Swimmer's Daily

  • It was just an ordinary all-staff meeting until Mallory Weggemann showed up to make a splash! Her message was for “us,” but it’s really for “all of us.”

  • Cal swimmer and Cheyenne Mountain graduate Daniel Carr is preparing for next summer’s Olympic Games.

  • Are you ready for Maddison Keeney’s “Top 3 Dives”? We asked Maddison for her personal favourites from the FINA World Championships, and here they are!

  • Ben Lecomte is an ultra-endurance swimmer and the first person to complete a cross-Atlantic ocean swim without a kickboard. He has also swum through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to raise awareness for sustainability and the impact of plastic pollution. He was named one of the World’s 50 Most Adventurous Open Water Swimmers in 2019 by the World Open Water Swimming Association.

    Some interesting insights from this episode:

    He swam over 3,500 miles from Massachusetts to Quiberon, France. The journey took him 73 days, swimming upwards of 10 hours a day, and fighting off sharks and battling 20-foot swells. Swimming 3,500 miles across the Atlantic was about mind over matter. Swimming hours upon hours a day with limited stimuli, your mind has to be even stronger than your body. As a coping mechanism, he had to learn to disassociate his mind from his body so while his physical body was suffering, his mind could be in an entirely different world. He swam across the Atlantic in honor of his father and to raise awareness for cancer. His father’s passing was the kick in the butt he needed to pursue his dreams and not live life with any regrets. Swimming the Pacific (until he had to abort the trip) was actually easier than his Atlantic crossing 20 years earlier since the older you get, the more you learn to control the mind and mentally deal with the obstacles along the way. He swam 400 miles through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the highest concentration of human-made discarded plastic in the world. It was like looking at the sky at night during a snowstorm. You are surrounded by millions of little particles of plastic. He cut open fish in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and found pieces of plastic. “You cannot really know your limit until you challenge your limit.” “Excellence is like beauty… it’s in the eyes of the beholder.”

    https://youtu.be/eNNrW2VwvEQ

  • A swimmer died after being pulled from the ocean in Crescent Beach on Saturday.

  • Decorated Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps sits down with Jeremy Schaap on Outside the Lines to share his journey with depression and discusses the impact of other athletes coming forward with stories of their own struggles with mental health.

  • Former WWE Superstar Shad Gaspard of the tag team Cryme Tyme is missing after a swim with his son Sunday.

    According to TMZ, Gaspard was swimming with his 10-year-old son at Venice Beach, California Sunday afternoon when the former wrestler and a group of swimmers were caught in a strong riptide around 4 p.m.

    A witness at the scene told TMZ that Gaspard directed rescuers to help his son first, which they did. A Los Angeles Fire Department official told the media Sunday that they believe Gaspard “did submerge” and that’s the last time the 39-year-old was seen.

    “The primary factor yesterday was the hazardous surf, with waves at four to six feet,” the source told The New York Daily News. “We had strong lateral and strong rip currents through the entire Venice area. Our lifeguards were making hundreds of rescues.”

    Read Newsweek

  • Adam Peaty did not need to be diagnosed to work out what was wrong.

    ‘I was in a place where you don’t find any fun in anything or you don’t really see the point in anything,’ the British swimming superstar recalls.

    It was 18 months ago that Peaty suffered from those symptoms of depression and, for a time, the Olympic champion and world record holder became more interested in booze than breaststroke.

    Peaty has previously admitted to struggling with the comedown from winning gold at Rio 2016. But this is the first time he has spoken of the mental torment he also experienced two years later, triggered by a defeat in the Commonwealth Games in April 2018 — his first loss in four years.

    ‘After Rio, you get the post-Olympic blues, but my deepest low was at the end of 2018,’ the 25-year-old tells Sportsmail.

    ‘The Commonwealth Games was a tough time because I took a loss in the 50m and I am the fastest man on the planet, so why was I losing? That doubt creeped up. There wasn’t really that much belief in myself.

    ‘After the Commonwealths, towards the end of the year, I didn’t have any races. And when you involve off-season and you involve partying and drinking, that’s a depressant in itself, so I was doing that a lot. I kind of, not went off the rails, but I didn’t really have that overwhelming motivation to perform at something. And I am a performer, so if I don’t have something to perform at, I completely lose my track.

    ‘Add that in with all that partying and stuff, it wasn’t that great to have that all at once.

    Read Brinkwire