A Day in the Life: John Criste, Day 1

IRVINE, California, January 9. AFTER taking a winter hiatus from the "A Day in the Life" series on SwimmingWorldMagazine.com, we come back with a bit of a different flavor. Last year, we focused on the college ranks during the inception of our daily diary series. With the great success of this quick look into the lives of swimmers at various levels of development, SwimmingWorldMagazine.com decided to broaden the horizons of the program.

With that being said, we introduce Irvine Novaquatics' John Criste – our first club swimmer to take part in the series. Criste, 17, won the 100 breaststroke title at the 2006 Speedo USA Swimming Junior National Championships. Additionally, he finished fifth in an epic championship 100 breast heat at the Kerr-McGee Elite Pro-Am meet in December. After posting the top qualifying time from prelims, Criste battled against great breaststrokers like Mark Gangloff, Roman Sludnov and Kevin Swander – not too mention the top breaststroker in the world – Brendan Hansen.

Monday, January 8, 2007
WOW! The first day back at school after two weeks off is always tough. Waking up at 5 a.m. to get ready for school was pretty hard… wait, no it wasn't, I woke up that early for practice everyday during my break; I live for it!

After school, I headed home to eat a nutritious meal before practice: pizza and salad. Okay, so the pizza isn't that nutritious, that's why I subsidized it with a hearty salad. It is important to eat healthy while you are at the peak of your training. In fact, it's important all the time. I try to do my best when it comes to eating healthy so that my body is in able condition to accept the physical pounding of swim practice and dryland.

Oh, dryland. Today, we started practice with our routine dryland circuit, upper body strength conditioning two days a week, leg strength conditioning once a week, and dryland exercises twice a week. Mondays happen to be upper body. My dryland partner, Kevin "k. lit" Little, and I are always pushing each other to give our best efforts in order to produce the fastest possible swim.

Here is part of our Upper Body program:
Bench press: 3 sets x 8 reps
Curls: 3 sets x 8 reps
Triceps: 3 sets x 8 reps
Hypers: 3 sets x 8 reps
Lat Pull Downs: 3 sets x 8 reps
Pull Ups: 2 sets x 6 reps
Lat Raises: 3 sets x 8 reps

Grand Prix is this weekend in Long Beach at the Belmont Plaza; a pool that swimmers in SoCal come to be very familiar with. After the tough two weeks of winter break practice under our belts, Nova is prepared to see how well it can swim under the physical condition our bodies are in. Ron Turner, our new coach who challenges us everyday in practice, with a positive response I might add, is excited to see how well we can perform. I'll admit that I am excited as well.

GO NOVA!

John

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