Hello again,

Unfortunately, blogging rules for the Commonwealth Games team meant I was unable to keep you informed during the meet. To sum up the experience in Delhi, it was intense!

In terms of my results, I was probably one good swim away from a great week, and came home with 2 gold medals, 1 silver and 1 bronze. Unfortunately, the swim that didn’t quite go right was the 100m Breast, my first race of the week and my favourite event where I ended up third.

There was a lot of talk in the media about conditions or problems in Delhi, to me most of these things were blown out of proportion. In saying that, the most disappointing thing about India hosting the 2010 games was that somehow the organisers didn’t manage to get one thing really right! For example there were plenty of buses, but it took 3 or 4 days for a practical schedule to exist, the food was good but initially there was never enough or you had to wait half an hour to get some.

To their credit things did get a little better each day but really at a major event or meet things should be ready to go from day 1. Ultimately my times and many times from the week weren’t that fast but once again that is probably a result of the conditions a little bit along with many people getting a little cast of Delhi belly. With 40 minute – 1 hour bus rides to the pool, and only short turnaround between heats and finals, absolutely brilliant times were few and far between. In some respects that made it a better meet, because people stopped thinking or talking about times and just wanted to race.

After such a disappointing start to the week it was so great to finish with such a great last night. Early on in the final finals session I had the 200m Breaststroke final and although I was leading pretty comfortably with one lap to go, the piano did fall on my back with 25m left and I ended up winning but only 0.08 of a second. It was my 7^th Commonwealth Games medal but my first individual gold so I was pretty ecstatic. I had to back up about an hour later for the medley relay, an event which I truly love and with Ash Delaney, Geoff Huegill and Eamon Sullivan we teamed up to win the final event of the meet comfortably. The sound the crowd made during my leg is memorable to say the least, after the backstroke leg we were .7 of a second behind the English team which is a bit over half a body length. I nailed my changeover and actually popped up from the dive in front and on my first two strokes I could actually hear the crowd make a ooooaaaahhhhh….. noise as I had taken the race away from the English in the first 15 metres of my 100m relay leg.

I’ve attached some photos, one of the team at the final team meeting, one of celebration after the final medal ceremony (check out the great mustache of the Indian guard caught in the middle behind Eamon!) and finally one of me receiving my first individual gold medal for the 200m Breast.

Next time I will tell you a little bit about what I got up to after racing finished over there.

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Well, racing is over and although the results weren’t great, there were some encouraging signs. I ended up 5th in the 100m, 4th in the 50m and 2nd in the 200m. None of these swims were great but all solid even if I was on the wrong side of some close finishes. In the 100 I was .1 of a second of the silver and in the 50 I was .05 of the silver again!

Although I feel incredibly fit and healthy I really struggled executing great races. I messed up a lot of pacing and a few of my skills. I will be better at the commonwealth games because of the practice at pan pacs. When I get home I will try to post some of the photos from the week.

Sent via BlackBerry on the Telstra Next G Network

Hello everyone from beautiful California. Well, we are very close to racing here at Pan Pacs and the excitement is definitely growing. This is arguably the favourite time for any swimmer, where the rest is kicking in and you have plenty of spare time since you’re not at the pool too much.

Most importantly, it’s this time that you realise that you’re about to swim fast and test yourself about the best swimmers in the world, which ultimately is why I do it. Our staging camp was held at La Jolla (pronounced La Hoya) which is a nice part of San Diego.

The first photo is just a pic of the team at the University of California, San Diego pool, enjoying the good weather and getting down to business. The second photo is of myself, Leiston Pickett, Marieke Guehrer and Andrew Lauterstein enjoying a treat at Yoghurtland to celebrate Nick Ffrost’s 24th birthday.

Team members also enjoyed going to Sea World, wandering the gaslamp district downtown, movies and pacific beach. Next time I should have some good news about racing here in Irvine, if you want to hear more about the preparation check out my recent interview for the swimming world magazine http://www.swimmingworld.tv/events/2010-pan-pacific-championships/interviews/6392

I am still coming to terms with no longer living in Canberra, daytime temps into the mid 20s at the end of July is something I could get used to!

Yesterday was the first day out of the pool for three weeks after a busy racing schedule, which included National shortcourse, Gold Coast regionals and our Southport club meet. 

One of the great things about swimming “smaller” meets like regionals and our own club meet is seeing so many kids out and enjoying their swimming, even in July when you would expect most kids to be having time off because it is apparently winter.

The sport’s success has always been driven by the children and their very supportive families that make events like local meets work. I always find it a huge honour to be asked for autographs or photos with the kids (like Ben here) as I remember when I was younger and living in Cairns, Kieran Perkins came up to visit for a clinic after his Barcelona Olympic victory in 1992, which was a huge inspiration for me at the time.

There are only nine days left until we head to San Diego for our staging camp before heading into L.A. for Pan Pacs. I am currently beginning to reduce my training load for the start of taper which is always an enjoyable time for any swimmer. Tune in next time for a look into the happenings on an Australia Swim team staging camp.

Welcome back,

Well it has been a busy couple of weeks; firstly I suffered my first little set back of this preparation losing a couple of days to illness. Although it is a little frustrating to not train properly for half a week, it is a good opportunity to rest a tired and aching body and let the muscles recover. To make life a little more frantic, throw in the end of the university semester with assignments and exams. Putting these little distractions aside training has been going really well, there is only 6 weeks until we go overseas for Pan Pacs, and every good session I get through just adds more confidence to my preparation.

One of the issues I briefly mentioned in my first entry was the decision to leave my long term Coach Vince Raleigh and leave the AIS. The move to the Gold Coast was a combination small positive points, like moving back home to Queensland (and being nice and warm) but the biggest deciding point was a change of training philosophy. It has been some 20 years since I learnt to swim, so you can imagine I have probably swum over 30,000 kilometres or 600,000 laps. That is why one of the keys parts of my new training regime is work out of the pool, trying to make sure that I do as little as possible in the pool but it is of the highest quality. One of those activities is spin workouts or bike rides, which can be seen in this photo. I am the good looking one on the left and beside me is fellow Olympic medallist, current 200m freestyle Australian champion and my training partner, Nick Ffrost (that is not a typo it is spelt double F). Mixing training up is a key part of any elite athlete!

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog.

For those of you who don’t know a lot about me, I am now living on the beautiful Gold Coast after spending 5 very succesful years in Canberra at the Australian Institute of Sport. After 15 years with my old coach Vince Raleigh which included two silver medals in Beijing in 2008, a world championship and world record last year in Rome, I felt it was time for a change, but I might save that story for another time.

Currently I am in hard training for both the Pan Pacific Championships in August as well as the Commonwealth Games in October. Each of these meets have special meaning for me as Pan Pacs will be the first major interntional meet I will swim at since being World Champion. It will also be a meet of the highest quality with multiple medalists from last year’s World Champs plus 4 time olympic champion Kosuke Kitajima (thats more individual olympic titles than Ian Thorpe won) and I don’t think he is too happy about me taking in 100m World Record.

Commonwealth Games is an event much like the Olympics which as a child you dream about competing at. I still remember watching Kieran Perkins break the 1500m world record at Victoria Canada in 1994. Four years ago I had the pleasure of competing at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games, but I feel like I have so much to prove. In Melbourne in my three individual events I was beaten by 0.01, 0.13 and 0.19 respectively – to come so close, yet failing to deliver a gold medal has been an incredibly motivating experience and something I plan to rectify later this year.

Stay tuned in the next couple of weeks for a behind the scenes look at the life of a world class swimmer.
Rix