"Super motivated?" I love that phrase; it's very inspiring. Though she says nice things about Bob Bowman, it's my opinion she fired him due to her unusually poor showings for a swimmer of her sublime talent.I look forward to her dominating again.
From the Baltimore Sun:
"I think it's time for a fresh start," she said. "Most people, after they're done with high school, they go off to college and they get that kind of change, but I've never really gotten that. I'm looking forward to it."
In California, Hoff will train at Fullerton Aquatics Sports Team, which this week was named by the U.S. Olympic Committee as one of two new professional and postgraduate training sites for elite-level swimmers working toward the 2012 Games.
[Link]
12 comments:
Interesting article. The article assumes a lot about her relationship with Bowman--and is incorrect. First, before the 2004 Olympics, she trained with the other coach at NBAC(Paul something). From 2004 to 2008, Bowman was at University of Michigan. He moved back to NBAC after Bejing, and Hoff started to train with him then for the first time as her main coach. She's had a lot of problems during that time period, but while she has beena NBAC swimmer for a long time, she's never really been a Bowman swimmer except for recently. I don't mean that she doesn't like him or anything--I have no idea. But she certainly doesn't have a relationship with him like Phelps does or other swimmers who have gone through an Olympic cycle with him. Also, the competition has gotten a lot faster while she has been stagnating--and its not all the suit. In the 400 Free, 2 years ago, she was the best in the world, and now there are probably 5 or 6 faster swimmers than her and her best time is well off the pace. Same in the IM's. She has a lot of women ahead of her.
Her taking the chance to leave home and try something different is pretty admirable. Her comment about wanting to swim with women who are fast is interesting also. There aren't many who can push her in training.
Will Hoff transfer to a Californian college as well?
YES! It's a graduate school there.
Which grad school would taker her in without a college degree?
That's right, I forgot she didn't have her degree
Bowman said nice things about Hoff, too. If they even worked together that much, I reckon that his coaching methods just didn't fit with what she responds well to and it wasn't anything personal.
Kukors is crazy-good at the 200m IM at the moment - broke WR by 2.3 seconds at the Worlds, and posted fast free times in the relays, so she can probably push Hoff.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/olympics/bal-sp.hoff06may06,0,2823978.story
The day that Katie Hoff realized the Second Act of her swimming life had truly begun, she was struggling to finish a workout at Meadowbrook Athletic Club. Her muscles were shaking, pleading with her brain to give the order to quit. She was so emotionally strung out, she fell to the ground and started to bawl.
Her new coach, Bob Bowman, bellowed at her from across the pool deck. Katie! Don't you dare give up, he barked. Get up! Keep going!
Hoff knew on some level that this is what it would be like to work with Bowman, who helped Michael Phelps win 14 gold medals during the past two Olympics. It was the main reason she reached out to him after the Olympics and after he returned from Michigan to be the CEO of North Baltimore Aquatic Club. She needed a change. But understanding what she was getting herself into, and experiencing it, turned out to be two very different things.
She finished the workout: Ten successive 100-meter freestyle sprints, followed by 10 successive 100-meter butterfly sprints, all of them to be swum as fast as possible.
It nearly broke her, but this is why she didn't follow through on her initial impulse to abandon competitive swimming: Afterward, Bowman asked Hoff, a 19-year-old Towson swimmer with two Olympics on her resume, a simple question.
Don't you feel prepared for anything right now?
"I was literally falling over and bawling and shaking and he was screaming at me," Hoff said.
Sounds like that last quote pretty much sums it up.
Mark Savage
10 x 100s all out! followed by another 10 x 100's all out.
My not just swim a 2,000 meter IM all out.
How fast can you swim 10 x100s all out knowing you have 10 x 100s all out 'fly coming.
What comes first: The heart attack or complete failure?
Coaching girls, coaching boys... Very different skills required for two very different types of athletes.
Tonnes and tonnes of stuff written on the differences but, at the risk of a huge generalization, a lot of the stuff that really works well when you're coaching boys does not work at all - in fact, it hurts the athletes - when you're coaching girls.
The girls that hand me my bum in workout, love ladder sets and distance but that cringe at doing 50's & 100s all out.
I had my doubts about the wisdom of Hoff swimming under Bowman from the start. Bowman has spent the last fifteen years coaching Phelps, many of those coaching in a one-on-one relationship. By now the two are virtually inseparable; a Phelps/Bowman swimming entity - and that constitutes an immense hurdle to anyone joining in. Whenever I've dipped my toes into discussions about who's this generation's most dominent athlete (invariably Usain Bolt, Tiger Woods, or Michael Phelps) I feel obliged to point out not only does Phelps have tremendous natural ability and work ethic but a virtually superhuman recovery ability to recover from physical effort. Trying to explain Phelps to track & field folk who dismiss swimming as an "inferior" sport just because he won eight Olympic golds in one Games (impossible in track) I must compare him to Paavo Nurmi, the legendary Finnish distance runner. Not only is he a physical freak of nature swimming-wise but he also possesses the greatest recovery in two or three generations (maybe only Nurmi himself has showed the same ability which would make it nearly a century). So Bowman designed workouts for Phelps read like fiction (or nightmares if you're Hoff) - often combining distance work with heavy anerobic loads - like 10x100 all out free sprints followed by 10x100 all out fly. Even Olympians, still mortal beings, will crack under that sort of stress.
I think Bowman is/was Michael Phelps surrogate father and Michael Phelps had the ability to exceed Bowman's expectations.
There is a lot of anger connected to Phelps' amazing resume: Thorpe taunts insisting that 8 medals is unobtainable, Cavic's puffery, his father leaving his mother...
I too was mostly raised by women and I really needed a coach or a alpha male in my life, Phelps got Bowman as his and I think swimming and Bowman made all the difference giving him outlets like 10x100s all out, then 10 more!
Contrast that to Hoff who had a nuclear family, albeit a Type-A and se simply thrives in a different way.
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