7x Olympic gold medalist Caeleb Dressel lost every race at the Westmont Pro Swim, and he is 100% okay with that. He kind of looked relieved. Of course, Dressel is an outlier among elite sprinters, doing enough work to pop fast mid-distance swims, something we saw last spring — his 3:44 400 IM and 1:40 200 butterfly unshaven efforts in-season. Right now, I’m guessing Coach Anthony Nesty will start backing off the distance and dialing-in the speed work as we near the next Pro Swim in San Antonio.
Dressel covers a lot of topics in this interview.
Commenting on his tattoo leg sleeve, he said “don’t take my advice” on how quickly to return to the chlorine after getting inked.
Super Bowl commercial, playing drums? Who wouldn’t want to do that? Apparently Caeleb. At first he said no to appearing in the Super Bowl commercial. He explains why in the interview.
Dressel’s dry-side life is integral to his recovery and mental health. He loves living on a farm now, with cows, and he feels a little like a cowboy.
Dressel Predictions? I’m holding off until after his next competition which should be the San Antonio Pro Swim, but that’s not confirmed yet. I think we need to see Dressel a little less broken-down before we start the prediction process. Feel free to play the prediction game anyway.
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This is a Gold Medal Media production presented by SwimOutlet.com. Host Gold Medal Mel Stewart is a 3-time Olympic medalist and the co-founder of SwimSwam.com, a Swimming News website.
Opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of the interviewed guests do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of the hosts, SwimSwam Partners, LLC and/or SwimSwam advertising partners.
If ya swim as fast as he does at the end of the season, you’d be ok with sinking straight to the bottom in-season.
so you are saying it ISN’T good to be ‘fast every weekend’ but fail at the Olympics?
Thankfully for every Sun Yang in the world there is a Caeleb Dressel.
what
What are you smoking
Are there going to be Trials pickems?
…will ask Braden. Not 100% sure about this. We have in the past….
@Gold Medal Mel Stewart, are you going to record a long podcast after San Antonio with him, where you can ask him more questions about his Trials and Budapest time goals?
…a pod will be scheduled at some point ahead of WC, but I’m 99.99% sure he will not share his goal times. BUT, we’ll certain ask the question. Sometimes he gives some insight into goal times w/o being specific.
Thanks so much.
Yeah if he doesn’t share, maybe ask him indirectly about his thoughts on the 50-100 free WRs in general.
I don’t really pay attention to in-season times unless they’re notable. A swimmer going a bit slower in-season is expected.
But in-season times where someone swims faster than they did in Tokyo or sets a PB are very fun to speculate about!
I just want it to be trials already.
As both a coach and a swimmer, I find it interesting how people react differently to the same training in season.
I coach both age groupers (mostly 11-12) and masters, and I generally hit my masters swimmers with comparatively significantly tougher training in season than I do the kids.
Most of the kids and some of the adults are very even in their performances, they’ll swim similar times no matter whether they’re tapered or in the middle of the season, while some of the kids and most of the adults have significant differences between their in season and tapered times. I’ve got one masters swimmer who will swim within 3% of her times no matter when the meet is… Read more »
Good point, it’s so variable. Mack Horton in-season is very, very slow, yet comes good for big races. Although he did miss the top two at trials last year in the 400m, and so did Regan Smith. Yet someone like Cate Campbell was able to produce 52’s, 100m free mid season for almost a decade. Go figure.
He doesn’t care about “slow” swimming cause he knows it’s a part of the process and trusts his abilities and his coaches
Exactly. And at this point he’s been one of the elites for like 6 years, and been able to hit 21.low/47.low/49.high whenever it comes time for championship season (other than the 2018 injury), so he has no reason to doubt that it works.
Mid 2017 is not 6 years ago but ok.
I’d say making the Olympic 100 free final in 2016 would be considered pretty elite. 2016 is 6 years ago
Fair enough. My definition of ‘elite’ may be different to yours.
In 2016, he came home from the Olympics with 2 gold medals. How is that not elite?
Top 8 at the Olympics isn’t elite? I don’t think anyone has the same definition as you by that metric