Championship season means fast swimming, raucous pool decks, and a swimmer's favorite time of the season – taper. Without getting too technical, taper is the period of reduced training at the end of a training cycle before an important meet, which allows athletes' bodies to recover and become more rested, preparing the muscles to perform at their peak levels at their championship meets.
For swimmers, taper means sleeping in an extra half hour, time spent on starts, turns, and finishes, as a jovial feeling pervades practice, with teammates in high spirits, excited to “hit their taper” and swim best times.
Amanda Kendall (LSU) touched on aspects of her taper last week in her blog post. This week, she is on her way to Knoxville for the Southeastern Conference Swimming & Diving championship meet, hosted by the University of Tennessee. She will test herself against the best in the SEC, in a championship meet that has seen the likes of Olympians Ryan Lochte and Allison Schmitt in recent years. Amanda is focused right now. She forwarded this message along:
This week totally got away from me. We are flying now, and wont arrive in Knoxville until 5:30. Then we have to go practice and eat. My week has gone well. Taper feels funny, but I am getting very excited. Sorry I wasn't able to blog this week, I am a little on overload right now. Hopefully I will have some exciting news to share next week.
-Amanda
Her blog will pick back up next week following the conference meet.
Last year, Michael Flach was heading to SECs with the University of South Carolina; however, after taking an Olympic redshirt, Michael is spending this time training down south with the Gator Swim Club in Gainesville, Florida and 2012 Olympic Head Coach Greg Troy.
Our lone underclassman, Bradley Phillips, has just begun his taper with the University of Virginia. The Atlantic Coast Conference women's championship meet starts this week, while the men do not begin until Feb. 22. Bradley blogs about what it is like to be on taper, along with some of the more fun aspects of being a college athlete.
Bradley Phillips
(Virginia Sports Media)
Taper is here and is in full effect, bringing about a lot of changes in my daily routine. The main purpose of taper is getting the body and mind prepared to swim to the best of your abilities at the championship meet. Different teams, and swimmers, have their own philosophies about when to rest and how much you need. It is between the swimmer and coach to work out a plan to best let their bodies recover from the grueling training season in order to perform well at championships.
There are some great traditions that most swim teams uphold during taper that help keep things fun and the mood upbeat. The concept of rest gets blown way out of proportion, and swimmers are known to go out of their ways to “save energy.” The theory is the more energy we save up during taper, the more we’ll have to use during our races. Stairs are to be avoided like the plague in order to not tire the legs out one bit. When there is no other way around it, don’t be surprised to see a swimmer trudging up a short flight of stairs like it is the steps into Mordor.
Have you ever been in an elevator where a person rushed in as the door was closing, only to get off just one floor up? It was probably a swimmer on taper. In college, swimmers will beg and plead their friends for a ride to class when it is a simple 10-minute walk to get there. Laziness gets taken to the extreme and swimmers will use any excuse to not physically exert themselves.
Another favorite taper tradition, for men, is not shaving. It is an unspoken bond between men across the NCAA to grow the largest and most manly beard before the championship meet. It’s funny to see how some guys can only grow a few wispy hairs that barely pass for a mustache – for example, me, – and other guys at the opposite end of the spectrum with beards that would put King Leonidas and the Spartan army to shame. One of the local college swimming conferences, the CAA, even had a fun unofficial online beard-off in which swimmers competed to see who had the best beard. Of course, the technical purpose of growing a beard is to increase your resistance while training in the water so that when you shave it off you feel incredibly fast.
The extra sleep we get as morning practices get pushed back later is a remarkable side effect of taper. Because we’re doing less work in the water, there is no need to wake up at obscene hours in the morning to train. It’s amazing how much difference one extra hour of sleep can do for the body and the mind.
One of the most important benefits of taper is the added team bonding. We do more activities out of the pool as a team, like going to the movies or a team dinner, all so we can strengthen our relationship as a group. To take home a victory at ACCs, we’ll have to be a united front, with everybody swimming for the same purpose. The camaraderie we form during taper can make all the different come race time.