Swimmer's Daily

  • A local family wants help raising awareness to fight breast cancer. They’re looking for people to play darts the weekend of Sept. 25. But there’s a catch, people have to play darts underwater as part of a tournament. It’s at central coast dive over the weekend and people can still sign up. They don’t even have to know how to scuba dive to be part of “Bosom Buddies.”

    See LOCAL12

  • Highlight video of our Pre-season training/bonding trip to Maui. Video credits to the one and only Lia Neal.

  • Rio 2016 have urged National Olympic Committees to seek “non-traditional” forms of accommodation during next year’s Olympics and Paralympics, such as rented apartments through their partnership with Airbnb. […]

    Speaking to delegates during last week’s OCA General Assembly in Ashgabat, Rio 2016 NOC Relations Department continental manager for Asia and Oceania Sarah Paterson admitted there were challenges, but insisted how organisers would help NOCs in any way possible.

    She urged them to look beyond hotels to apartments and other rented accommodation, claiming they could offer advice wherever needed.

    This follows an agreement signed earlier this year between Rio 2016 and Airbnb, the online rental community which is offering as many as 20,000 “affordable” accommodation options, predominantly aimed at fans attending the Games.

    Read Inside The Games

  • Former college swimmer Kaitlin Frehling has an important message for you wannabe college athletes – watch your social media posting!

  • Michigan’s own Allison Schmitt is known as the swimmer with a smile, the happy one by the pool. The Olympic freestyler will tell you now that the smile was real, but she was also secretly struggling.

    Schmitt won five Olympic medals during the 2012 summer games in London. Three were gold medals in the 200-meter freestyle race, the 4×200-meter medley relay and the 4×100-medley medley relay. She won a silver in the 400-meter freestyle and a bronze in the 4×100 meter freestyle relay.

    She returned to her hometown of Canton Township on a high, greeted by family, friends and fans. But then, the high turned into a low.

    “There’s this thing that they call post-Olympic blues and I think I had a little bit of that and I kept isolating myself and isolating myself. So, I just kept digging into a hole,” Schmitt told Local 4. “I didn’t really know how to describe it, I just wanted it to go away and to be happy and to be kind of like my old self.”

    She had begun suffering from depression.

    She said she wasn’t good at asking for help and that might have been part of the problem.
    “I would just want to sleep all the time and someone asked me, ‘What do you look forward to getting up in the morning?’ And what I looked forward to was going back to sleep,” Schmitt said. “I would never really respond to my messages or phone calls; especially to my mother because I feel like she has that mother sense that if there was something wrong she would always call me when I was crying and I would be like, ‘How does she know?’”

    Schmitt kept quiet about what she was feeling for quite some time, but in January she opened up to the three people who are closest to her.

    “I don’t think anyone put any pieces of the puzzle together, because even outside the pool I could still put a smile on, I could still have fun,” Schmitt said.

    However, her friend and teammate Michael Phelps did notice and said something during a swim meet in Austin, Texas, in January.
    “At the Austin Grand Prix, I walked out after the 400 (meter freestyle) where I probably didn’t give it my all, but I pretended I did,” Schmitt said.  “Michael had said something to me. He said, ‘Hey, I can tell,’ we had been going to practice for the past few weeks together, and he said, ‘I can tell in the past few weeks you’re not acting yourself. Something seems weird. If you need help just let me know. I have been through it and there is other people I can have help you.’”

    Schmitt said she started crying on the pool deck. “I just started crying and I said, ‘I do need help,’” she said.
    She confided in Phelps, and two of her coaches; Bob Bowman and Keenan Robinson.

    Read Click On Detroit

  • A Triangle company that guards against drownings is making a big splash as the summer comes to an end.

    SEAL Innovation, Inc., a company we previewed in a “What’s Next” segment two years ago, just received word the YMCA in Raleigh will be using their SwimSafe technology.

    “The problem is people don’t know their child is drowning,” said Dr. Graham Snyder.

    WNCN first spoke with Snyder in late 2013 as he was developing the swimming technology designed to stop drownings.

    His SEAL SwimSafe system was born out of first-hand experience trying to save drowning victims brought to WakeMed.

    “I wanted to find a solution for that because I hear this repetitive story of how it happens and I wanted to give the parents and the lifeguard a warning if in that rare instance a swimmer went under water and was not seen,” said Snyder.

    While the idea is simple, the technology is complex.

    “What the system does is it tracks continuously the status of the swimmer inside the swim band which is worn by the swimmers,” he said.

    Users simply turn on the hub and then set the swim level on a band between toddler to teen. A guard band is worn by parents or lifeguards.

    Snyder said that as good as the technology is, it’s not a replacement for a watchful eye.

    “It’s a technology that tells the status of a swimmer…If they’re above water or underneath the water,” he said.

    If the technology can stop even one drowning then it will have been worth the seven years he’s it took to develop it, Snyder said.

    See WNCN

    https://youtu.be/iedOLMO_42o

  • After the OpenROV team had been designing their own drones for almost half a decade, they decided to create an open source solution for consumers to enjoy. The Trident underwater drone comes ready to operate out of the box and is aimed at being easy to use for those new with the hobby. Best of all, everything is packed into a sleek, yet powerful, form factor.

    OpenROV says that they “painstakingly throughout” the Trident’s design to optimize its performance and usability. They claim that the unit’s specially hydrodynamically offset thruster design allows the Trident to move quickly when needed or maneuver delicately when desired.

    The form factor of Trident is “small enough to fit in a backpack or fit under an airplane seat”, so you can take the unit wherever you are headed. OpenROV notes that the unit’s sides are molded with firm rubber that protect it “from underwater obstacles as well as rough handling.”

    For those wanting to know the technical specifications, the Trident can dive to a depth of 100m and move at a top speed of 2 m/s. The best part is that, unlike aerial drones with short battery capacities, the Trident can last up to three hours of run time.

    See PetaPixel and KickStarter

    https://youtu.be/pjTh8ChlFss

    And oh, they reached their $50,000 goal in only 5 minutes, and are at $540,000+ now

  • A Colorado man garnered top overall honors Saturday at an open water swim in the Florida Keys designed to raise awareness of the need to preserve six aging lighthouses off the subtropical island chain.

    Boulder’s Yoelvis Pedraza completed the 9-mile Swim for Alligator Lighthouse Saturday in 3 hours, 18 minutes and 3 seconds, besting his 2014 victory time by almost 17 minutes.

    “I like to come to this swim, it’s such a long swim and it’s only once a year,” said Pedraza, who recently moved to Boulder from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. ” What ‘makes’ the swim is to get to the lighthouse.

    “Right underneath it, is just a gigantic diversity of life,” he said. “You see reef, you see fish, you see everything.”

    Alison Hayden of Kinnelon, N.J., won the women’s title at 4:31:07.

    Read South Florida Reporter

  • You’ve heard of cycling tours, where vacationers ride bikes from destination to destination. You can also take running trips, touring the rugged countryside or city landscapes by foot.

    Now, add swim travel to that list.

    It’s not as crazy as it sounds, with a growing number of swim tour operators. Vacationers can take a dip in the Gulf of Kotor, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Montenegro. Or swim their way across the British Virgin Islands. The companies take care of all the logistics, including boat lodgings.

    “It’s becoming really popular because people are tired of going to the beach and doing nothing,” said Nina Strel, of Strel Swimming Adventures, which takes people on trips to the waters of Turkey, Croatia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Lake Powell in the U.S.

    Strel and Swim Vacation are two of the major swim tour companies, along with Swim Trek and The Big Blue Swim. While details vary between trips, most of the itineraries include a planned swim in the morning to a hidden cove, across a gorgeous reef, or to explore underwater shipwrecks. You have lunch, go for a hike, and get some feedback on your stroke before another swim in the afternoon.

    Read Yahoo! Travel