Open Water national champ and Olympian Alex Meyer to train with Tennessee Aquatics

Alex Meyer, the former open water world champ and reigning U.S. national champ in the 5K distance, is moving from his longtime Boston base to a new training home with Tennessee Aquatics.

Meyer is a former U.S. Olympian and was a decorated collegiate swimmer for Harvard, where he continued his post-grad career up until this season. He told SwimSwam this week, he’s decided to continue his training in Tennessee with the Vols main distance coach Tyler Fenwick.

“I’m very excited for it,” Meyer said. “Tyler is very committed to open water. And I know [Tennessee head coach] Matt Kredich is a great coach and gives Tyler a lot of freedom to do what he needs to [with open water swimmers].”

Harvard coach Tim Murphy left the program last year to take over Penn State’s teams. Murphy was the coach who recruited Meyer, trained him all four collegiate years and the majority of his pro career, helping put Meyer on the Olympic team in 2012.

Murphy’s exit was part of the reason Meyer ultimately started looking for a new training home. But Meyer said he’d already been mulling over some options before that while navigating the troubles nearly all post-grad swimmers have to face.

“October-November-December were always perfect for me,” Meyer said of training with Harvard. “But after that, the college guys were on training trip and then tapering for meets.

“That part of the year is when I really need to be training full speed ahead, and there wasn’t always pool space for me to take my own lane and do what I needed to do.”

Meyer said the large Tennessee facility should give him more of an opportunity to meet his specific training needs. He also noted that Tennessee, being farther south and warmer, has access to open water training facilities for more of the calendar year than his Boston training base did.

Meyer competed for Seal Innovation Team this past season, but said he’ll be representing Tennessee Aquatics in future competition.

Meyer was very positive in discussing his alma mater and former training home, thanking the team and athletic department for all the years he spent there (8 in all), but also sounded very excited about his future training plans.

He said he was looking at several other training options when he visited Chattanooga to watch a relative run an Ironman race. While there, he needed a place to swim, and Fenwick, a longtime friend of Meyer, offered to let him use Tennessee’s facilities.

“I swam there, and I realized they had everything I needed,” Meyer said.

Meyer won’t officially make the move to Tennessee until early next month, but he will be in the area this coming weekend, as he’s swimming in the Swim the Suck race, a 10 mile course through the Tennessee River Gorge on Saturday. You can find more details about the race here.