New Site - Blog Moved

The new website is now up and running at the domain address: www.robertiddiols.com. It looks great and I'm extremely happy with it. Thank you very much, Karin, for doing all the work. Let's hope I can put it to good use for some time yet. All the blog posts have been transferred across, but you now have to click on the title of each post to read the whole thing (you'll see what I mean). It's a bit irritating but it's written into the code so as not to slow down loading times. See you there!

Video Inspiration

I know attention spans shorten considerably when sat in front of a computer screen, and as one fellow blog host put it recently, "watching a half-hour of video on the Internet is like sitting through all three Lord of the Rings films back-to-back in the theater", but in my hours of idleness afforded by my waning training schedule I've trawled through a swathe of fantastic swimming videos online. Michael Johnson described how he became a master of pausing video cassettes at the exact spot to analyse and piece apart his technique, but in the age of YouTube even the fool has it all at his fingertips. With only a week to go before I'll be in the zone and up in Sheffield I'll share with you one or two videos over the coming week that I've gone back to again and again. The first, somewhat unsurprisingly, is the 4x100 freestyle relay at the Athens Olympics in 2004. The South African team of Roland Schoeman, Darien Townsend, Lyndon Ferns, and Ryk Neethling rewrote the script and the record books by sending the Americans and the Australians home with something to think about. Perhaps I'm slightly biased by having trained with all four of them during my time in Arizona, and I very proudly count them all as friends, but for me it's greater than the famous relay of 4 years ago in which Jason Lezak ploughed to victory for the Americans. Maybe not a better race, nor even a better spectacle, but certainly a bigger inspiration. I don't know the commentators but like the rest of the world they were blown away by the opening hundred; "Roland Schoeman is tramping with 25 to go. I mean these are class swimmers. He's a big body-length up."

PS.

We're currently working on a new website that will incorporate this blog. It will take a while to transfer everything over but it will give this whole operation at least the veneer of professionalism. It could be up and running within the next few days. Updates here as usual. Stay tuned.

Taper - Timed 50

Just ten days to go. Taper time is a wild beast. It's a Tazmanian Devil raging and tearing through your chains and means of control. Fortunate is the swimmer who can keep a level head in the weeks running up to a meet. Even the hardiest and most experienced of competitors would be forgiven for turning their palms up to the sprint gods. In the water you feel great, but then not so a day later. What distinguishes those who succeed is not simply the belief that it will all come good on race day but rather the knowledge that it will. Yesterday I stood on the blocks at the far end of Aldershot's Garrison pool for a timed training swim, focussing on my dive and break-out but breathing and controling the last 15 meters in particular. I was pleasantly surprised by the result. I split 5.3secs to 15m, 10.3secs to 25m, and turned to my feet in 24.1secs. The committed visitor to this blog will know that that time was faster than my race there two weeks ago. To find that sort of speed when not feeling good breeds confidence, confidence that you can't manufacture when the time before a meet can be measured in days and not weeks. Normally I'd feel a bit squeamish about posting a training video online, but as the sporting legends in Johnson's Gold Rush kept reminding me, you can only affect what you do so don't worry about anyone or anything else.

Gold Rush

A significant part of preparation for a big meet is purely psychological. This time round I've taken to reading - first up, Michael Johnson's Gold Rush, which he writes to be a read as a manual for "what makes an Olympic Champion". With his television work for the BBC Johnson's a self-proclaimed adopted-Brit so the book contains interviews with heroes like Chris Hoy and Steve Redgrave, but also has the lion's share of swimming pedigree too, including Rebecca Adlington, Mark Spitz, and Ian Thorpe. The interviews are woven through the text to bolster and contextualize the stepping-stones upon which Johnson dances and skips. It's genuinely excellent, and it's the best book of its kind in my admittedly rather narrow experience. Each interviewee, not least Johnson himself, has a particular outlook regarding sporting success, a particular set of beliefs and practices, of dos and donts. There's a large degree of overlap, but what's most interesting is the common trait, the shared factor. One such factor is visualization. Another is total self-absorption. Both of these are best illuminated by Chris Hoy when he tells Johnson what is was like to witness the team in the heat before his own break the World Record at the Beijing Olympics.

It was about being able to say, right, none of that is in your control; you have to focus on what you can control, and that is your performance. I was rehearsing in my head over and over the perfect race, from the moment I started to the moment I finished. Having that strength. At that time I did a lot of work beforehand, preparing for that potential situation to arise. It worked almost flawlessly.

Preparation

There's now just two weeks before I head up to Sheffield for my final stab at Olympic qualification. My training will gradually wind itself down to the stage where I'm like a coiled spring, a caged banshee ready to burst off the blocks with as much zip and vim as I can possibly muster. Lots of fruit and veg, neither to gain weight nor to lose weight, and lots of rest, sleep, and space. The physical work has been done, and now I'll focus on the details and technicalities of my starts, turns, and finishes while at the pool. I feel more powerful in the water than I ever have before, but it will make not a jot of difference unless I can translate that to speed, explosive speed. After a lifetime in the sport I know what works best for me. I'm doing everything I can; no stone stands unturned, no crack remains unfilled. More so than at any meet I've swam in the past I'm going to concentrate on my psychological preparation, whether by visualizing each aspect of my race, or running the race through my mind like a cassette, replaying what might happen and what could go wrong and how I'll deal with each situation. There's no chance of failure.

The Fast Lane

I know you're not supposed to use your phone while behind the wheel, but I couldn't resist snapping a picture of my view from the driver's seat last night. Spread between Runnymede and Virginia Water the brains behind the Olympics have converted what was previously a bus lane into an 'Olympic Lane'. How about that? We're quite a way outside London, but I presume there must be a reason behind it. Rowing events, perhaps. Or maybe it was installed specifically for yours truly on his way to training. Either way I'll be driving in it as much as possible from now on.

Video Highlights from March

People have assured me that they managed to snag the videos off the BBC Red Button, but it's notoriously difficult to record so all I'm left with of my swims at the Olympic Trials in March are these clips taken on mates' phones. We'll have to make do for now, and enjoy the various noises people make when watching swimming. If smartphone resolution isn't your thing, you could scroll down to the foot of this page at the British Swimming website and click the 'Men's 50 Free Final' link, but I think the videos below have a rather more personal touch. First, here's my semi-final swim in the 50m Freestyle. I was in the first semi-final so had no idea what sort of time would suffice to qualify for the final. Even coming third didn't guarantee a swim the next day, especially in something as short and boisterous as the 50m Free. Thank you, Cags at TribeSports. (I'm in lane 1.)



My time of 22.87secs. remains my personal best time, and seeded me eighth into the Final the following night. Could I go faster and move up the ranking? I tip my hat in the direction of Mr Lowe for the video. Here it is, complete with pre-race build-up and false-start controversy. (I'm in lane 1 again.)

Splash Out

It's unlikely that any of you missed this, because of the almost global circulation claims of the Windsor and Eton Express, but here's the article they printed of my appeal for sponsorship. Unfortunately, nothing came of it (has come of it), but it was satisfying all the same. Here is the online version of the article, and if you search their buy-a-photo section you can find some more peculiar pictures of yours truly. Enjoy the weather!

Bracknell Open 2012

I competed at the Bracknell and Wokingham Level 1 Meet this weekend. With exam season very much upon us there wasn't much in the way of opposition so I came away with easy victories in both my events, the 50m and 100m Freestyle. In fact, because I knew I was going to swim more or less unchallenged I experimented with my stroke and changed my race-plans somewhat. I recruited an eager eleven year-old to record the races so I could deconstruct and analyze the swims afterwards. I won the 50m with a time of 24.02, slightly off what I would usually expect, but as you can see from the video below my stroke-rate is notably slower than normal. Similarly, in the 100m I touched with a time of 52.66, not a bad time but I was particularly interested in coming back as fast as possible during the second length. My splits were 25.3secs for the first length (roughly a second-and-a-half slower than what I regularly target) and 27.2secs for the homeward stretch. For me, splits within two seconds of each other is almost unheard of, and it shows that I can produce good back-end speed, which is something I'll undoubtedly need to draw upon in a month's time at the National Championships. Unfortunately, my eleven year-old friend got a tad overenthusiastic for the 100m, so I've just posted the 50m. If you're interested in reading the full report that I write for the paper and the club website, you can read it here (my teammate Lucy Campbell snatched the headlines this week as she competed at the European Open Water Cup in Israel last week and came away with the bronze for the 10k (!)).

I'm in the middle with the black cap.