside and the pool water, recently filled, was probably not much warmer. So while jumping in wasn’t fun at all, the overall experience wasn’t too terrible, and we did two reasonable practices yesterday.
So all in all, it was a successfully start to Florida. And it’s not like it could get any colder outside, right?
Right?
TO BE CONTINUED
Meters Traveled:
Distance: 9110
Sprint: 8400
I’ve thought to myself about what I’m going to do with this blog. On one hand, I don’t want to keep people from reading this by not focusing on the most important details of the training trip experience. On the other hand, it’s not really fun to rewrite the same stories over and over again. Currently I’m thinking of compromising by linking to last year’s blog, then expanding on details that are new for this year’s training trip.
Two nights ago, when we landed at the Ft. Lauderdale airport, I quickly got to experience the first of these new details: driving.
Every year for training trip, the team rents a fleet of minivans (we rented 7) to take the team from the airport to the hotel, from the hotel to the pool and back, and from the hotel to the grocery store and other vitally important places (like the ultra-tourist trap known as Shell World). Since we only have three coaches with us in Florida, the rest of the minivans have to be driven by swimmers who are legally able to rent cars: those 21 or older. Technically I could have driven last year, but we had enough senior swimmers. This year, however, my services as a driver were definitely required.
In no time whatever, I was handed the keys to a silver Kia Sedona, given a map, and told to drive out the near-100 miles from the airport to our hotel in Tavernier on Key Largo. Mark Fino suggested that we would stay together as a caravan, but those plans fell apart almost immediately as we hit Ft. Lauderdale’s busy traffic.
There is something terrifying about driving a car that you are still getting to learn on a highway you’ve never driven before following directions to a place that, even though you’ve been there before, this is the first time you actually have to worry about getting others there in one piece.
Thanks to the expert navigational help of my co-pilot, Money Mike Sabatka, we made it to the Ocean Point Suites without making a single wrong turn, safe and sound.
Ready to go to practice the next morning.
Just like last year, we’re swimming at the beautiful 50-meter long pool at Founder’s Park in Islamorada, Florida, the next town south of Tavernier. It’s an extremely nice pool, and all last year, we enjoyed the sun while doing our practices.
This year, things were a little different. It turns out that South Florida is having the coldest winter in seven years. And while we still got afternoon temperatures in the 70s, the mornings and evenings were decidedly colder.
I’m no stranger to swimming in the cold. At the beginning of each of my summer seasons, I would be told to jump into the pool at the Haymaker Swim and Racquet Club, despite the fact that it was only 60-odd degrees outside and the pool water, recently filled, was probably not much warmer. So while jumping in wasn’t fun at all, the overall experience wasn’t too terrible, and we did two reasonable practices yesterday.
So all in all, it was a successfully start to Florida. And it’s not like it could get any colder outside, right?
Right?
TO BE CONTINUED
Meters Traveled:
Distance: 9110
Sprint: 8400
Friday, January 8, 2010
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).
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).
Thursday, January 7, 2010
On the circumstances of the Oberlin Swimming and Diving Team
September – December 2009: Training Trip Months -4 - -1
In the almost a full year since I wrapped up my training trip blog for last year, the Oberlin Swimming and Diving Team, like everything at a college, has changed. Seniors have graduated, freshmen have arrived, and each class in-between has continued their march towards graduation (or at least towards super-senior status). Head Mark Fino remains in charge, having grown muttonchops loosing a bet to Laura Fries when she made her B-cut, then growing longer and shaggier hair, and finally cutting it into a look that Dimitri Macris considers reminiscent of Brendan Fraiser in The Mummy but what I think invokes Bayside High’s infamous demi-god Zach Morris. The loveable Elise Knoche has left the position of Assistant Coach, with local boy (born and raised in nearby Elyria) Alex de la Peña taking the position and inheriting the titles of sprint coach and Fino’s errand boy.
Our woman’s team has had a fantastic first half the season, with multiple upset finishes and an unprecedented 4th-place finish at the Wooster Invitational, our traditional “half-way” point. Multiple records have been broken as the woman’s team looks to continue their fantastic performance throughout the new year.
And the men’s team?
Well, that’s kind of a different story.
We’re far from being weak. We have plenty of strong swimmers that consistently perform in and around the top levels of each competition we enter. At Wooster, we placed 6th with only eleven swimmers.
Yeah, that’s right, eleven swimmers. Thanks to returning senior Jake Wishart, that’s up to twelve. With zero divers.
These are not good numbers. Our fellow conference team, Kenyon College, perhaps the best Division III program in the country, boasts 29 on their men's team. Perhaps it’s not fair to compare our team to the reigning national champion, but still… we could use some more guys. Our recruiting efforts have lead to five incoming freshman off of the fist early decision cycle, but as excited as I am for the team, as a graduating senior I still feel for the smaller numbers now.
But despite our small numbers, the men's team has had some impressive performances. And so, with Oberlin’s first semester finished and no pesky distractions like “classes” or “personal lives” to take time away from the most important thing in the world (swimming), we’re ready to enter January, the most swimming-intensive month of the year.
Or are we?
TO BE CONTINUED
In the almost a full year since I wrapped up my training trip blog for last year, the Oberlin Swimming and Diving Team, like everything at a college, has changed. Seniors have graduated, freshmen have arrived, and each class in-between has continued their march towards graduation (or at least towards super-senior status). Head Mark Fino remains in charge, having grown muttonchops loosing a bet to Laura Fries when she made her B-cut, then growing longer and shaggier hair, and finally cutting it into a look that Dimitri Macris considers reminiscent of Brendan Fraiser in The Mummy but what I think invokes Bayside High’s infamous demi-god Zach Morris. The loveable Elise Knoche has left the position of Assistant Coach, with local boy (born and raised in nearby Elyria) Alex de la Peña taking the position and inheriting the titles of sprint coach and Fino’s errand boy.
Our woman’s team has had a fantastic first half the season, with multiple upset finishes and an unprecedented 4th-place finish at the Wooster Invitational, our traditional “half-way” point. Multiple records have been broken as the woman’s team looks to continue their fantastic performance throughout the new year.
And the men’s team?
Well, that’s kind of a different story.
We’re far from being weak. We have plenty of strong swimmers that consistently perform in and around the top levels of each competition we enter. At Wooster, we placed 6th with only eleven swimmers.
Yeah, that’s right, eleven swimmers. Thanks to returning senior Jake Wishart, that’s up to twelve. With zero divers.
These are not good numbers. Our fellow conference team, Kenyon College, perhaps the best Division III program in the country, boasts 29 on their men's team. Perhaps it’s not fair to compare our team to the reigning national champion, but still… we could use some more guys. Our recruiting efforts have lead to five incoming freshman off of the fist early decision cycle, but as excited as I am for the team, as a graduating senior I still feel for the smaller numbers now.
But despite our small numbers, the men's team has had some impressive performances. And so, with Oberlin’s first semester finished and no pesky distractions like “classes” or “personal lives” to take time away from the most important thing in the world (swimming), we’re ready to enter January, the most swimming-intensive month of the year.
Or are we?
TO BE CONTINUED
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
On New Beginnings
January 6th, 2010: A Later Start
I got a lot of positive commentary about my previous blog. Enough, in fact, that when December began to roll around again, I thought about the upcoming Winter Term and our training trip and thought to myself, "Hey, why don't I catalog my thoughts on this trip as well?"
Since I so eloquently explained the purpose of this blog last year, I will simply repeat the opening information I provided then:
My name is Daniel Holm, and I am a Senior History Major at Oberlin College, a liberal arts school located closest to Cleveland, Ohio. More importantly for this blog I am a member of the Oberlin College Swimming and Diving Team, a Division 3 NCAA team that, like most other NCAA teams, goes on a training trip to somewhere warm during the winter months. We are like wealthy retirees this way.
The purpose of this blog is to detail not only my expierences of the Oberlin Swimming and Diving Team's 2010 trip to Key Largo, Florida, but to generally create a more detailed understanding of the entire training trip process for those of us unlucky enough to never be able to take such a trip.
This will be facilitated by (hopefully) daily updates in which I will write about a certain aspect of the training trip expierence, whether it be the actual swimming, the accomodations that we live in, activities we do besides swimming, or the minutae of living with your teammates.
This blog will hew very closely to the format of last year's one, with a few exceptions:
I forgot to bring a camera. Oops. Photos will, hopefully, sporadically appear thanks to the generosity of my more prepared teammates.
I will attempt to write updates in the evening, and not in the afternoon. Due to this, updates will cover the previous day instead of the previous morning/evening cycle. This may change as the trip goes by.
Comments, of course, are more then welcome.
I got a lot of positive commentary about my previous blog. Enough, in fact, that when December began to roll around again, I thought about the upcoming Winter Term and our training trip and thought to myself, "Hey, why don't I catalog my thoughts on this trip as well?"
Since I so eloquently explained the purpose of this blog last year, I will simply repeat the opening information I provided then:
My name is Daniel Holm, and I am a Senior History Major at Oberlin College, a liberal arts school located closest to Cleveland, Ohio. More importantly for this blog I am a member of the Oberlin College Swimming and Diving Team, a Division 3 NCAA team that, like most other NCAA teams, goes on a training trip to somewhere warm during the winter months. We are like wealthy retirees this way.
The purpose of this blog is to detail not only my expierences of the Oberlin Swimming and Diving Team's 2010 trip to Key Largo, Florida, but to generally create a more detailed understanding of the entire training trip process for those of us unlucky enough to never be able to take such a trip.
This will be facilitated by (hopefully) daily updates in which I will write about a certain aspect of the training trip expierence, whether it be the actual swimming, the accomodations that we live in, activities we do besides swimming, or the minutae of living with your teammates.
This blog will hew very closely to the format of last year's one, with a few exceptions:
I forgot to bring a camera. Oops. Photos will, hopefully, sporadically appear thanks to the generosity of my more prepared teammates.
I will attempt to write updates in the evening, and not in the afternoon. Due to this, updates will cover the previous day instead of the previous morning/evening cycle. This may change as the trip goes by.
Comments, of course, are more then welcome.
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