2021 Week 39 - Sierra Nevada ⛰🇪🇸
Trying to create the habit to write some blurb each week here! I totally missed Tokyo, which is lame, but I’ll be better! Focus: more consistency and allow myself to be short and sweet.
Week 40 - this is after the 2021 ISL ‘regular season’ matches in Napoli 🇮🇹 have ended. The athletes took 4 days break to go home, visit friends or just relax. Yes they basically didn’t swim at all… I pretended to not know, and just didn’t ask.
Personally I dashed back to Istanbul for my couple of days break, and slept a lot, but also got out a fair amount to explore the European side of the city. I’ve decided to have a ‘cultural day’ each week and this week took a trip to the National Palaces Painting Museum, before flying over to Spain on Tuesday.
I have four athletes with me now here in Sierra Nevada 🇪🇸 (2,320m):
Kregor Zirk 🇪🇪 (200/400m Freestyle, 200m Butterfly)
Siobhan Haughey 🇭🇰 (100/200m Freestyle)
Travis Mahoney 🇦🇺 (Free/Back/IM)
Simona Kubuva 🇨🇿 (100m Backstroke)
Travis and Simona have done altitude before, actually here in Sierra Nevada, but not for 10 years. They were a little nervous about coming as they have had negative experiences in the past training at altitude. In fact, that seems a very common thing amongst many of the swimmers. My hope is that my personal experience living and training at altitude for running will help me manage the training load for them. I mentioned this in the SwimSwam Podcast episode I was featured while in Napoli.
During the first 4-day block in Sierra we focused almost exclusively on allowing the athletes to acclimate to the altitude. Since we spent so much time swimming easy we also made it a priority to have a large technical focus as well as doing video work.
On the running front - this is my second altitude camp in three months now, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that my acclimation from August was still very strong. I didn’t struggle really at all in the first days in Sierra Nevada and even got in some good harder sessions on the Friday… but then I got a little sickness, so that was less than ideal.