The Panthers are in sunny Fort Lauderdale, training at Pinecrest Academy, both short and long course. The team hotel is right on A1A on the beach for the fourth-straight year. They will be on the trip through the 15th of January before resuming the regular season schedule second semester against Carthage College on Jan. 16.
****************************************************************************
The fifth blog entry comes from freshman Chris Jenkyns:
Day six, day of the epic ocean swim. Today, the teams switched into two groups, one group went to Pine Crest and one group had an ocean swim. The ocean swim is something we didn’t do last year and it was a good alternative to a normal swim practice. The ocean swim consisted of swimming out to buoys located off shore and then swimming horizontally to the shore. Although an official GPS wasn’t used to track total distance swam, estimates of about 15 miles were common.
Everybody from the ocean swim returned alive, but tired from battling sharks, stingrays and man-of-war jellyfish. One swimmer who returned alive, Emily McClellan, had a great story from the trek. “While swimming in the deep abyss we witnessed creatures that we’re pretty sure have yet to be discovered. Overall it was a great workout and a fun way to swim.” Some swimmers in the group thought it would be funny to play tricks on the scared swimmers when another swimmer grabbed her legs and pulled her under the water. The open water swim was a great time that hopefully will happen again next year.
At Pine Crest, the other swimmers did a taxing workout that left their bodies tired and sore. After a nice warm-up, the group was met by Mary Kuyvenhoven, who brought with her stories from the ocean. We continued practice with many I.M. sets and then a difficult dry land where laps were run, stairs stepped and pushups done.
Later in the day, a group of swimmers and Coach Kyle shout out to Dan, Matt, Sarah, Brady, Evan, went to Primanti Brothers for lunch. The sandwiches there were great and had french fries and coleslaw on them. Also they had brownies which were delicious because who doesn’t like brownies? After a nice recovery practice Maggi Beck, Brady Huemann, Jeff Maxwell and myself played Conasta continuing our ongoing matches from the beginning of the trip.
Well, were almost done with training trip, only a couple more days to go before we return to the cold. Three more days of practicing to go ...
