Varsity girls swim team member Katerina Wietfeldt (11) begins her day at 4:40 a.m., when her first alarm, “Style” by Taylor Swift, “jolts” her awake. She has three more alarms, five minutes in between, to different iPhone sounds, as she tends to sleep through the same sound.
By 5:10 a.m., Wietfeldt is out of the house and on her way to swim practice at Rancho San Dieguito’s Solana Beach pool. It is still dark as she arrives, except for the three stadium lights around the pool. Wietfeldt begins by rolling last night’s tarps up and off of the pool. From 5:45 a.m. to 7 a.m., she practices paddle sets. Just as she lifts herself onto the deck at the end of practice, the glow of morning begins to fade into a clear sky.
School is from 8:30 a.m. to 1:05 p.m., with the swimmers having early release at 1:05 p.m. for meets on Thursdays at the start of lunch. The team gets on the bus, and normally leaves the school at 1:20 p.m.
On March 13, the school’s swim and dive team (3-0) competed in a dual meet against Del Norte High School.
“On the bus … I go through the roster of the other school and look at the [swimmers’] times to see if they’re, like, fast or not so I can compare and see if we have a good chance of winning,” varsity swimmer Scarlett Zhang (9) said.
Between eating lunch and anticipating the meet, the team begins to break into chatter. At 2 p.m., the team arrives at Del Norte High School. The team sets up their canopies, Zhang unfolds her chair, and in the background, someone begins to play rap music on their speaker.
“Usually, everyone’s pretty excited,” swimmer Anita Qian (10) said. “It’s low pressure, so it’s pretty fun. We cheer for each other and hype each other up.”
Once the team is set up, the swim and dive head coach Richard Contreras and assistant coach Jade Foyston hand out small cards with each swimmer’s events, which Contreras finishes the night before. According to Contreras, the strategy is to outscore an event, not necessarily winning the event, as the winning school is determined by most points.
In preparation for the meet, JV warms up in the pool first, then varsity. Team captain Sophie Kelley (12) starts her warm-up with a “600 kind of whatever you want.” Then, the team either does 50 drills and kicks, or hundreds made of 75 free and 25 of build, where swimmers “build” their tempo to almost race speed. They finish warming up with a couple dives or push pace — when a swimmer connects to a longer race, to hit a goal time and get a feel for it.
Right before the meet starts, the team gathers one last time for a cheer; it usually changes from meet to meet, but today, it was “Wheel of Fortune.”
“It doesn’t really have anything to do with Torrey,” Kelley said. “It’s just kind of a tradition. ”
At 4:40 p.m., the meet began.
“Behind the box, I mostly just focus on, like, breathing, making sure I get like, enough air, and I adjust my cap and goggles,” Kelley said. “I try not to think too much up on the block, though. [I] make sure that, like, my dive is good, and I don’t leave early or anything.”
In between events, the girls warm down in the side pool to loosen up and release lactic acid. They keep warm under parkas, hide from the wind in the pool’s storage room and drink electrolytes, as well as a variety of packed snacks.
“Sometimes I’ll use my massage gun if anything’s sore,” Kelley said. “Or I’ll just stretch and listen to … ‘Ready for It’ by Taylor Swift. That’s what I always do.”
But perhaps the biggest challenge at today’s meet was something completely out of anyone’s control: the weather.
“It wasn’t a great set of conditions for either team, you know, much less for the coach who’s getting, you know, blown on and rained on,” Contreras said. “When you get up to race, if you’re cold, you’re stiff. If you’re cold, your heart rate’s low. And when they get up to the block and they dive in the race, they need to be loose and their heart rate needs to be elevated so they can pump blood around their bodies quicker.”
During the 400 freestyle relay, it was windy, rainy and cold. It was the last event of the night, and Wietfeldt was swimming the third leg.
“The team was tired already, but right before they went, they all just started hyping each other up,” Wietfeldt said. “I dove in only a couple seconds ahead of the other team, and so my favorite part was getting to dive in and then having to, like, really race and just secure an even more of a lead for my team. And then I guess, like, seeing our last girl finish the relay and winning, it was definitely really exciting because it was pretty close.”
The school won the dual meet against Del Norte High School. In individual events, Qian won 100 back and 100 free; Zhang placed third in 200 free and second in 100 free; Kelley placed third in 100 fly and second in 50 free after being out-touched by 0.5 seconds; and Wietfeldt placed second in 100 back and third in 50 free. The Falcons won all of the relay events.
At 7:30 p.m., the team took down its canopies and rode the bus back to the school. But for most of the team, the day still has not ended. Zhang goes home to finish biology and Chinese homework, while Kelley finishes an English project.
“Just as kind of an overall picture, these swimmers … function at a very high level,” Contreras said. “They get up very early in the morning. They spend a lot of physical energy. They go to school, they have good grades, then they go back to swim practice, and then now they’re in high school senior. They compete at least once or twice a week, and competition is draining. That’s one of the most impressive things for me to see.”
