A Day in the Life: Andrea Hupman, Day 7

HONOLULU, Hawaii, December 16. IN her final entry in the "A Day in the Life" series here on SwimmingWorldMagazine.com, Northwestern junior Andrea Hupman writes about a variety of things surrounding the Wildcat training trip so far. She also relates how the court appearance went, as three swimmers had to testify against someone who allegedly broke into the team van early in the trip.

We want to express our gratitude to Andrea for participating in this super-sized edition of the "A Day in the Life" blog series.

Also, with the holidays coming up, the series will be taking a break until next year. Some exciting things are developing with the series in 2007 as SwimmingWorldMagazine.com has lined up swimmers from a variety of backgrounds to shed light on their daily lives. We will have club swimmers, Masters swimmers and swimmers from the Division II and Division III levels of swimming. We might also invite our friends from across the aquatic-sport spectrum to take part in the series.

Until then, here is Andrea's final blog to tide you over.

Friday, December 16, Day 7
Aloha!

I realized that I've made it almost a week without writing about our favorite breakfast restaurant, Smorgy's. It's an all-you-can-eat buffet style restaurant, with all kinds of breakfast food. It's an open air restaurant, so there are lots of birds. In addition to our pigeon friend from the beach, we have lots of little bird friends at Smorgy's. We see some of the same ones everyday—there's one with a limp that is always there. You have to be careful about leaving food on your table unattended because the birds will be sure to help themselves. Some of the girls get annoyed at the birds—allegedly, Rachel Rys even kicked one. She is our team vegetarian and claims to love animals and claims it was an accident, but I'm not so sure…

The wind moved in today. We left the Windy City only to find another one. And, the wind is very playful; it loves playing hide-and-seek with our things. We find paddles and flip-flops that have flown to the other end of the 50-meter pool. I'm trying to convince Coach Jimmy Tierney we should use duct tape to build sail boats out of our equipment and hold races during one of our practices, but I somehow don't think he's going to agree.

He does think, however, that we should get water balloons to throw at the other vans during the drives to and from the pool. Today, he pulled up next to one of our vans that had the back windows tilted open. He got out his water bottle and tried to squirt in water, but the angle wasn't right. Water balloons, though, would work much better. I hope we find some at a store; it could be lots of fun.

The court appearance today went pretty well. (For those of you just tuning in, one of our vans was broken into earlier this week.) It was a preliminary hearing. Our girls were asked basic questions such as, "What was stolen?" or, "Do you know this woman?" In addition to our three girls who went to testify, there were two other people whose ID's were found on the woman and who were testifying. The district attorney believes the case will likely end in a guilty plea or in a plea bargain. But, if it goes to trial (which wouldn't be for another couple months) our three witnesses will be flown back for free in order to testify. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

Morning practice repeated our sprint set with the cords as resistance (20×25 @ 1:30, 5 without equipment, 5 with paddles, 5 with fins, and 5 with fins and paddles). I moved up to the black cord (it's thicker and offers more resistance) for all the 25s. It was important to focus both on the power of each stroke and maintaining stroke length even for the last 5 yards when I felt like I was hardly moving. After that set, we did 4×15 yard blasts from a dive. It feels like you're flying when you swim without resistance. It helps solidify everything you've worked on with the cords.

Afternoon practice focused on kicking.
5 x {6×50 @ :50 solid pace, 1×200 @ 3:00 all out fast, 1×100 swim easy)
Our fast emphasis was a slightly longer distance. Mixing up the distances keeps the sets interesting. The longer distance also helps build up endurance.

We are only halfway through training trip, and I have to end my blogs here. But, I will let you in on a few of the fun things we are looking forward to, such as an entire day off on Sunday (I am still in a bit of happy disbelief about it; we've never had one over training trip before), a hike up Diamond Head, a trip to Pearl Harbor, a trip to the Dole Pineapple Plantation, and our dual meet against University of Hawaii where we will be joined by the Northwestern men's team (they are currently training on a different island). Mahalo for reading my blogs. I hope you've enjoyed them!

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