Day Nine: Swimming Competitions

I was not present at today’s lecture but, from what I’ve got, it was about preparedness. It is the first step alongside with prevention and mitigation, that has to be planned and implemented in advance in the process of managing an eventual risk: it entails the first two steps quoted above and it’s what makes response and recovery efforts truly effective. Now, let’s see if I’ve understood: I swim since I was 6-year-old and there was a period, from 13 to 17 years old, in which I used to do competitive swimming – I know it doesn’t seem like, but I was quite good… or at least not that bad. In order to prepare for the competitive season, we followed more or less the same training of the Olympic level athletes (not that we were at their level of course…). First of all, the risk associated with intensive swimming or wrong ways of swimming are made clear since the start: the risk of a cramp due to muscles’ tension or dislocation is quite high if your muscular structure is not built up enough – therefore, it is essential that before starting to train for velocity you actually train for resistance in order to heat your all body up reducing to the minimum the risk of cramps; for this we used to swim interruptedly for a long period but not at full power – something quite heavy, like dolphin style swimming for 100 meter consequently or similar. Then, after resistance, it was the turn of technique: my instructor was extremely picky about two things in particular, the first dive and the underwater somersault, the exact two things I hated the most basically… we also had to restart the pool every time there was something wrong with the position of arms and / or legs. Then the final part: velocity – we had to race against each other and only the best one was exempted from doing a surplus of pools (the message was basically ‘if you don’t want to fait later, you better give the best now’). If I don’t remember wrong, my best performance in the long course 100 meters’ freestyle has been 1 minute and something like 20 seconds or less – and guess what, it was not during a competition… Usually the three phases would take respectively 3 months of resistance, 4 of technique, and 2 of velocity, for an overall of 9 months in order to get ready for the competition. But of course it was not just about swimming… as a matter of fact, as much the trainings could be tiring, the thing I hated the most was the diet: being as I am, I had to eat a

lot and often – not that I usually don’t eat enough, on the contrary despite the appearances, but I tend to eat very slowly and this does not help in any sense: you take too time to eat and it’s not good when you have to train right after, you feel full before and, generally speaking, it’s tiring and frustrating – not to talk about how nasty tuna and proteins together tasted… In case however you happened to have a cramp or a momentary lack of energies (and I still remember the many awful cramps in the right calf muscle), the procedure was simply to take a break, massage the injured part and keep swimming very lightly just to keep the muscle warm – of course, if the situation was to be more serious, you would have to recur to the medical staff instead, but luckily enough this never happened.