Swimmer's Daily

  • REMUS SharkCam: The hunter and the hunted: In 2013, a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution took a specially equipped REMUS “SharkCam” underwater vehicle to Guadalupe Island in Mexico to film great white sharks in the wild. They captured more than they bargained for.

  • Sitting on the deck at his beloved Meadowbrook, Michael Phelps glances toward the pool where he was once afraid to put his face in the water.

    “This is me,” he said, a slight smile curling off his lips. “This is home.”

    This is where Phelps put in most of the work to become the most decorated athlete in Olympic history. This is where he’s looking to add to that legacy after an aborted retirement, his eyes firmly on the Rio Games two years away.

    And as the world’s greatest swimmer takes his comeback to it’s the biggest stop yet, this week’s U.S. national championships in Irvine, California, it’s important for him to remember where he came from.

    Why? Because for all the hoopla over LeBron James returning to Cleveland, there’s no bigger homebody than Phelps.

    Read Boston Herald

  • Five thousand. That’s the population of Coolangatta, Australia. Yet someway, somehow, this tiny town has produced more surfing world champions than anywhere else in the world.

    A lot of that has to do with the local wave. You may have heard of it – it’s called the Superbank. But in The Ripple Effect, we learn that the history of the Coolangatta Kids runs a whole lot deeper than the world’s most famous sandbar.

  • Following the remarkable introduction of High Diving in the FINA World Championships programme and crowning moment of the first-ever World champions in Barcelona (ESP) last year, Kazan (RUS) will host the inaugural edition of the FINA High Diving World Cup on August 8-10, 2014.

    Two events are on the programme: a men’s competition in three rounds (Aug 8 and 10) and a women’s competition in one round (Aug 9). Men will perform five dives from a 27m platform while women will take off from a 20m platform, exhibiting three dives.

  • With a majority decision, through mail vote, the LEN Bureau approved to move the next European Short Course Swimming Championships from January to December 2015.

    Earlier this year LEN allocated the next edition of the European Short Course Swimming Championships to the city of Netanya (ISR) – the dates of the event were set at 15-18 January 2015.

    After recent consultations, the host of the continental showcase, the Israeli Swimming Federation informed LEN on their purpose to transfer their initial aim of institutional naming support to the City of Herzliya. In the meantime LEN also conducted surveys and found that changing of the dates would also secure a bigger success to the event.

    “The overall sports calendar in January is quite overloaded, and LEN wishes to avoid a clash with most of the other main sport events, as well as its own continental organisations counterparts, in order to properly value the due outcome of the aquatic product to offer worldwide” LEN Executive Director Paulo Frischknecht said.

    A mail vote has been conducted and the overwhelming majority of the LEN Bureau members approved the proposal on moving the event to December.

    This means that the next European Short Course Swimming Championships will take place on 2-6 December 2015 with the institutional naming support of Herzliya. The event will also mark the first ever s/c Europeans to be held over 5 days.

    See Press release from LEN

  • Dave filmed this amazing aerial vision with his quadcopter off Esperance, along south Western Australia’s beautiful coastline. Huge pods of bottlenose dolphins cruise the shoreline and surf the crystal clear turquoise waves.

  • Catherine Bent is a female water diviner whose body is highly sensitive to nature and physical elements. She identifies spots where water and underground streams can be tapped into, using a bizarre zombie-like walk which throws her body around so violently that “sometimes she falls flat on her face”.

  • In the late 1990s, South African researcher Tim Noakes proposed that a “central governor” in the brain prevents us from getting too dangerously close to the absolute limits of our bodies. Physiologists have been arguing ever since about the brain’s role in determining truly “maximal” effort, but the bottom line is clear: “We know there’s something in the brain that regulates performance,” says MacRae. “Now we want to see if we can manipulate it.”

    To do so, they’re using a technique called transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS, which has experienced a wild surge in popularity among researchers over the last few years. There are studies on pain, depression, memory and learning, and enhancing the motor rehab of Parkinson’s and stroke. Then, last year, Brazilian researchers published a study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine showing that trained cyclists produced 4 percent more power and had lower heart rate and perceived effort during an incremental test after a 10-minute bout of tDCS—and suddenly, the sports world was interested.

    “It’s about the nature of fatigue,” explains MacRae, a trim, straight-backed figure with a faint South African accent. “Why do we slow down? Why do we make that decision to slow down?” If the answer seems obvious, think again. It’s true that if you take an isolated piece of muscle in a Petri dish and jolt it with electricity over and over again, it will eventually stop twitching. That’s how we usually think of fatigue—as a purely corporeal phenomenon, a mechanical breakdown. But that’s not what happens in a race. You cross the line and you’re still moving. Your muscles still work, and your heart’s still beating. So why didn’t you go faster?

    Read Outside

  • Seven-time Olympic swimming medalist Amanda Beard was in Springfield on Friday, Aug. 1, 2014, putting on a clinic at the west-side YMCA. She’s continuing her professional career, aiming at a spot in the 2016 Rio games, 20 years after her first Olympic medals in Atlanta.