As Big Ten championships beckon, IU swim team prepares for spotlight

On any given late afternoon at the Counsilman/Billingsley Aquatic Center, the first thing one will notice upon walking in is not the distinct smell of chlorine commonly associated with pools.

Instead, the powerful sound of dozens of swimmers pounding through the pool and the booms of divers jumping on and off the board stand out.

On this particular Tuesday practice, the IU swimming and diving team is only weeks away from the Big Ten Championships — for the women, only one week remains, and for the men, two. Both teams are well into tapers. However, to the unknowing eye, it looks as if they’re training with maximum effort.

Today, though, is just another day of what IU swimmers have to go through, what the swimmers call one of the toughest daily workout regimens of all sports.

“We are pretty much continuously training,” senior swimmer Margaux Farrell said. “I would say that, for 90 percent of our time spent in the pool, we are moving. There is not a lot of ‘wall’ time or time spent taking breaks. We go through set after set until the workout is complete.”

Senior swimmer Allysa Vavra said she knows exactly what Farrell means. For Vavra, who is a bronze medalist at the 2011 Pan American Games, one of her weekly workouts consists of swimming 3,000 yards and more than one mile in warm-ups alone, which is followed by 30 laps of 100-yard swims that are required to take fewer than 60 seconds. All IU distance swimmers go through a similar workout a staggering 10 times a week and are in the weight room four times per week.

“I think swimming is one of the hardest sports because not everyone can do it. It is mentally and physically demanding, and we practice a ridiculous amount,” Vavra said. “I think people don’t realize what we do sometimes, but I think they should try jumping in and doing the set I talked about before. It sounds easy, but most people can’t even make a 100 in under two minutes.”

For both the men’s and women’s teams, all this hard work is put toward winning a Big Ten title. The women have won the Big Ten Championship three straight seasons and four of the last five, and the men are looking to win their first since the 2005-06 season. For most swimmers and divers, that title is the pinnacle of competition, and after months of hard work, it is finally within reach.

“It is this level of mental and physical training that I feel makes us prepared to be successful at our championship meets,” Farrell said. “Championship meets are long, stressful and trying on your body. You have to have a strong endurance base, and you must be mentally able to handle to competition as well. Personally, at Big Tens, I have to swim 10 races, and at NCAA’s, this number can be even higher because relays are swum at both prelims and finals.”

While swimmers work on their endurance and speed, on the other side of the CBAC, divers continue to work toward perfection. Multiple rounds of diving repetition follow long periods of stretching as divers work toward mastering dives by competition time.

“Diving is very mentally demanding,” junior diver Zac Nees said. “There is constant movement in diving, but the real stress is on the mind. We are diving constantly and doing different types of dives every time, so there are so many things we have to think about in order to strive for perfection.”

At 5 p.m., the swimmers come out of the water, the divers move from the boards and the team retreats to the locker rooms with smiles of relief on their faces. Practice is finished, but only for today. Tomorrow, an equally challenging routine will follow.

“Swimming and diving are very much mental sports, and you can will yourself to achieve or not achieve your goals,” Farrell said. “You need to be tough going into a meet setting to tell yourself that no matter what, you’ve trained for this. When you think about it, practice is so much more grueling and intense, and competitions are actually just the fun part to let all your hard work shine.”