Swimming: Siobhan-Marie O'Connor blogs on her World Cup success in Asia
Last Updated: 07/11/14 2:12pm
On 18 October we left home for a seven week trip of competing and racing across Asia. The pool in which my training group are based is the University of Bath pool which has been shut since September and won't be open again until April due to repairs and redevelopment.
This means we have had to train elsewhere and we had been training at Millfield School which has been really good. However, a group of us were invited to attend the 7 week Asia Tour and I am able to go with the help of Sky Scholarships.
The first part of our trip was a week’s training at the Japanese Institute of sport in Tokyo. In this week we were able to settle into the new time zone and get over our jet-lag. The Japanese Institute were very welcoming and it was good to eat some of the traditional food and explore the city during our free time.
After our week at the Institute we travelled across Tokyo to a different hotel where we were to be staying for the Tokyo leg of the World Cup. British swimmers only competed in two rounds this year but there are seven in total.
Bronze
This was my first race of the season and it definitely felt a bit weird getting back into the swing of things. I was happy with how I swam over the two days considering that I hadn't really been back in the water after my break for a long amount of time. I won a bronze in the 200m IM and a bronze in the 100m IM.
We then travelled as a team to Singapore for the last round of the World Cup series. I really enjoyed this competition and it was great to go back to Singapore as it is a very cool place! At this competition I felt better than I did in Tokyo and won a silver in the 200m IM and 100m IM and a bronze in the 100m Free. It was good to get back into racing again and hopefully this should help prepare us for the World Shortcourse Championships at the end of the shortcourse season.
After Singapore, my group from Bath and I flew out to Phuket in Thailand and this is where we are at the moment. There are 10 of us here, six swimmers and four staff members, and we are training here for four weeks in preparation for either the World Shortcourse champs in Doha or the Scottish Shortcourse champs in Edinburgh.
We are training and staying in the Thanyapura Resort which is amazing. It is a huge facility with two pools, four gyms and other facilitates for pretty much all sports. We are very lucky to be able to train and live in such a beautiful place for this month and I am looking forward to getting a good block of work done before we travel to Doha.
