Julian Drew Swimming
The pool which was the final staging post for Penny Heyns before her date with Olympic destiny again proved something of an omen for the double Olympic champion. After a lacklustre season which had already seen her talk about the possibility of failure at January’s Perth world championships, Heyns returned to the University of Alabama swimming pool in Auburn and turned in a performance that has given her renewed hope for Australia in eight weeks time.
At a low key meet in Auburn two weekends ago Heyns won the 100m breaststroke in 1:09.95 and was just out-touched in the 200m in 2:34.04. Although the times were far from her world record for the 100m event of 1:07.02 and her Olympic record of 2:25.41 over 200m, they still brought a smile to her face. “I’d only been training for four weeks and my 100m time was a lot better than I expected. We travelled for 10 hours, got into the hotel at four and then swam at seven. It was a small meet which was really just an opportunity to swim long course. There were a few people there who will be in the US team at the world championships but I just wanted to gauge how I’m doing,” said Heyns
After winning the Olympics Heyns didn’t concentrate on her swimming as much as she would have liked and spent more time attending awards banquets and sponsor functions than in the water. With no American collegiate season to get her into shape earlier in the year and a change in coach in February, Heyns failed to win at either August’s Pan Pacific championships in Japan or the World Student Games in Sicily later the same month – the two events where stunning victories launched her on to the international stage two years before.
Disillusioned, she returned to her University of Nebraska base at the end of September and started preparing for Perth with a new approach to her training regimen. “I think the results from Auburn show that it’s working for me,” she says.
But its not just in the pool where her training has changed. “The whole concept behind my training is a lot more holistic. In other words its not just what I’m doing in the water but my gym work, the amount of recovery and rest I get, my diet, what I think about. It’s everything.”
The departure of Czech coach Jan Bidrman – who guided Heyns since she moved to America in 1993 – took some time to get used to but now, after discussions with other people, Heyns and her new coach Paul Nelson have tailored her training more closely to her needs.
“I’ve always had an idea of what I needed to do in terms of my training and after talking to other swimmers, coaches and physiologists we now have a programme along the lines of what I’ve always wanted to do. It’s a lot more specific and I’m more confident with it than I’ve ever been with any other programme.”
Her training is now geared specifically for the 100m and although she says she will still race the 200m, it is no longer a priority. “I won both events at the Olympics and I feel that’s enough for me. Now I’d like to really focus on one event and do something great.”
Heyns believes that because she wasn’t as focused on her swimming after the Olympics as she was before, a few bad habits had started to creep into her stroke. Heyns had perfected a very narrow, quick kicking action under Bidrman which he learnt from legendary Hungarian coach Josef Nagy
“I think between the Olympics and Pan Pacs I took things for granted and my stroke went a bit. The kick went a little wider and things like that and that’s what I’ve been working on now. It’s just minor adjustments really. The stroke is basically still the same.”
Heyns is also concentrating more on quality than quantity in her new programme. “I’m not doing the same mileage as I was doing before but there’s more intensity in what I do. To be honest I don’t even have an idea of how far I swim in training anymore. Some of my workouts are based totally on time such as eight, five-minute swims. I just go flat out. I can’t go any harder but obviously you can’t go as fast for five minutes as you do in the 100m.”
She has just one more meeting before Perth, the US Open Championships at the beginning of December and, as with Auburn, she will race straight from her training without any taper. For the world championships, however, she will use a slightly shorter taper than she has used in the past because of the intensity of her current training.
Does she have any predictions for Perth? “All I can say is that I’m expecting a nice surprise at the world championships.” For Heyns and South Africa a nice surprise would be a return to the invincible Penny Heyns we knew in 1996.
ENDS