Posted: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:13 AM - 8,087 Readers
By: John Maher
They say you can't go home again, but Aaron Peirsol is doing just that for the second time this month.
Peirsol's first trip back to his hometown of Irvine, Calif., and his old swimming pool didn't go all that well. At the national championships earlier this month, the five-time Olympic gold medalist found himself in an unusual and uncomfortable place after finishing second in both the 100- and 200-meter backstrokes. Peirsol lost to rival Ryan Lochte in the 200 after falling to David Plummer in the 100.
"I got touched out in the 100 and out-raced in the 200," he said.
The Pan Pacific Championships, featuring the best swimmers from the United States and 20 other countries, begin today in Irvine, where Peirsol has a chance to send the message that, at 27, he still owns the backstroke.
"I'm certainly looking to go a lot faster," Peirsol said. "Times at the nationals weren't what we expected."
His coach, Eddie Reese, agreed.
"I felt like he had no speed at the national championships," said Reese, who also coached Peirsol at the University of Texas, "but here we are two-and-a-half weeks later, and I think he will swim a lot faster."
For almost a decade, Peirsol has been the best backstroker in the world. He's won five Olympic gold medals for the U.S., and at the Pan Pacific championships he captured three gold medals in both 2002 and 2006. He currently holds backstroke world records at 100 meters (51.94 seconds) and 200 meters (1:51.92).
Although he wasn't wild about the second-place finishes at the nationals, he did like being back in the pool where he was a prodigy for Irvine Novaquatics.
"That's where I learned that I could do what I do now. That's where my career really took off," Peirsol said.
Peirsol made his first Olympic team when he was still at Newport Harbor High School. At the University of Texas, and for a few years after that, Peirsol was part of the Texas Trio. He, breaststroker Brendan Hansen and butterflyer Ian Crocker all set world records while dominating their specialties. They also combined their talents on powerful U.S. medley-relay teams. All three own Olympic gold medals for relays, but only Peirsol won an individual Olympic gold, and he has three of those.
Maybe that success is what kept him in the pool while Crocker and Hansen exited competition after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Or, maybe it was Peirsol's love of the water that kept him in the sport. Unlike his two former UT teammates, Peirsol grew up on the West Coast, where the ocean was never far away.
"Where I went to kindergarten, for crying out loud, was literally on the beach. Newport Elementary was right on the water. The playground was the sand," Peirsol recalled. "It gave me an affinity for the coast, the water, for swimming. Just being around water was my childhood."
As a teenager, Peirsol said, "I tore up the beach as much as I could. I surfed up and down Newport."
After Peirsol won a silver medal in the 200 backstroke at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, he returned for his senior year of high school, which was experimenting with block scheduling. In his last semester there, he fashioned a schedule even a beach bum would envy. Peirsol loaded up classes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and had one class on Tuesday and Thursday — and those were over by 9:30 a.m. Since there were no morning swim practices on Tuesday and Thursday, only afternoon ones, Peirsol was able to hang out at the beach those days.
"It was absolutely ridiculous," Peirsol said. "It was incredible."
He said life has never been as idyllic since , but he has managed to strike a balance between training and life outside the pool.
"Swimming has been a great aid in helping to see the world," said Peirsol, who has been to Europe and Central America in the past year. In Austin, he picked up a diversion this winter, buying a used boat along with swimmer Eric Shanteau. They keep it on Lake Austin, where they try to take it out a couple of times a week and do some wake surfing.
And yes, he still finds time for training.
"My job is to keep him in the pool doing the right things so he can stay in the ball game," said Reese, "which he wants to do. He's very competitive."
Peirsol said at the national meet, he and some Longhorn Aquatics swimmers were a little over-trained, that they hadn't tapered their workouts early enough in the season and weren't fully rested.
"Our team was fairly flat. That extra bit wasn't there," Peirsol said. "I think there are a whole lot of guys who think they can go faster."
In his hometown, at his old pool, he'll be getting a second chance to do just that.
