No More 9-Hour Sleeps But Mama Butterfly Dana Vollmer Finding Break As Good As Rest

If you see Dana Vollmer nodding off in the corner at the USA Pro Swim meet at Santa Clara Sunday morning, give the Olympic 100 ‘fly champion a gentle nudge in time for her to make the blocks for the heats of the 100 free.

Relatively new to this ‘being a mum’ thing, Vollmer tells reporter Elliott Almond of the East Bay Times: “I felt like going in I knew what being tired was.” Cue the muffled sound of the young mothers union of the world stifling giggles as they prepare to have a mid-morn catnap now that little pants has nodded off at last.

Vollmer, Almond notes, used to get a 9-hour sleep each night, with a two-hour recovery nap in the day between training sessions in those days when she was preparing to become the first sub-56sec 100 ‘flyer ever, the moment set in Olympic gold.

“I can’t just say, ‘Arlen, Mommy needs a break,’ ” Vollmer tells Almond. “Swimming is my ‘me’ time, but my swimming doesn’t come before my family.”

One reason, perhaps, why there may be no clash with Aussie Emma McKeon and others in Santa Clara on ‘fly. Vollmer is down to race the 100 ‘fly and the 50 free but she says she’ll be dropping by only on Sunday for the 100 (the heats this morning will confirm whether that is so) to test the freestyle skills she’s been working on out on the wave off the Tasmanian coast with Water Whisperer Milt Nelms.

Volume, 28, is already back down to warning-sign times this season: 56.94 in the 100m butterfly and 53.59 in the 100m free, the latter the swiftest by an American so far this year. The USA needs her: at 9th in the world in the rankings a month out from when the pointy end of rankings get real as Olympic Trials unfold in Omaha, there are five Australians ahead of her, three of them inside 53, the Dolphins leaping towards the 4x100m freestyle with an edge of speed that others will struggle to match.

Olympic gold, 2012, for Dana Vollmer – by Patrick B. Kraemer

Whatever Vollmer’s aims are for the summer, a return to Olympic waters is a strong possibility. What looks like a speedy return to speed has in fact been part of a long process for Vollmer. As Nelms notes in an exchange with SwimVortex:

“Dana’s improvements are a reward for her and her coach, Teri McKeever, staying in process.  McKeever told me in 2011 and 2012 that she recognized what Dana could do to improve her freestyle along with her butterfly. At that time, impairments of injuries, old habits, and the pressure to compete prevented Dana from making those adjustments.

“Her long break from training before Arlen was born allowed her to begin to recover her health, and she has done excellent work with her physio since her son’s birth. Her body is able to do the things that her instincts were telling her to do in the past, things that she was not able to do back then.

“Given Dana and Teri’s overall approach, the improvements are really no surprise.”

A good moment, then, to recall Vollmer’s take back in 2014 on the cusp of taking a break to start a family with husband Andy Grant, on where she thought swimming would find its future speed:

From The SwimVortex Archive – January 2014:

The way Dana Vollmer, Olympic champion and world record holder, invited us to step back in time with her was worthy of the opening line of any movie that may some day celebrate her life. Lights, camera, pan wide on the pool, train in on the little girl with the blonde hair hanging back just a touch, cue voiceover and … ‘action’:

“I played mermaid constantly; I would watch my shadow on the bottom of the pool and build a relationship with the water … I don’t remember how I learned to swim. I joined summer league at five and did that until I was 11. I’d done soccer, track and field, just about everything, even gymnastics until I realised I was going to be this tall.”

Breakout to London 2012, a beaming Vollmer, 6′ 1″, age 24, stands several inches taller than Lu Ying (CHN) and Alicia Coutts (AUS) as she poses for photos, her hand clutching the Olympic gold won over the swiftest, most efficient women’s 100m butterfly ever seen, eight years after her first Games in Athens and four years beyond the misery of a missed Beijing 2008.

Cut, take two from the Tardis. “I had a really good experience with swimming as a child,” said Vollmer. She is talking to coaches and teachers at the World Aquatic Development Conference in Lund. It is January 2014 and the American champion, beyond a thought-provoking double act with CAL and USA teammate Caitin Leverenz, has valuable experience to share.

Dana Vollmer, of CAL and USA [Photo: Craig Lord]

“My early years in sport were aimed at making my experience as diverse as possible,” said Vollmer, an ambassador  for the American Heart Association. “Swimming was never pushed on me by my parents. Granted there were some mornings that I didn’t want to get up and they needed to give me a little nudge but I was there because I wanted to be there.”

By 11 she was swimming year-round, basketball another sport that was still in the frame of long-term possibilities. Her parents were there “supporting me and driving me to workouts” but, mercifully as she sees it, not imposing any external ambitions, hopes and dreams on their daughter.

Many will have overheard the parents of 9 and 10-year-olds who talk of their boy being the next Michael Phelps. “I think that the parents are more excited than the little boy in those cases,” said Vollmer. “What they need to be doing is cultivating the environment in which it can be about the kid’s experience and not their goals and wishes. It shouldn’t come from an outside force. It has to come from you.”

Blessed

Vollmer [Photo with CAL and USA teammate Caitlin Leverenz in Lund] says that she has been “blessed with fantastic coaches” throughout her time in swimming. “Looking back at my experience and then looking at all those stories of horror [abuse of many kinds part of the story of swimming], I feel so lucky that the people around me were more interested in me as a person not as an athlete with potential to be good.

“Teri [McKeever, head coach of CAL women’s team and the USA Olympic women’s swim team in 2012] wants me to be a well-balanced human being, someone who can go on and be prepared for the rest of life and cope with the different challenges out there because of what you faced in your career as a swimmer.”

Ron Forest coached Vollmer in her youth in Texas. He would give his young pupils goal sheets, the emphasis for each child to look at what they could do and see how they might improve that, how they might make progress measured against self not whether they were winning a race or beating the kid in the next lane. Said Vollmer:

“I would write down 10 little goals to get there, to where I wanted to be and thought I could be. We would take each stroke and write down five ways to improve each of those.”

When she was 13, she wrote down 57sec as her goal for the 100m butterfly. At the time, her best was a 62. “I always had lofty goals,” she said through a broad smile that was reflected back at her from a captivated audience.

“Even in my career today, it is important to set little goals. Even now, I am striving and wanting to go better in Rio than I did in London.

“It was a world record. So, how do you got about that? How do you go about getting better than that?

“For me, it’s about having five good turns in workout, focussing on some small …

continue reading in source www.swimvortex.com