Franklin senior Anthony Ries springs off the starting block during last month’s Johnson County meet.
Daily Journal file photo
The swimmer’s pleas grew more desperate after every 400-yard freestyle interval.
“Can I go to the bathroom?”
Each time, his coach’s response remained the same.
“No.”
Finally, after repeated requests, the swimmer’s tone reached an unmistakable pitch.
“Can I please go to the bathroom?”
The coach reluctantly paused.
“Number one or number two?”
“Two.”
“Go ahead.”
Barring the imminence of such a potentially pool-clearing threat, there is seldom any interrupting a late-December swim workout. The holiday season might mean vacation and relaxation for some, but for swimmers looking to peak at the big end-of-season meets in February or March, there is no more grueling stretch of the calendar.
Two-a-day practices can routinely have high school athletes logging more than 10,000 (and sometimes up to 20,000) yards in a 24-hour span. Even the most energetic teenager seeks out between-practice naps, and mid-practice vomiting is not unheard of.
But it’s all a means to an end. The training methods — break ‘em down, then build ‘em back up — are tried and true, and while the blueprints vary somewhat by coach and school, the process is largely similar across the sport and the end goal is the same for everyone: be at your best when the stakes are highest.
The journey may not always be enjoyable, but the payoff usually is. Especially here, in one of the fastest swim counties in one of the fastest swim states in the fastest swim nation on earth.
There’s a reason the talent here stands out so much. They trust the process.
Grind time
By the time they reach high school, most swimmers have been through the competitive cycle enough times to know the drill. The holiday break is no break at all.
With school out, coaches are free to pile on the yardage — and while some do more than others, nobody is holding back. Even at Franklin, where there is usually more of an emphasis on building top-end sprint speed, swimmers routinely face late December doubles totaling upwards of 10,000 yards.
The Grizzly Cubs feast on a heavy diet of what are known in swimming parlance as “blue” and “purple” sets — shorter bursts at race pace. At Center Grove, longtime coach Jim Todd has been known to favor “red” sets, keeping the yardage volume toward the high end.
Every coach has shown adaptability over the years, though, and since each season brings a new roster, the training plan might need to be customized as well.
“We’ve definitely modified,” Todd said. “Like this year, we continued weightlifting, and most years before we would not lift during that (school vacation) time, but this time we did. So yardage was down just because we would take an hour of our practice time and be lifting.”
That doesn’t mean the yardage wasn’t still high, though; it’s still late December, and the Trojans still had several days around the 15,000-yard mark. At Greenwood, 12,000 or 13,000 is considered a normal day during the break.
The good news for the swimmers is that when they get back to school in January, coaches have less time to run them into the ground — and if they were able to survive practices during the holiday season, they can take whatever else is thrown at them.
“I would just be exhausted by the time I got home from practice and just take a few hours’ nap,” Franklin junior Allie Lacy said of the late-December workouts. “But coming off of Christmas break, it’s so relieving, because I just feel so much better and so much more confident in my swimming, because I know that what I went through was so tough and I got through it.”
Having teammates by your side to offer encouragement certainly helps.
“Our boys are really good at keeping each other positive,” Greenwood senior Conner Peckinpaugh said. “They’re out there playing four square right now. We’ve made our locker room basically our sanctuary in a way. We’re all supportive of each other, so even when the practices are hard, we know we can lean on each other and build ourselves up as a team. At the end of the day, we had a really tough practice, but we’re all doing it together.”
Switching gears
While nothing can quite measure up to the two-a-days during vacation, swimmers are still putting in heavy yardage during most of January — which can be inconvenient when most teams have conference championship meets during that time. Stakes are high, but any rest could disrupt the plan that will allow them to peak when the stakes are higher, and so everyone just swims tired.
Nobody’s swimming their best times at conference, but they also understand why and know to grade their performances on a curve.
“I don’t even think about how exhausted I am,” Franklin senior Callum Buchanan said. “I just think about performing well at the meet, improving on what technique I need to improve on, and the same will really apply for sectionals.”
“I tell them right now, ‘If you’re faster than you were last year, we’re in a good spot,’” Greenwood coach Ray Onisko added.
At some point, usually a couple of weeks before the sectional meet, coaches will start to pull their foot off the gas and begin what they term a full taper — providing the swimmers’ broken-down bodies with more rest so that the muscles they spent all winter building up will be ready to deliver lifetime-best performances when it matters the most.
For some swimmers, those peaks need to come at different times. Most have to be at their best for the sectional just to be able to potentially advance to the state meet. For a select few who can excel at sectional while somewhat fatigued, the taper will be delayed by a week in order to line up with state.
That means some swimmers will need to be on different practice schedules than others, which can lead to questions of fairness. Some coaches will avoid customizing tapers for that reason. There’s also the matter of competitiveness. Johnson County has gotten faster across the board in recent years, so while he has customized at times in the past, Todd is tapering his teams on the pretty much same schedule this season.
“It’s so competitive at sectionals now that you basically have to be pretty rested at sectionals,” he said. “Ben (Clarkston) and Garrett (Crist), we may not put the brakes on them as fast as we do with all of the rest of the kids on the team. And I think Lara (Phipps) needs as much rest as she can get. She trains really hard, so she’s going to need a lot of rest.”
Other coaches continue to stagger the timing of the taper on a case-by-case basis.
“Really, the focus is all in on sectionals,” Onisko said. “You have to go all in on sectionals to get to the state meet — and a couple of the kids it’s basically, ‘All right, give us the lay of the land going into state meet.’ Some will hit the end of their taper going into sectionals; some will just be starting that week.”
“At this point, the kids communicate with other kids within their groups or within their genders, and they understand that what we’re doing is working for them,” Franklin coach Zach DeWitt said. “But at the end of the day, everybody needs something different — and unfortunately, sometimes that means that some people need a harder path.”
Finishing touches
By the time the postseason arrives, the hard work has been done and the swimmers are in a peak position physically. All that’s left in the final hours is the small tweaks — special tech swimsuits, full-body shaves and the like — that make as much of a difference psychologically as they do scientifically.
For male swimmers especially, shaving below the neck isn’t something that gets done regularly during the year — so when they shed their fur for the biggest meets, it can offer a bit of a pick-me-up.
“My first time doing that was last year at sectionals, and I definitely felt a difference,” Peckinpaugh said. “I got in for warmup, and my kick felt faster. … It was weird getting used to it, but as soon as I did get used to it I feel like — I felt faster, and I think my times reflected that a little bit.”
“There are definitely legitimate physical advantages that it’ll give you,” Buchanan added. “It’ll activate the nerves, bringing them up to your skin, from a really fresh full-body shave, but I definitely do think that there is a mental aspect to that whole thing.”
And at season’s end, when hundredths of a second can make a world of difference, even the smallest mental edge can pay dividends. Nearly every Johnson County team has experienced recent success on the biggest stages, so it’s much easier for swimmers here to trust that the juice will indeed be worth the squeeze when the time comes next month.
“The taper plan that we do here, it works really well for me,” Lacy said, “and coming off of such hard training into a taper gives me a lot of confidence.”
“I just let them know that it’s okay to be exhausted and tired and a little bit cranky,” Todd said. “It’s okay, because when we rest, it’s going to make a big difference.”
