Amanda Beard, Jason Lezak, Aaron Peirsol, Lenny Krayzelburg. If you're remotely connected to the sport of swimming you recognize these as the names of Olympic champions. What you might not know is that in a swim training culture that usually has swimmers (who compete in events averaging two minutes) training like marathon runners, these athletes were trained in a manner that is pure CrossFit.
The mastermind behind the training center in Irvine, CA, where this training takes place is Dr. David Salo, who was named men's head coach at the World Championship meet in Montreal, Canada, that just concluded on July 31. For a guy who was almost blackballed from the community for espousing his radical training ideas twenty years ago, attaining this position today is quite a feat!
Back in those days, when Salo was a graduate student in exercise physiology at USC, his instincts as a swimmer and student told him that swimmers of all distances could swim faster on a fraction of the conventional training volume if the intensity was high enough.
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