On the road with the UWM swim team...

With the UWM swimming team down in Florida on their annual training trip, we thought it would be fun to have a member of the team share their thoughts each day on the UWM Blog.

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.

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The first blog entry comes from junior Sarah Wardecke:

Day One in the Sun:

After being on a plane all day yesterday we were finally able to spend some much needed time in the sun. We started off the morning in the short course pool, with our most difficult set being a set of power-kicks. During power kicks, we kick on our backs with our arms straight up in the air and pray that if we move our feet fast enough we can prevent ourselves from sinking to the bottom on the pool. Despite the sun being in our eyes (which caused us all to run into the lane-line a few times) we all enjoyed the warm rays of sun.

Within minutes of returning to the hotel the entire team was down at the beach. Since we had cloudy and cold 40-degree weather last year, all the returning swimmers were very excited to finally have warm beach weather. Although it was a little cloudy, we took full advantage and everyone was sprawled across the sand reading books, throwing footballs, tanning and swimming in the ocean.

Despite a call for rain and storms, we lucked out and were able to spend as much of the afternoon as we wanted outside.

Finally, after hours on the beach we returned to the Pine Crest High School pool, once again, for our second practice of the day. However, this time we swam in the long course pool. Even though we were able to avoid the rain earlier in the day, we were not so lucky during this practice. While it sprinkled the first portion of our warm up, it began to thunderstorm about 40 minutes into practice.

Even though a few of us continued to try and swim through the storm, once the lightning sirens went off we were sent to camp out in the locker rooms. After about twenty minutes the storm cleared and we returned to the pool to finish another tough practice.

It’s been a good trip so far and we’re all hoping for many more sunny days to come.