It's all about recovery between races for McIntosh

PARIS — In the heavy-lifting portion of her Olympic swim schedule, what Canadian swimmer Summer McIntosh does out of the water is as important as what she does in it to add to her medal haul in Paris.

A mere 15 hours after claiming her second gold medal and third medal of the Olympic Games, the Toronto teenager was back in the pool Friday working on more history-making hardware in the 200-metre individual medley heats and semifinals.

McIntosh posted the second-fastest time in the evening semifinals to reach the final Saturday, when she'll try to ascend the podium a fourth time.

"It's all about outside of the pool right now," McIntosh said. "I know once I dive in, I'm good, but it's really important to recover as best as possible in between these races."

The 17-year-old had a day off after her 400-metre freestyle silver on opening night and another after Monday's dominating victory in the 400-metre medley, but it's been two-a-day races since then.

Anticipating her insertion into a women's medley relay final Sunday could mean as many as eight races for her over the last five days, and up to 13 over the entire nine days of swimming.

"It almost feels like a job to recover sometimes because it does take a lot of energy to figure out what's going to be the best recovery possible," McIntosh said.

The two-time world champion in the 200-metre butterfly captured gold in Olympic-record time Thursday.

She also anchored the 4 x 200 freestyle relay team to fourth later in the evening, which further shortened her recovery time for Friday's races.

"I always come back to she's a 17-year-old girl. Managing all this and doing it day after day, it's not an easy thing," said her coach Brent Arckey. "As far as the times and stuff, these are things that we've talked about doing, but managing the whole thing is probably the hardest thing to do.

"We're trying to get to the end of this thing and then we'll be able to take the deep breath."

Arckey says McIntosh has rehearsed her Paris pace in training.

"When you have eight, nine or 10 practices a week, maybe you're coming off of a swim meet and you're doing something fast afterwards. You have all these opportunities to get up and rehearse high-performance efforts over and over and over again," he explained.

"That's just setting up a chaotic situation and teaching somebody to achieve in those situations."

McIntosh had no complaints about her Olympic race schedule.

"The whole event schedule is really nice and kind of lines up with . . if I were if I were to write (it) I would write it exactly how it is to be honest," she said. "It's really nice because I've had two days off right after both my four hundreds.

"Trying to treat every day like the first day of meet. Try to keep in the zone as much as possible."

The latter requires limiting social media exposure and time with her family, as well as a lot of eating and naps.

"It's a lot more simple than probably people think behind the scenes," McIntosh said. "All I'm doing is eating and sleeping.

"Just trying to sleep as much as possible even though it's hard after all the adrenalin and excitement, along with eating as much as possible and just kind of letting your mind take a rest as well.

"All those things add up over time, like once you get to Day 9 of a meet, it's still trying to feel as fresh as possible."

She prides herself on her sleeping talent.

"Any swimmer can attest to being a good napper. It's kind of a skill you learn doing two-a-days (workouts) all the time," McIntosh said.

"Usually my practices are at 5 a.m., so I usually nap for like three hours after them, so definitely am a professional napper at this point."

The 200 I.M. is McIntosh's mystery race. She's competed it just once internationally with a gold medal in the 2022 Commonwealth Games.

"Since I do the 400 I.M. and I'm good at that event, I know I can be good in the 200," McIntosh said. "They are very different. The 400 I.M. is definitely harder, but the 200 is definitely a sprint race. It's probably the sprintiest race I can do at a high level.

"I feel good. I kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel, which is a little bit bittersweet because I've been obviously enjoying my time here."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 2, 2024.