Indiana University of Pennsylvania: 2012 Training Trip Blog - Day Eight

by Josh Huger (MrUtopia)

Indiana University of Pennsylvania: 2012 Training Trip Blog - Day Eight

IUP's Allyson Mitidieri will provide us daily updates on the Crimson Hawks

Day 8:

Today in Delray, the IUP swim team had a full and fun day as we got back into double practices and continued some IUP training trip traditions! Morning practice was hard and we were all left feeling very tired afterwards. It was a beautiful sunny day today though, so the whole team still went down to the beach for our annual team pictures!

Team pictures are a tradition for our team. The girls and boys teams each get separate pictures on the beach, and then each team does a pyramid picture. This year the pyramid building was quite the show, and a lot of people on the beach came by and took pictures of us on their phones and just watched us completely failing, and then finally succeeding at building good pyramids. It was fun to do this team tradition and this year was a great success. After the pictures were finished, we all went and relaxed on the beach and by the pool, before heading to our night practice.

We left the hotel early for practice so we could make another team training trip tradition possible: the freshmen dance contest. The freshmen were paired, a girl and a boy, and they were judged on the creativity of their dance moves for every song. If we did not like the dancing of a pair, they were eliminated. The final pair still dancing was the winner. This year, Matt Nakagama and Gabby Guttman were our dance off winners, and I must say they were hilarious and had some pretty sweet dance moves. Good job to the other freshmen as well, especially Zach Fountain and Emily Shumaker who were the runners up!
       

After the dance contest we went to our night practice which turned out to be our challenge set of 8 x 150s on 6:00. This set was difficult because of the lactic acid build up in our muscles in between 150s. Still, overall the team did an awesome job and we all had a really good set tonight. I actually thought it was a lot of fun, but I did feel bad for some of our sprinters who have a tough time with doing more than a 50! Even they did well too though. Good job guys!
       

After practice we came back to the hotel, and off to dinner and our rooms. The freshmen and juniors went out for their class dinners tonight, and I have not talked to any of them since but I assume that they had a good time! Tomorrow night is our last night in Delray and the sophomores and seniors will have their class dinners then.
       

Tomorrow being the last day, it should be a good one. Again, I can't wait for what tomorrow brings, and I can't wait to make the best of it! LET'S GO HAWKS! KA!

Read more posts from Allyson here