2022 FINA World Championships Diary by Gary Francis "Gaz"
Introducing Gaz's Diary
If you've been around pools for long enough you've probably had the pleasure of bumping into our Olympic Programme Lead Gary Francis. Gary, or Gaz as he's affectionately known is on the ground as team leader for the 2022 FINA World Swimming Championships. To help you stay up to date with the latest and greatest, we'll be sharing 'Gaz's Diary' everyday in the lead up to and during the competition.
Also a special shoutout to Lewis Clareburt who's not only leading the charge for our athletes in the pool. But, also capturing awesome images to help you stay up to date with the team.
Settling In Period
The training sessions are starting to move towards more quality work now so it’s certainly a better time to assess how the athletes have handled the travel and recovery process. Overall they have done an excellent job as the quality of the work completed today was excellent with several swimmers starting to swim some tough sets, varying in from broken swims and 50’s at race pace to some high end aerobic work for a couple of the middle distance freestylers.
The athletes are really gelling together well, as evidenced by the swimmers who are resting for that session still coming to the pool deck to stretch out with their colleagues. I haven’t really seen that to this extent before, especially in a centre that has so many places to go to where they can grab a coffee or sit in comfy surroundings. The team have also started to stretch and prepare as a group before moving onto individual preparation which is another encouraging sign of developing team culture.
Tomorrow the relay swimmers will work some relay changeovers into their training. We felt that it wasn’t really beneficial to do too much too early before they are feeling sharper in the pool. The next couple of days will be quite low key with regards to relay practices with the teams just grabbing opportunities when individual sets allow and get them experimenting with different pairings as the relay order starts to take shape.
On a non-swimming note, tomorrow there is a big international athletics meet at the centre in the stadium and the rumour is that there will be an attempt on the woman’s 5000m WR. We finish training at 7pm and the race is scheduled for 7:38pm so hopefully we’ll get to see something special and very motivational too!
That’s about it for day 3!
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Make sure you're following @swimming_nz on social media to keep to date with the latest athlete interviews, results and excitement from our Aquablacks team at the 2022 FINA World Swimming Championships.
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