Tatjana and company face long road back to Tokyo
Teammate Kaylene Corbett also lost fitness in lockdown
● Even the cold winter mornings at the open-air Tuks pool feel inviting for Tatjana Schoenmaker.
After about three months out of the water — her longest absence since she took up swimming — nothing was going to keep her out when her Pretoria base opened up again just over a week ago.
“We’re so excited to be in the pool that it doesn’t matter, we’re embracing the cold.” But the time away has taken its toll.
“It felt like I needed to go back to learn-toswim classes,” she said with a laugh this week. “Swimming is all about the feel of the water and technique. After a week away we can lose the feel, so it’s bad after 10, 11 weeks.”
Schoenmaker, who last year became SA’s first woman swimmer to win a world championship medal, is one of the country’s top pool hopes for the Tokyo Olympics, which have been rescheduled to 2021.
She is one of two torpedoes coach Rocco Meiring is priming for the Games, the other being Kaylene Corbett, who finished eighth behind Schoenmaker in the 200m breaststroke final at the world championships.
Corbett, like Schoenmaker, had to get used to the water again.
“It feels like your body parts don’t know what they’re doing,” she said, adding she loved the moment she dived into the pool.
“Your ears go under the water and it just goes completely silent, it’s the best feeling ever, that pure silence.”
It’s going to take a long time
Meiring warned that after three months of lockdown he had to rebuild their warheads. “They obviously lost their conditioning and they’re unfit.”
In full training they would clock up to 60km a week, but now they’re on 20km. “It’s going to take a long time.”
Schoenmaker and Corbett did what they could during lockdown, but there’s no substitute for water.
“We were trying to work on other things that we don’t have time for when we’re in full training, so for me it’s flexibility,” said
Schoenmaker. “My flexibility was really not good before the lockdown.”
Another element was maintaining strength, improvising with weight training. “We were doing a lot of gym work, body weights. We would pick up a bottle of water or squat with a dog or something,” said Schoenmaker, who worked out with her dachshund while enduring lockdown with her family in Johannesburg.
“I was trying the same thing with my eight-year-old sister,” said Corbett, who was with her family in Port Elizabeth.
But the longer they stayed out of the pool, the harder it got. “It was tough,” Schoenmaker admitted. “I think when it got really tough was when other countries were opening and we were still not in the pool yet.”
It can take a year to drop one’s time by a split second; since registering her 2min 22.02sec African record at the 2018 Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast, it took Schoenmaker 15 months to get down to 2:21.79 at the world championships.
“So [having an extra year to train] was an advantage, but out the pool we were losing that advantage. Now there’s so much aerobic capacity and stuff we still need to build.”
Corbett injured her knees and hips from the land-based training, forcing her to return to Pretoria two days before her 21st birthday last month for physiotherapy.
Schoenmaker turned 23 on Thursday, and according to Meiring she had hinted that she should get the day off from training. “That didn’t happen … I gave her training for her birthday,” he said with a grin.
He’s treating her the same way he did after Rio 2016, when she had narrowly missed qualifying, was injured and was down.
“I told her, ‘we’ll train a little bit and your body will tell us when you want more’.”
The swimmers are back and their enthusiasm is sky high, although not equally on all elements, like Corbett’s attitude to the winter cold. “That’s one of the things I haven’t missed, getting into the pool when it’s freezing outside.”
It’s the best feeling, that pure silence
Kaylene Corbett
SA swimmer