Imagine driving for 30 minutes to get to your sport’s practice area. In this case, the pool. You arrive, change into your suit, and finally get your goggles on. Then you hear thunder and a loud beep in the air from the club’s storm warning system. You now have to wait for the storm to pass.

Meanwhile, you just missed another practice.

The ODA swim team has had a rough start in this year’s swim season.  The two week pre-season before the official swim practices also had weather problems. In the past six years, this has been the worst cancellation of practices due to thunderstorms.

The loss of practice can greatly affect the conditioning of the swimmers and in turn their performance in swim meets.

On average the swim team will swim around 4000 yards a day in the two hour practices. That’s 2.27 miles. During the end of the season after the swimmers are conditioned to swim 4000 yards a day, the swim team switches to tapering. Building to this point of endurance is critical. 

Without building up conditioning, an important training technique called tapering cannot happen. Tapering is when swimmers increase the intensity of the practice but shorten the number of yards they swim. Tapering is used to drop time during districts and regionals. Swimmers wear drag suits to make it harder to streamline and they swim more sprint sets with longer breaks. Basically, swimmers decrease the yardage of their training, but they increase the intensity.

“It is unfortunate that bad weather happens because then we can’t be our best for districts,” says sophomore Max Hajduk.

“We don’t let the weather hold us back, because we can’t control it, but what we can control is our mind set for competing,” Head Coach, Michael Salmon.

Thunderstorms can also affect swim meets. If a swimmer does not compete in enough meets then they can not qualify for districts.

Recently, Hurricane Hermine caused the cancellation of a whole week of practice. Luckily, Head Coach Salmon is rescheduling the meet.

Assuming it not pouring rain Swimming is a great sport to watch. The best events are at the beginning and end of the meet, the relays. For the medley relay four swimmer swim 50 yards (2 laps) and each swimmer swims a different type of stroke.

Come out and support your ODA swim team…don’t taper them out of your mind.

• Tuesday 9/20/16  @ North Shore Pool
• Thursday, 9/22/16  @ Arlington Park