An inflatable Carrefour pool, a belt, a rope and a pole to tie it to. Swimmers, exercise bikes, or ellipticals don't work for swimmers to stay in shape, so they have to force their wits. Most have accepted that they will lose their sensations in the water and have resigned themselves to maintaining their muscles with hours of gymnastics and weights, but others have gone further. Far beyond. This is the case of the Dutch Sharon van Rouwendaal , current Olympic champion of 10 kilometers in open water, who currently resides in Montpellier.

The start of the confinement in Spain caught him in the Sierra Nevada High Performance Center with his partner, also a swimmer Rob Muffels , and, in anticipation of similar measures being taken in France, he ran to the supermarket for material. The idea then, with the Tokyo 2020 Games still on, was not to lose touch with the water in key months of readiness, and although the Olympic postponement provided relief, Van Rouwendaal kept his idea of ​​training in static.

In the exterior part of his house he mounted the pool, the contraption and began to swim. Although the inflatable's little more than two meters in diameter did not allow him to boast, he was able to continue working on his cabbage stroke. "There is always a solution, you just have to be creative. I have only been able to do 45 minutes because the water was very cold ...", he wrote on the social network Instagram in which he also showed a video of his invention. These days Van Rouwendaal is taking advantage of confinement in France to promote his biography 'Bruut' which, at the moment, has only been published in Dutch.

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