M. Swimming practices outdoors

Penn's men's swimming team went through a grueling week of training over winter break, but to hear them tell it, the Miami sunshine they received in exchange was well worth the effort. Enjoying temperatures in the 80s and the experience of swimming outdoors, the team was allowed to focus on its swimming without the usual distraction of a busy campus life. "It is a lot easier to train hard when you are happy with the surroundings," assistant coach Michael Schnur said. "Training is less of a burden outdoors." The only real burden of the trip turned out to be the meet that Penn competed in while in Miami. The NCAA requires all teams to compete in a meet if they travel further than a couple hundred miles from home during the season. Swimming against training partners North Carolina State, Miami and Penn State, the Quakers finished fourth in an irrelevant meet. "You just say, 'Let's get on with it,' about the meet," Penn coach Kathy Lawlor-Gilbert said. "It's a requirement of training." The Quakers are expecting the trip to pay high dividends during the key races at the end of the season. Lawlor-Gilbert pointed to the opportunity to use the University of Miami's outstanding pool and weight facilities. In addition, the opportunity to train alongside Penn State and North Carolina State's teams was a crucial benefit of the trip to the sunny South. "The people at Miami were very accommodating," Lawlor-Gilbert said. "The coach is an old friend. We got to use the football team's weight room. We swam the long-course pool for our morning workouts. The workouts were real hard." Although the training had left them tired, the swimmers looked at the trip as having positive effects on their team cohesiveness. "Swimming-wise everyone is tired, exactly where they should be," Senior Jon Levine said. "We were close as a team before, but this helped." Others agreed, saying that the opportunity to live together gave them a better chance to become closer as a group. "We definitely got to know the freshmen better," Penn senior and co-captain Colin Robinson said. "The rooms were arranged with a couple of freshmen and a couple of upperclassmen in each room. There was good team bonding. It was a good trip, and it was good training." After flying back to Philadelphia Wednesday, a tough two-workout day on Thursday, and a bus ride to gloomy New Hampshire on Friday, Penn defeated a surprisingly weak Dartmouth squad 145-96 on Saturday. Lawlor-Gilbert was decidedly pleased with the team's performance in their first meet in three weeks, especially when one considers that the Red and Blue were competing with tired bodies and without a full complement of their swimmers. "They haven't had a chance to recover," Lawlor-Gilbert said. "We try to train through dual meets, but we do take each dual meet seriously. We hope to eventually get everyone in the pool at the same time."

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