A Milestone and a Lesson 4/21/12

On Wednesday (April 18th) we celebrated 100 days till the Opening Ceremonies in London. Wow! It is really hard to believe how quickly the Olympic Games will be here. How did we celebrate this milestone? Two of our players, Tony Azevedo and Merrill Moses flew to New York for a big media day. They left right after practice on Tuesday morning and arrived in New York around midnight. Their media stops included early appearances at the NY Stock Exchange and the Today show and then later in the day stops at various other NBC affiliates. After a day in the “spotlight” so to speak they boarded a plane and headed back to Los Angeles. Both arrived home in the early hours of Thursday (1:30 am) and after a few hours of sleep were on time for our morning training at 8:45. Those that stayed home also had a long day. We had a very tough workout in the morning that consisted of some difficult swims and leg work. Immediately following training, six players – Ryan Bailey, Adam Wright, Jesse Smith, Jeff Powers, Peter Varellas and Layne Beaubien had an all day photo shoot with Men’s Journal magazine. This was big deal! Men’s Journal brought a staff of 18 to do make up, hair, catering, interviews and of course photography. The shoot lasted from 11 am to 6 pm and it was a hot summer-like day. Needless to say, the guys were sunburned and a pretty exhausted when they jumped in the pool for our competition night. Although the scrimmage started out a bit slow the competitive juices began to flow and it ended up being a good practice. Physically drained and a bit emotional the team showed up for practice on Thursday morning in a sour mood. As training began, it was obvious that the team looked lethargic. Robert (assistant coach) took them through a couple of warm up sets and then it was time for the main set. It was not necessarily a hard set but on this particular day it seemed like a big mountain to climb. Here is the set – start out with a 200 swim medium speed (this means under a 2:12), next swim 2 X 100 above medium (under 1:05), and finally swim 8 X 50 with everyone under 30 seconds on each one. If everyone does not make it then we do the entire set again. Let me make this clear – for all of our athletes swimming a 50 under 30 seconds should not be difficult at all. In fact, most of them swim a 50 in under 23 seconds. However, on this particular day a few of our older athletes were struggling with exhaustion and “broke down” after the first couple of 50’s. So we repeated the set, not once but three times with the guys becoming more and more agitated after each failure. Watching and waiting for the right moment to speak, I stopped them and addressed them before they were to swim the 8 X 50 (the fourth time). I simply said this “I know that we all had a super long day yesterday and that we are all exhausted, however, when we get to the Olympic Games not one of our opponents is going to give a damn about how we feel. We have to be able to be strong in these moments and push through it. Only when we can do this in practice consistently will we be able to do it at the Games”. The team responded and everyone made the 50’s and we were able to finish the rest of the practice on a positive note. We can not afford to waste a day of training. Each and every day counts. I believe that all the players went home with that message and hopefully learned a valuable lesson about being able to stay together in those tough moments and push their bodies and minds to another level when they feel like they can’t. In fact, we have to take the word “can’t” out of our vocabulary if we want to win. We are now off to Serbia for 9 days. We will be in Belgrade where we will train with a club called Partizan. This club team’s roster is primarily made up of the Serbian national team. It should be good intense training. We will travel with all 16 of our team and once again we will have a chance to evaluate individuals and see how different combinations of players work in the water together. When we return, we will have less then three months left in our preparation for London. Thank you for all of your support! The team appreciates it. See you at the pool. Coach