There are few better places in the world to go swimming than Hawaii – just ask the NU men’s swimming team.
The team held a training camp in Hawaii that culminated in a complete trouncing of Dartmouth at the University of Hawaii pool in Honolulu. But before you get jealous, consider the amount of work the swimmers put in over their two-week business trip to the islands.
The team’s regimen involved 5.5 hours of training every day at the Hawaii Preparatory Academy on the island of Hawaii, beginning with a morning swimming session starting at 5:30 a.m. In the afternoon, the team spent an hour lifting weights, which was then followed by two more hours of swimming.
“They trained pretty hard,” said head coach Bob Groseth. “They did get a little bit of time to go down to the beach, which they liked to take advantage of.”
Then, after training camp was over, the team flew from the Big Island over to Oahu, flying in at 7 a.m. and racing Dartmouth at 10:30 a.m. – conditions that made the Wildcats’ dominance somewhat unexpected.
“I was a little bit surprised that we won all the races,” Groseth said. “They’d been training really hard, but they really wanted to race.”
Not only did the Cats have the winning swimmer in all nine events, they also boasted the second-place competitor in seven of the nine. The only exceptions were the 400-yard medley, where NU didn’t enter a second team, and the one-meter dive.
Senior Eric Nilsson won both his races in his first meet since receiving his second Big Ten Swimmer of the Week award on Nov. 25.
But the question remains: Why does a swim team need to go to Hawaii to train? What’s wrong with the regular training site in Evanston?
Groseth gave two reasons. The first is that he was trying to create a more focused “training-camp feel” that you simply can’t get by staying at the team’s regular location.
The second, in case you couldn’t guess, is the weather.
“With the sunshine and the water close at hand, it’s just a much better environment than Evanston.”
