This story belongs to Male’s Health’s “Road to the Olympics” series, where 6 professional athletes share their training journeys as they prepare to complete at the 2024 Paris Olympics in July. Check out all of the professional athletes’ entries here
Ivan Puskovitch, 23, will complete in his very first Olympic video games in the 10K open water swim this summertime, a test of endurance and speed. Open-water swimming likewise infamously evaluates ones capability not to get shaken off by various water conditions, be it choppy, windy, rainy, or full-on wavy on race day. At the 2024 World Championships, he put 14th and made his area on the group for the Paris video games.
We overtook him on the cusp of May, when the strategy he began following this year considerably altered: With simply 2 and a half weeks to enter the term, his coach at West Virginia University quickly resigned. Puskovitch understood what he needed to do: Put school on time out and cross the nation to reunite with his main coach, Mohammad Khadembashi, at TSM Aquatics in Santa Monica, California. Khadembashi had actually continued to deal with the swimmer long-distance while he remained in school, and now they are together at the very same swimming pool once again. Here, in Puskovitch’s own words, is what training and life resembles today:
THERE’S A LOT going on today, however I’m having a good time with it. When the facilities altered at WVU and my coach resigned, it required me to act without missing out on a beat, due to the fact that I can’t do anything to compromise my Olympic preparation. I owe that to myself and our nation.
There were just 2 and a half weeks left in the term, however that’s time I would have invested not improving. I got the news that my WVU coach resigned on a Thursday, and within an hour, I called my coach in California, my household, and some pals on the West Coast and stated I needed to return there pronto to reduce any missteps in my training.
I invested my entire day Friday loading my life into boxes and flew out on Saturday. It’s an extremely spur-of-the-moment, “life occurs” circumstance, however I’m actually delighted to be in Santa Monica. I was truly positive that needing to miss out on 3 days of training to move myself and be back in a perfect, best, beautiful training environment was going to injure me method less than for 2 and a half weeks being sidetracked and being bitter about the circumstance. It was a hard scenario with a great deal of moving parts, however it’s all coming together.
I’m presently residing in a hostel and living out of 2 luggage. Food is among the hardest parts; I’m going to the supermarket nearly every day given that it’s a shared living circumstance and I do not wish to use up excessive area.
It’s the closest I’ve ever lived to the swimming pool. I get up at 5 a.m. and skateboard to practice– it ranges from 5:30 to 7:30 a.m., and after that I have practice once again at night from 5 to 7:30. I do 11 to 12 sessions each week, and swim as much as 100 kilometers a week throughout my heaviest training blocks.
I take an hour and a half to three-hour nap every day in between practice