Olympics reporter Michelle Prendiville spent a day in the life of World Champion swimmer Lewis Clareburt to see just how his prep is tracking in the buildup to Paris.
5am wake up calls come with the territory of being a World Champion swimmer but Lewis Clareburt was still rubbing his eyes as he let 1News into his Auckland central apartment block in the early hours of the morning.
The early mornings aren't easy. But Clareburt knows all too well the mental strain and physical grind he has to put his body through daily if he wants to have any chance of winning an Olympic medal in two months' time.
“You do talk to yourself a lot," the 24-year-old said. "I'm always visualising stuff, when I go to training, I don’t know what I’m doing so you get comfortable in uncomfortable situations.”
Clareburt made the move from Wellington to Auckland in November last year. A new city means new challenges every day. One of those is not having home comforts and the luxury of mum and dad’s cooking available to him.
Some mornings he can be a rushed for time so the swimmer let us in on his secret snack when heading to training.
“Sometimes when I’m not organised, I have to go get a bite to eat from the Z station – It’s always closest to the pool."
His now not-so-secret pre-training snack is a pie.
“It doesn't sit too bad, he laughed. "Sometimes you might get the odd part that wants to come up! But most of the time it's pretty good.”
But Clareburt and his stomach is by no means safe under the direction of his coach Mitch Nairn.
“I try and break him as often as possible," laughed Nairn. "It's very, very difficult but I try very hard, I thought I might have had him in the bucket spewing the other morning!”
Clareburt and Nairn are out to break barriers and win New Zealand’s first Olympic swimming medal in almost 30 years.
The 24-year-old is the current World Champion in the 400 metre Individual Medley, but he’s been learning some tips off the current world record holder, Leon Marchand. Clareburt went over to the United States in December where he trained with Marchand.
“I saw exactly what he did on a day-to-day basis. I got to sit and watch everything they did, saw all the times and then try swim faster than them, and that's what we've been doing!”
By 9am Clareburt has finished his pool session, but the grind doesn’t stop. It’s an easy 20 metre walk from the pool to the gym at High Performance Sport on Auckland’s North Shore.
There, Clareburt uses weights and does explosive sets of work to make sure he can do the same when he goes out of the start blocks in Paris.
It’s this routine he’s done almost every day for the last three years, now finally about to come to a head.
“By the time I get on the start line there's nothing else I’ve done to get me faster," he said.
"I hope when I’m walking out to that final or the heat, I know that the work has been done and now it's time to rumble.”
* The 1News Olympic team will continue to profile the key New Zealand athletes who are heading to Paris over the coming weeks.
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