Melbourne… check.

Melbourne was awesome. Thank you Nunawading Swimming Club and coach Nick Veliades. (picture of me and nick). Practices were getting harder to get to as I was adjusting to the time change. To make the 5am practice meant continually getting up at 3:50am. Traffic is good (i.e., light), but there is still the issue of driving on the left side. Time is quite off. For example, it is 9:15pm Thursday in AU and 6:15am Thurs. in Iowa.
So, my last training session was this morning. Both today and the last two days prior have been the most interesting from a training perspective. This team is pretty quick… like h.s. age females going 1:02 stand-up 100 meter free. The h.s. age guys were going :56-:58. They did a quality set yesterday, followed immediately with lactate testing. This club program has everything a university team would have in the US. Their college/university system is very different than ours. Almost all will go to “Uni” in their hometown (i.e, Melbourne) and live at home. They DO NOT swim for their Uni. There are hardly any swimming programs at the college/university level. So… back to lactate testing…they have their own lactate testing equipment. After this MVo2 set, their lactate mmls were anywhere from 1.1 to 13.6. They have tested lactate in relation to warm-down amounts and warm-down intensity and have come up with some really interesting information (i.e, look for a possible change in our warm-dwn, dogs and ducks).

They also use heart rate monitors that have the “swimming handle” attached so they just press the monitors to their chest to get an immediate reading, then pass it along to the next person. Their athletes show up on time… meaning dressed and ready to get in the water before 5am… They have up to 10 training sessions a week, but the total mileage is not what would happen in the US with that many sessions. They are very quality focused and do purposeful training. Each session leads into the next. I never found any garbage yardage.

The dryland “gym” session was fantastic. I took quite a bit of video and I am sure Tim will get really psyched about some of this stuff. This team has their own “physio” or conditioning coach. His name is Simon. Simon was extremely informative. (i.e., look for a possible addition of some exercises, dogs and ducks).

Aussies LOVE their sports. It was not more than two days after Stephanie Rice won gold in the 200 IM before she was on an Australian postal stamp. All of their gold medal winners have a postal stamp of themselves. It takes YEARS here to get on a stamp, and God forbid it would be an athlete. 1 hour of TV Evening News… :30 minutes of weather, happenings, etc. and :30 minutes of sport. I think I love it.

So, not to worry… it has not been all swimming. I have seen wallabees (sp?), kangaroos, the Great Ocean Road and the Apostles, had lots of great coffee, incredible fruits, and some really crazy driving!

I hope you all are getting ready to start a fantastic 2008-09 school year!