Typical Day
It's a normal Tuesday and Sam's alarm goes off at 5:10AM. Why 5:10? Because it takes him eighteen minutes to get dressed, walk down the dorm hallway, find his bike, and meander down to the swimming pool while shoving protein bars in his face and sipping a giant nuclear mocha, which he hopes he tastes just once.
In some parts of the country where they deny cold, in the winter, the deck around the pool has ice from overflows. Sam's careful that he doesn't slip on it as he trundles to the blocks in his Speedo while the sun slowly begins to rise on the horizon.
If you're a sprinter, you're in the Intensity Lanes. If you swim strokes, you'll train a different area. And if you're just an animal, you'll train in the Insanity Lanes. The best swimmers all earned their chops there.
Sam's earned his chops.
Sam greets his teammates as they appear by the poolside. They acknowledge the good weather and, with a few sighs mixed in, casually talk about how their weekends went. Everyone either played catch-up or just played. They'll regret it next weekend, Sam thinks to himself. He was one of the few who's on top of his schoolwork.
Sam and his teammates continue to chat as they all snap on their swim caps and pull on their goggles. "Alright, in the pool!" wails Coach. Sam winces as he drops himself in the freezing water.
Coach spins a watch and a whistle. In the Insanity Lanes, you should expect to put in 10 grand before 7:30 with a lot of set rotations involved. Set rotations are things like "30 one-hundreds on the 105. Ready, go."
For many teams, weightlifting follows early AM practice: for others, it's at lunch and combines with running football stadium bleachers. Sam's team is part of the latter group. After an hour of rotating 20 repetitions each on ten different weight configurations, for six cycles, he and his teammates run from seat AAAOO1 up to the top of the football stadium. Then, they jog back down to each AAAOO2.
About forty-five minutes later, this little Herculian task is finished.
It's 3:30PM. Sam emerges from his rhetoric class while munching on yet another Clif bar. He needs to shove enough calories in his body so that people can't see through him. Still, he's gotta stay lean.
In the animal lanes, Sam does ten 400 IMs in the tough part of the season on a tight interval. He does a dozen hundred flies, no breath, third lap. He finishes the workout with "get out swims," and at the college level, it's perfectly reasonable for the coach to demand that someone swim an NCAA "capital A" class time in order for the team to get out; if they don't, tack on a 16:50 freestyle with paddles.
The sky is a peachy cream color as Sam emerges from the classroom of his discussion section. He checks his watch: 7:45PM. That leaves just enough time to have a huge dinner, start an essay, and go to sleep. Luckily, Sam is right in the thick of it: he's already gotten into a steady routine, but it hasn't been so long that he’s burned out...yet.
How long does this Disney vacation last? About eleven and a half months a year. Sam gets Sunday afternoons off and after the final big meet of the summer, usually mid-August, he'll do nothing but let his body heal into Labor Day.
Almost there.