On the Necessity and Purpose of a Training Trip

January 3, 2009: Training Trip Day -2

So I was out to dinner with some lifeguarding friends a week or so ago, and naturally, us all being college swimmers or ex-college swimmers, we got around to the topic of our upcoming training trips.

After sharing stories about our own experiences on training trips and our own anxieties about the upcoming month, I believe the consensus we arrived at was something along the lines of "training trips are not very fun", except with probably some slightly more colorful language.

However, thing a friend of mine said did stand out to me. He said that "Training trip is really the beginning of the season."

Fastforward about a week. I'm at a Christmas party talking to an old family friend, who asks me about training trip. I explain the basics (Winter Term, going to Florida, awfulness) to her, and she asks a question.

"Why do you go on a trip? Couldn't you just practice at school?"

I didn't have an answer for her.

It certainly doesn't make a whole lot of sense to pay a fairly substantial amount of money to travel to a warmer place (in the middle of winter, when it won't be extremely warm) to pay for lodging to reserve a strange pool to practice when we could stay in our dorms and swim at the pool we already had the college build for us.

Of course, if we had to stay in Oberlin for the entire month of January, I'm betting we'd get a result similar to Fargo.

So that's part of it: It's just nice to take a break from the cold and go down to the warm. As little fun as many other parts of training trip can be, that aspect of it is at least enjoyable.

I'm betting the other major reason that most colleges do a training trip ties back into my first friend's quote, about training trip being the beginning of the season. Of course, its' silly to ignore the first half of the season, which involved a whole lot of training and some important meets. But the point still stands that taking a trip simply to concentrate on swimming is a great way to well, concentrate on swimming. It sets the pace for the second half of the season and kickstarts it in a way that is both intense and memorable to the swimmers involved.

Maybe that is why so many swimmers have mixed-to-negative feelings about training trip. It's an extremly rough week, both physically and mentally, but it sets a pace that can result in some really great achivements down the line.

Of course, the worst part is when you end training trip, go back to the cold and snow, and try to maintain training trip's intensity. But that's a story for another day.