College Club Swimmer Josie West Preps for Nationals, EP 272

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Welcome to Champions Mojo.

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Join us for conversations that inspire and empower you as an adult athlete, fitness enthusiast or master swimmer.

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Our goal is to make each episode insightful and inspirational and to discover what it takes to build or keep a life of personal excellence.

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I'm your host, Kelly Pallas, and we're here to champion you.

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So I have an awesome on-deck interview today with Josie West.

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Josie, welcome to Champions Mojo, Thank you.

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So Josie has a really cool story.

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She swims for the University of Virginia club team.

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She's 21 years old.

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She and I just swam the 400 IM against each other and this is her first master swimming meet.

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So tell us how this has been, what the 400 IM was like for you and a little bit about club swimming.

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Yeah.

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So I've been a member of club swimming at UVA for four years.

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I'm a senior at the university and that's been a lot of fun.

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But this is my first master's meet.

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So through our college club swimming membership we could enter any master's meets we want, which I've never done before.

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But last fall I studied abroad so I couldn't swim any of my club meets and I'm looking forward to the CCS National Championship in Phoenix in March.

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But I still need to qualify.

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So I just swam the 400 IM at the Nova Masters meet to make that qualification time to go to Arizona in March.

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What was your 400 IM time?

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You were so far ahead of me I didn't really see it.

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It flashed off before I got there.

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It was like a 520, which isn't awesome for me, but it's under the qualifying time, so that's all I needed.

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Yeah, that's all you needed.

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So tell us a little bit about what exactly club swimming is yeah.

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So club swimming the university has a club and that's like central to the university.

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We have practices, meets, a lot of social events too, but our team is about 300 people, which is crazy.

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But that team belongs to the like national entity of college club swimming which is underneath the US Masters umbrella.

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That we compete against a lot of other schools and get to travel to regionals, nationals and also some dual meets, inter-squad.

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But it's a lot of fun yeah.

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And I think I've heard through the grapevine you guys are self-coached at some of the universities.

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Tell us about, like, what does a club swimmer's training look like?

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And coaching and that kind of things Meet schedule.

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So we offer like eight practices a week and it's like go as you want.

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There's not like an attendance requirement.

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Our coaches are mostly grad students.

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We have a couple ex-varsity swimmers that are grad students that are coaching us, but it's pretty like self-motivated to go and train.

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So I swim probably five practices a week and those are about an hour and a half hour, hour and a half depending on the day.

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Meets we go to about three travel meets a semester.

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So there'll be three like fun meets and then in the fall we have our Eastern regionals and then in the spring we'll have nationals.

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And nationals obviously have qualifying times.

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What would you say the like yeah, it's college club swimming is getting a lot more popular.

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So since my first year the times have gotten a lot harder.

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Our team at UVA is we're pretty talented, so we'll probably be sending like 40 people to Arizona Not to brag.

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But the college club swimming national champions UVA women are three times reigning.

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So going for our four piece in our women's national title this year in our women's national title this year.

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So that's not surprising, because the University of Virginia's women, the varsity so you guys are the club team and the varsity obviously is number one.

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Now they're going, isn't their 5P, they're fifth.

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Yeah, that's what I thought.

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So do you guys interact?

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Do you time at their meets?

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Do you watch their meets?

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Yeah, so we practice right after varsity so we kind of see them on the deck.

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A couple of times I've had a class with a few of them, so I know a couple of them and then we get invited to time with their meets on deck.

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So we do that all the time and they donate to our club fund for putting our time into volunteering at their meets, which is cool.

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Do you guys do the full taper tech suit?

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getting ready for a meet.

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I think it depends on the swimmer.

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There's some swimmers that are going nationals, that go to every single practice and train really hard and lift on their own and they'll have a race plan themselves.

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But there's other swimmers that do this more for the friends and just happen to make a nationals cut.

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You know, and we'll do their own thing, but it's pretty independent.

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You got to know what your own body needs.

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So the club.

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Actually, the club training is independent, so, like you guys, don't do a group taper.

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We do taper off, but I think everyone, because not everyone's at every practice every day and we're all our own students.

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It's a little bit more dialing in your own routine, Right?

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So if somebody chooses to go three practices a week and you choose to go eight, then you need a way different taper than that person.

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So what are you studying?

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And when you're a senior, what are you going to do with your life?

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I'm a senior at UVA, with graduating with an architecture degree in May and I'm planning to go and work in DC for an architecture firm.

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Yeah, very nice.

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Anything that you like, specialize in that you've kind of been attracted to in architecture, the firm that I'm working for does a lot of like commercial buildings so kind of that's.

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everything that's like restaurants, gyms, banks, schools, sometimes like all sorts of stuff can fall under that.

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But, yeah, very interesting field.

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I'm very new to it all.

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It's a lot to learn.

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A lot to learn, so obviously you must have had some swimming background coming into club swimming.

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How would you describe your background and what kind of got you into club swimming and how that blends with you know, very academically challenging university?

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up until high school and then I joined my high school team which is known to have a big history to Olympic gold medalists in Denver, colorado, missy Franklin and Emma Weber being those Olympians.

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I was really inspired by that team.

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So then, starting in high school, started doing year-round USA swimming and then was super planning on like swimming D3 in college and talking to a lot of like Northeast schools, middlebury and WashU and Tufts.

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But COVID was my junior year of high school so it was right during that All my meets were canceled and that kind of made me pull back and see what else there would be if swimming didn't really work out.

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So got right into club swimming at UVA and it's been amazing, met all my friends through it, been on exec for two years.

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I was actually involved in the College of Consuming National Board too for two years.

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Being on exec.

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Tell me about that.

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So I joined as a first year.

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Actually I got elected as spirit chair so I did the merchandise and meat planning a little bit.

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And then the next year I was the social chair so that was planning team dinners and travel.

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We do like a training trip and a beach week, you know all sorts of events like that.

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But as an exec member you kind of just help plan.

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Everything Comes under the same umbrella.

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Cool.

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So do you know much about the partnership with United States?

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Masters Swimming.

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Because I was able to serve as Eastern representative on the College Cup Swimming Advisory Board.

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I actually do, but not many people do Tell me a little bit about that part.

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So College of Swimming is underneath USMS and when you join CCS you can check a box that says like to do the bridge membership and that gets you in right away.

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But they're starting to phase it to where everyone's getting that bridge membership so you can just go right ahead and enter these master's meets underneath your team from CCS.

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So if you were talking to a senior, or juniors and seniors who are trying to pick, where am I going to?

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I want to swim in college.

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Maybe I'll do D3, maybe I'll even do D1, but maybe I won't make the travel team, or what would you say to them?

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As far as looking at the college, you know the club swimming team for universities.

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It ended up being for me that my academics came over swimming, so that's why I ended up at UVA over anywhere, I'd say.

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When I look, when you look into those teams honestly, their social media presence gives a pretty good level of involvement.

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Like UVA club swim, we attend three meets a semester.

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That's all documented there and all of our social events are there.

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So I think that's a great way to kind of get a feel for the team if you don't know anybody.

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Also, SwimCloud all of our CCS stuff goes in there.

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So if you kind of want to look at where you would stand on a team or how competitive a team might be, it's all in SwimCloud, which is awesome.

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That's so cool.

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And has anyone ever been so good in your four years at UVA that they might have made the varsity team?

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Just you know, on improving UVA is a pretty quick varsity team.

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So we've actually had a couple of varsity teamers step down to club.

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But we had one boy, emmett Hannum.

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He's very, very quick, he won all of his events at CCS Nationals and he had an option to like walk on and he actually decided not to because of academic reasons and commitment reasons.

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But it's a rare case, especially in my school, but it happens.

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Yeah, I know it happens at other schools.

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I just wonder if Todd, you know, would be scouting and seeing if some, some woman went.

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You know, 21 in the 50.

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Hey, that's kind of cool, yeah.

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Todd can get anyone he wants on his team, so he's not necessarily looking for us, but after our nationals.

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He always like, will post something up for us and congratulate us Like he's very aware of what we're doing.

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Yeah, that's really cool.

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That's really cool.

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Todd's great.

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I've had him on the show twice, so he's really an awesome coach.

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So is there anything that I have not asked you about club swimming that you may want to share?

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My favorite clubs and memories are from the CCS National Meet.

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So it's been in Atlanta, it's been in Columbus.

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Last year was at the Knot in Indianapolis and there's usually over 100 universities there, which is so cool to see everyone walking in.

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And being from Denver, which is very far from UVA, I have like people at all sorts of schools across the country, so it's been really cool to run into people from high school that I swam with, from summer team that I swam with at home and you know gather like UCLA, and then we gather Oregon and then Wisconsin and CU and all take a picture together and kind of just celebrate that we're all swimming still.

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But that's a meet with a lot of school spirit.

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It's really fun.

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That's awesome.

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Do you plan to swim for life?

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I do.

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It's a form of exercise that works best for me and it's fun, and I do distance, so I have got something.

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I like swimming a long time.

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That's great.

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Well, I recommend it highly, yeah.

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So thank you so much for spending this time with me today.

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Thank you.

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Thank you for listening to the Champions Mojo podcast.

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College Club Swimmer Josie West Preps for Nationals, EP 272

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