Swimmer's Daily

  • Myles Brown trained really hard last year. He was eyeing individual medals in the swimming pool at both the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and the Fina short-course world championships (a 25m event) that took place in Doha, Qatar, in December.

    When neither materialised, he was really disappointed – so much so that he decided to take a break from swimming. “The pressure and expectations [from within myself] got the better of me,” he tells me at a coffee shop in Westville, Durban. “I didn’t achieve what I wanted to do and it was quite a big disappointment for me. Straight after Doha, I took one and a half months off swimming.”

    Brown spent that month surfing, playing golf and doing a lot of thinking. “A break is obviously not advisable for a swimmer, but for me it was necessary – to figure out why I was doing what I was doing and to regain my love and passion for the sport.”

    The break seems to have paid off for the 22-year-old, if his performances at April’s South African National Aquatic Championships in Durban are anything to go by.

    Brown dominated the freestyle events at the King’s Park swimming pool, speeding to gold in the 100m, 200m, 400m and 800m freestyle races. On the first day of the championships, he set a new South African 400m freestyle mark of 3:46.08, breaking a record set by Ryk Neethling in 1999. Four days later, Brown broke the South African 800m freestyle record set by Troyden Prinsloo in 2009.

    Read Mail & Guardian

    (a video from last year)

  • The 20-year-old became the first man to swim the 100m breaststroke inside 58 seconds when he set a time of 57.92 seconds at the British Swimming Championships in April,

    That came eight months after breaking the 50m breaststroke record.

    “There are lots of areas I can improve to get every millimetre out of myself,” Peaty told BBC East Midlands Today.

    “I am more pleased to be the first person to go under 58 seconds. I never thought I would get anywhere near it.

    “It boosted my confidence massively knowing I can go that fast.

    “It’s a great position to be in, but it’s now about re-focusing and re-motivating to see what I can get.”

    See video interview on BBC

    Image courtesy of deepbluemedia.eu

  • Hungary’s Katinka Hosszu talks about her stacked schedule at the Arena Pro Swim Series Charlotte.

    Hosszu explains how you have to enjoy the pain by swimming as hard as you can, even in prelims.

    Every race is an opportunity to get better as a swimmer.

    See Swimming World

  • A 19 year-old East Tennessee man was trying to spend a relaxing morning on the riverbank doing some fishing, but ended up in the water to save a man’s life.

    Daniel Baldwin is in love with the sport of fishing. If he’s not in class at The University of Tennessee, he’s on the river angling for the next big catch. One of his favorite spots for bass fishing is at the boat launch of Norris Lake in Tazewell.

    “I came here to shoot a video for YouTube about catching small mouths off these boats ramps in the summer time, but I walked away with something I’ll never forget for the rest of my entire life,” Baldwin said.

    Because he was shooting a video, Baldwin had his GoPro strapped to his chest and had just started recording. That’s when he noticed a man just a few feet off shore fall into the water from his boat and start going under the water. Baldwin said he immediately realized the elderly man couldn’t swim and rushed to help, jumping into the eight to 10 feet deep water to get the man above the water and onto the shore.

    The entire event was caught on camera from Baldwin’s point of view.

    “I threw my rod down and jumped in there didn’t even think about anything else except for getting that man out of the water,” he explained.

    See WKRG

  • Paul Giamatti has joined the small but impressive list of celebrities who were competitive swimmers before they achieved stardom, publicly discussing his past life in the pool during an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

    On the show to promote his upcoming film San Andreas, Giamatti talked about growing up in New Haven, Conn., as “the third-level backstroke guy” on his team. He doesn’t specify if the team was part of his high school or if it was a USA Swimming team.

    Giamatti also briefly talked about a training trip to the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in the 1980s, and said he thought he might be a member of the Hall of Fame. Though a few Hollywood celebrities are among the illustrious group of inductees, Giamatti is not one of them. He and Kimmel shared some laughs over a common occurrence among swimmers: the process of shaving.

    See Swimming World

    http://youtu.be/SkAQz81X3B4

  • 6-times Danish coach of the year Bo Jacobsen has decided to start his own coaching consulting business, see www.coachjacobsen.dk. Bo is brother and former coach of Danish swimming legend Mette Jacobsen, who also coached Jacob Carstensen to gold in the 400 freestyle at the 1997 World Short Course Championships.

    Bo was from 1994 to 2013 the flag bearer of Danish swimming outside of the National Training Center in Copenhagen, as head coach of 12-times Danish club of the year SGI/West Swim, later merged into Esbjerg Svømmeklub, before he moved on to new successes as national head coach of Finland, 2013-2015.

    And he is a nice guy ! :-)

    bo-jacobsen-coaching.pdf

     

  • Brian Goldman died peacefully Sunday morning (May 10, 2015) after a long battle with colon cancer. He is survived by his wife, Michele, his two adored sons, Jared and Ben, his parents Jill and Alan Goldman, his sisters Betsy Goldman and Melissa Rouse, brother-in-law Scott Rouse, nephews Jake and Austin Rouse, brother and sister-in-laws Mark and Tamar Hauptman and their children, Jacob, Rebecca, Gabrielle, and Noah. He is also survived by his precious Mudpuppy family.

  • Brock on your Block host Phil Brock talks with Mikey Flaherty of the organization Swim With Heart in Santa Monica. Swim With Heart focuses on children and adults with special need teaching them not only how to swim but how to also strengthen their bodies.

  • In part 3 of the official film of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games we turn our attention to Swimming, Athletics and we see Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj attempt to claim Olympic glory.