Swimmers face heavy holiday workload

<p><strong>B</strong>y the end of this week, almost all of the county’s high school students will be enjoying a hard-earned break from tests, homework and getting up early.</p><p>Not the swimmers.</p><p>Don’t be fooled by the lack of meets on the schedule — the second half of December is undoubtedly the most grueling part of the high school swim season.</p>[sc:text-divider text-divider-title="Story continues below gallery" ]Click here to purchase photos from this gallery<p>Practices become a long slog, with many coaches pushing their kids to cover 8,000 to 10,000 yards — or maybe even more — in a day.</p><p>The idea behind the heavy midseason training load is to get swimmers fully built up before gradually tapering down to help the bodies rest up for the biggest meets of the year — sectional and state.</p><p>“This is just a period of overload where we can really build some character, build some endurance and some high aerobic training underneath everything,” Indian Creek coach Brad Smith said. “But it’s that period of overload just to really get them to where, when we start hitting championship meets and we back them off, they have some of that part of the training down and we can really focus on the sprint and the fine technique and the fundamentals.”</p><p>Though the actual yardages covered at holiday practices vary depending on the coach (and on the swimmer), no team is exempt from the grind that this time of year brings.</p><p>Some may <em>want</em> to be, but they know that the payoff they seek in February won’t come unless they invest the energy now.</p><p>“If you don’t work hard these two months,” Franklin sophomore Cade Oliver said, “February comes around and it’s like, ‘Well, I didn’t do too hot.’ It’s because you didn’t try in the training. That’s what taper is all about — you have to train these two months vigorously and hard.</p><p>“It hurts, it really does, and you want to quit, but at the same time you’re always like, ‘I want to do really good, and at the end of the season it’s going to pay off.’”</p><p>In most previous years, local teams would have been heading straight from the mid-December Johnson County meet into the holiday break, leaving two solid weeks of training before school is back in session.</p><p>But this year, the calendar threw a bit of a wrench into everyone’s training plans. Final exams followed the county meet instead, forcing coaches to alter their schedules a bit.</p><p>“Instead of having two weeks of Christmas break where we can train really hard, we’re at a little over a week,” Center Grove coach Jim Todd said. “It’s not nearly as much as we’re used to, but we’ll try to overtrain them a little bit between now and the beginning of January and see where we are at that point.”</p><p>Fortunately, that’s an option — the next meets of any real significance for local teams come on the first weekend of January, when Center Grove, Franklin, Greenwood and Whiteland compete in their respective conference meets.</p><p>Local swimmers will likely be pretty tired going into those events, but they can take comfort in the fact that just about everyone else will be in the same boat — at least everyone who is serious about contending at the sectional and beyond.</p><p>For those teams, potentially sacrificing the smaller meets to peak at the biggest ones is just part of the cost that comes with trying to be the boss.</p><p>“Really (December is) the culmination of getting the high yardage, getting some good speed in, some good distance, just kind of working on everything … to kind of lead us into specializing when we hit January,” Greenwood boys coach Matt Hockersmith said. “That’s when we really start to hone in on what they’re going to be doing for championship.”</p><p>There is, however, a delicate balance to be struck.</p><p>While much needs to be done in these next few weeks to fully prime swimmers for the postseason, there is the risk that some can be pushed past a breaking point. The key for coaches is to approach the line without crossing it — and that line is different for every kid.</p><p>“You’ve got to be really careful in a month like this,” Franklin coach Zach DeWitt said, “because you can bury your kids — and when I say bury, it might take them 10 days to rest, and once you get into that, I call that getting into a black hole. Sometimes kids don’t come out of that. And I’ve been guilty of this, too; I’ve done it before.</p><p>“When you’re grinding and burying kids all the time, you’ve got to also consider the human. And we say as coaches before we leave practice every day, ‘We train the athlete, we coach the kid.’ … Sometimes that takes precedence over what science says.”</p><p>Fortunately, most swimmers seem to understand the science and are willing and able to do what’s asked of them during this challenging stretch.</p><p>The holidays might not be as fun this way, but the gifts that can come in February appear to be worth it.</p><p>“It can definitely get to you at some points,” Franklin senior Carla Gildersleeve said, “but you just have to remember that everybody’s in the same boat, so just stay positive and it’s fine.”</p><p>“Swimming fast is fun,” Smith added. “They know they’ve got to get through this to swim fast.”</p>