Blog #2

16 days until the start of the Olympics and 17 until I swim my first race.

I mentioned in my last blog that sometimes different people swim in different groups. Last Friday was one of those days and Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte came and swam with our group. I guess at some point and time last week Eddie Reese decided that our group was going to do a quadrathlone. I don’t know if I spelled that right or even if it is a real word. A quadrathlone is very simple. It is a 50 of each stroke all for time. We did the set in the short course yards pool. I think that we went on somewhere in between a six and eight minute interval. The coaches recorded everyone's time on a white board and at the end you add up all your times to see where you place.

For those of you that don’t know much about my swimming history when I was in high school and even I college I was a very successful Individual Medley swimmer. There were several times while I was at Auburn when we did a quadrathlone as a team. Because I am a pretty good sprinter and I am good at underwater dolphin kicking I usually won or placed second during my time at Auburn. Now we had some really great IM swimmers at Auburn when I swam there but not like Phelps and Lochte (obviously they are one step ahead of everyone). Just to refresh your memory of some of the other guys swimming in the group Ian Crocker (amazing at three of the four strokes and not a bad breaststroker by most standards), Aaron Peirsol (144 in the 200IM), Eric Shanteau (great IMer), Ricky Berens, Brendan Hansen, Dave Walters, and Scott Spann. As you can guess it is pretty exciting getting to be able to race these guys in this set. In fact everyday at this training camp is pretty fun.

It not going to come as a surprise that before the set most of the talk was on Phelps, Crocker, and Lochte (for good reason). My main goals was to show these guys and the coaches that I am a pretty good sprinter and that I am good at all of the strokes. I wasn’t worried about where I was going to place, I just thought if I had a great set maybe I can come close to one of those guys. As you have probably already guessed by my long introduction, I had a great set. For those of you wondering what my times were here they are. Fly 21.5, Back 22.3, Breast 24.1, and Free 20.3. All of those except the breast were personal best times for me. For all of the young swimmers that are reading this you can do best times in practice without fast swim suits on. It will not happen often but if you are feeling good let it go and just swim fast, that’s what makes swimming fun. I am sure most of you are wondering how this measured up to the other guys. I am proud to say that I got second place in the quadrathlone. Ryan Lochte won. His times were. Fly 21.1, Back 21.0 (wow!), Breast 25.3, and Free 19.5. Lochte beat everyone by quite a bit. It was one of the most fun days of training that I have ever had.

This has already turned into a longer blog than I was expecting but I also wanted to tell everyone about Saturday morning when we got all of our gear from the USOC. Basically after our morning workout we got on a bus and headed over to the San Jose State University campus where the USOC was doing the processing for all of the 2008 Olympians. When we got there my group was selected to go straight to uniforming. The way that uniforming works is they give you a huge shopping cart. Not a little shopping cart like the ones at your local grocery store. We got big Home Depot shopping carts. They also give you a check list with about 50 or 60 things on it and everyone lines up. Once you are in line you go through this huge room that is set up like a warehouse and try on and pick up all of your sizes. Now Nike is the main sponsor for the USOC so the majority of the stuff that we got was Nike but Ralph Lauren did the uniforming for the opening and closing ceremonies so we got plenty of Ralph Lauren stuff too. The cool thing about the opening ceremony stuff is that Ralph Lauren sent some of the their people there to make sure everything fit correctly and even had a tailor and seamstresses adjusting everyone's pants. When it was all said and done the entire Home Depot cart was over flowing with stuff. I should also mention that USA Swimming is sponsored by Speedo and earlier last week we got a ton of Speedo gear as well which was pretty sweet. They have also told us that we are going to be receiving a box of more stuff from the USOC with more clothes in them. So if any of you end up getting some USA Olympic gear from me for Christmas, you know where it came from. What can I say I am a regifter.

After uniforming we did some other logistical things like we got sized for our commemorative rings, took some head shots, and had a team briefing meeting. It all is so boring after getting all of your free stuff. All in all Saturday is one of the most fun parts about being a part of the USA Olympic team. Hopefully I wont wait four days before writing again.

Mark