To the Island and back

Hi everyone, I hope you had a wonderful weekend!

This past weekend (January 21st-22nd) the team traveled to UPEI for a swim meet. Unlike championship meets, this particular meet only had "heats" and no finals. This made for a quick weekend of racing, with 2 sessions on Saturday and 1 session on Sunday.

We showed up ready to race, even though we did not rest the week prior. Despite being tired, many swimmers actually posted season-best (PB) times! There were even a handful of lifetime-best times, which was really exciting! We had a couple girls come incredibly close to qualifying for CIS: Juliana Vantellingen rocked her 800m free, Kaitlyn Young was within reach in her 200m fly and a couple girls were just shy of their 50m qualifying times. The whole atmosphere changes when we have close races like that; the whole team is up on their feet cheering and coach Robin is the loudest of us all. The weekend of racing got everyone thinking positive and pumped up for our conference championships in less than 3 weeks!

Now I'm going to tell you the single most amazing word a swimmer can hear... taper. According to Wiki, Tapering refers to the practice of reducing exercise in the days just before an important competition. If I had to put it in my own words, I'd say tapering is the absolute best time during our season because we get lots of rest, everyone is in good spirits and we can all stay awake in class! The idea behind taper is to rest our bodies for an upcoming meet, in this case, AUS Championships. Taper consists of less early morning swim practices, less meters swum at practice and faster swimming. To put it more simply, we're focusing on quality over quantity.

The reason I am telling you about taper is that it is an important preparation we do in the couple weeks prior to AUS Champs. The taper we did before our AUS Invitational swim meet in the fall proved to be effective for most athletes to perform their best. For the remainder of this week, we're still training at high intensity (especially in the gym) and the taper will truly begin next week.

I'll be posting again at the beginning of next week to update you on training!

Have an excellent week!

Natalie