SwimSwam wants to give you an inside look at what a normal day-in-the-life looks like for any given swimmer, and how that differs from team to team or city to city. We send our head of production, Coleman Hodges, to be a fly on the wall at practice, then relay what he discovered back to you over pancakes. Or at least breakfast.
Just north of the windy city of Chicago, SwimSwam ventured to Evanston, Illinois, the hometown of Northwestern University. Fresh off the B1G/ACC challenge meet, the wildcats were right back into the swing of things on this Tuesday morning, running a whopping 4 different workouts in the span of 6-9am.
Starting on the pool deck at 6am was the Distance group (workout #1).
D group had a dryland/core workout followed by a 100-120 minute water workout. The workout started long, but actually by the end the D group was doing almost as much speed work as anyone else that day.
After everyone else lifted from 6-7am (don’t have that paper workout, but it is workout #2), the rest of the team got in the water. For the women, this was their only workout of the day, so they were in from 7-9am (workout #3).
They started off with a killer pace set, and ended with power and buckets.
Last of all, their was the non distance men who were in for some quick power from 7-8am (workout #4) ahead of their 2nd practice that afternoon.
They got in some work with socks as well as buckets, waking up the nervous system and getting them ready for speed. And most important of all, they had their priorities straight for the day.
Lots of action, and fun to see different workouts. Very fast moving.
Is it just me or shouldn’t every team be doing at least 4 different workouts every day? I can think of 4 different groups being sprint, mid-sprint, mid-distance, distance. Even those can be broken down into more specific groups…
Just you I think. Northwestern is the only team that does this.
I think this is the norm for most college teams, I’m just always fascinated that they have so many moving parts (having not swam in college myself)
Also of note, this is Northwestern’s first semester as a combined program, and Coach Kipp arrived after the swimmers signed up for classes based on separate program schedules. One more thing that they are currently working around (hence 1 practice for women in the AM, but double for men)
Evansville, Illinois huh?? Sheesh man, gotta do better than that!!
Hopefully they meant Evanston