Poolside-Chat-parents-of-competitive-swimmers

[Glittertwins]

Hopefully this will work as we’re at 999 on the other!

Congrats to mini Hello

Well done @Hellocatshome / mini!

I hope you've all been having a good summer hols. I've really enjoyed the swimming on the telly.

Just a big "how/are you mad?!" to the 10m divers (and parents) in case there are any lurkers.

It's been a great summer of swimming this year. Going to miss it although the competition merry-go-round will soon ramp up. I think I have September free of meets then it goes mental.

It's been very weird - but nice and definitely necessary not swimming for week on end.

Ds just did 2 short sessions after British.

Summer lockdown now and first week back is again just 2 short (morning 😫) sessions.

I absolutely agree about the diving. And when they handstand on the 10m - especially the outdoors this year - I'm just sat willing them to hold it.

DS's club dont have a shut down but move to a reduced timetable and swimmers strongly encouraged to take a week off at some point over the summer. We aren't going away so DS is currently on his enforced (by me) week off and is not a happy bunny!

Some of the youngest divers train while DS has training and I cant watch them 🙈 although I have sat there quietly willing a very nervous diver to jump off the 10m board and I was so proud of her when she did and I dont even know her 🤣

We also have a diving club train at the same time as us, how they can do what they do is amazing. It terrifies me!
I felt sorry for them last night as we had a fairly boisterous silly games set for half the session so it was noisy

A few years ago DD's school organised a "learn to dive" afternoon at pool with 3m and 10m boards (I think the games teacher lived in the same town and knew some of the coaches). DD could just about cope with 3m but the 10m board looked stupidly high and I think just a couple of kids were willing to jump off feet first.

DD has swum twice in the past month. Thankfully training resumes next week.

Ds and I love watching the Mr Bean episode when he's on the 10m platform 🤣

We watched some diving at commonwealth pool when we were there as they had a camp on.

Some of them looked about 8. I was so impressed as they threw themselves 10m off the platform into a pool about 3 times as Dee as they are tall!

DD used to dive as well as swim but she gave up diving as she didn't want to get injured and have to stop swimming!

She was fairly decent at it as she had a gymnastics and trampolining background but her first love has always been swimming.

It is terrifying (& very painful) when they don't land well.

I often wondered how painful it was because there lots of taping and also lots of heavy wrapping like wrist guards which I always assumed was preventative?

The kinesiology tape is to help prevent but also promote recovery.

The pain factor is high depending on height of board, type of dive and landing position. You can get very badly injured as well.

DD gave up after a particularly bad landing as she had a real mental block about getting back on the board to re-attempt the dive (and also didn't want time out from swim)

I couldn't even look down off the platform and just jump, let alone doing all the twists etc. Very impressive to watch so I shall stick to the spectating side!

We've had our return to training email.

We've had a new director of swimming as a replacement for a head coach and so far it seems like things are changing but positively.

So after the end of season meets and not real training although sessions available and the 2 week shut down for the first 4 weeks they return in a phased way.

So 2 sessions, 4,6,8 then week 5 the full on 9 sessions. I've never seen this before but I know how much pretty much 4 weeks off has done ds good so I'm assuming this is a way of building up without overloading them?

We've still got 3 sessions a week on summer timetable before full service resumes in Sept

The secondaries are back here and we had a full turn out for training this morning. Love seeing the new first years in the new uniforms. And it was dark leaving the house.
Summer is over!

We went back this morning. Just 1.5 hours.

Ds coach also mentioned to him that he's on a swim programme this year but can't tell him more until SE contact him/me.

Back to full evening program tomorrow night and then the competition treadmill!

I think ds first comp will be much nearer to Christmas!

Apparently the para British winters are in Glasgow over a termtime weekend so I'm very much thinking we won't be doing that one!

Got our Gala schedule for this season last night. They are doing a distance gala in November which DS is worrying about despite having done 2k at the Regional and National Open Waters. I will never understand that boy.

We have our first L3 gala on Sept 11th. I remember entering DS in almost all events…It seemed like a good idea at the time as he was on a PB roll. It’s going to be a real shock to the system 😳

Our first one is October but am now being more strategic with their entries. They have to do the odd event that they don't have a ranking time on in the last 2 years but other than that, it's just what they want to do rather than everything as before. One of them already has all the county qual times needed and is just targeting SC winter regionals.

Our regional SC is having para events and so ds will swim it. I imagine his times are enough.

He's actually only 1/2 second off the AB qualifying base times for 50 free up to 2 seconds off the base for 400! Such was his improvement at the summer meets!

I’ve gone opposite purely as he has the winter counties and regionals times he’s likely to get, so now just swimming to improve his times across the board

We get no say in the matter, we have to enter what the coach says. He has 4 sc regional times and if they use the same times as published last year for counties then he has 1 time for that so far. He is close on a couple so we will see what the next few galas bring. He is having a bad spell with his trichotillomania so I'm not telling him anything about times, what will be will be.