okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Learning from Norwegian Swimmers
Marianne Andersen wrote about a presentation on how the Norwegian Swim Team went from no Olympic participants in 2000 to 2 Olympic medalists in 2008. Here's a rough translation of a bit that caught my eye:
...after the 2000 Olympics they knew that they were far behind the best in the world in the amount of swimming kilometers. With that background (the volume of swimming) and the access to swimming pools that the Norwegians had, it was unrealistic to make up the volume immediately. Dale Oen is far behind, for example, Michael Phelps in the amount of kilometers of swimming in a year. So, they decided that they would be the best at alternative training.