A Day in the Life: John Criste, Day 5

Today's practice consisted of a few short sets, all at a moderate pace, to keep our stroke technique together before we race tomorrow. We started out with a team stretch, a part of swimming that is crucial to the maintenance of a swimmer's body. Stretching loosens the muscles so you're not too tight when you get in the water. With our schedule, (consisting of plenty of dryland and weight training) stretching keeps our bodies limber and flexible, which in turn helps maintain our stroke technique.

When it comes to my preference, Fridays are always at the top of the list. Friday sums up an entire week of training and always prepares you for, an almost always rigorous, Saturday practice. Saturday practice usually means a test set, lactate set, or threshold set. All three sets, I think, are beneficial to training. A test set usually sets our pace for the next few weeks; it's always important to put forth 100 percent effort on this set because your pace times depend on it. I don't know about you, but I don't want to practice slower pace times when I want to go fast in a meet!

Lactate sets are always a tough adventure. I call it an adventure because when you start, your body feels like it is at the peak of practice performance, but somewhere along the set your body can do one of two things: keep going strong or completely fail. I know, the word completely rings a bell doesn't it? Every time we do a lactate set in practice, I am eager to get started because I know that when it comes down to the last few rounds, I am going to have to put forth everything I got. The harder I try on the back half of the set, the more my muscles ache. The way I see it, if I get through the pain now, there is no reason I can't get through the pain during a future race. Doing lactate sets not only prepares my body for physical pain, but it prepares me mentally (helping me overcome the mental block sometimes created by difficult sets such as these.

An example of a common Nova Lactate set:

8 x 100s on 8:00 interval
*no swim down

With such a long interval, the build up of lactic acid grows with each resting minute and each 100.

Threshold sets depend on our pace times derived from test sets. Doing a threshold set gets our heart rates up for a long period of time while holding a pace on any given distance. Our threshold sets vary from 400s for the distance group all the way down to 50s. I always find myself practicing my negative splitting during a threshold set, giving myself more power in the end of a race.

This weekend in Long Beach will be a good judgment of my effort in all three of the aforementioned types of sets. As I have continuously said, I am very excited to get in the water and race some fast swimmers. I am looking forward to seeing how well Nova can perform this weekend knowing our current training situation. All it takes to swim fast when you're tired is a good attitude and a little bit of faith in your abilities.

I am very privileged and thankful to be on such a great and supportive team, I couldn't ask anymore from them. Hopefully, I am as good a teammate to them as they are to me. As this school year hits its halfway point, I look back at the memories I have with my teammates and school friends, and look forward to the memories I will make with my soon-to-be new teammates at Stanford University.

GO CARDINAL and GO NOVA!

John