This is Dec. 29, so swimming probably wasn't high among sports you expected as adornment for today's page. But competitive swimming is a year-round thing. Someplace in the mid-Atlantic states, there's a meet every weekend.
In fact, some of swimming's toughest training occurs in winter.
At the Columbia Swim Center recently, each of two dozen teen-agers who are part of the Columbia Clippers' senior squad swam 6,500 yards -- or 3.7 miles. It was a typical session, their leader said.
They repeatedly drilled on starts, too, exploding four at a time off the "blocks" into the water, ripping to mid-pool, and finishing the rest of the 25 yards.
Later the swimmers did crunches to tighten abdominal, oblique and lower-back muscles and a routine using 3-pound dumbbells to gird shoulders against injury.
"Are you meeting expectations?" assistant coach Matt Goode gently chided one girl, 14, who simply wasn't into lying on her side on the wet deck to do dumbbell work.
Perhaps it was having swum nearly the same distance earlier -- starting at 5:30 a.m. That pre-dawn session is a twice-a-week regimen for all; some come a third morning to build endurance.
Like her teammates, one of the exercise leaders, Laura Allen, 17, swims often. The college-bound senior said some of her fellow Atholton High School students consider her to be nuts.
"This is our high school sport," Allen said. "A lot of them play two or three sports. Every one of us here chose to do this. There's no time off. It's a lot more intense than any team sport. That's why we do this eight times a week -- nine for some of us -- plus the meets. ... We kill ourselves."
Allen, a Clipper for five years, works hard to be a good state-level swimmer, says coach Ken Spencer. She says the next meet is her focus; maybe sectionals, maybe ... she doesn't say "nationals." She hopes to swim in college.
For Allen and the other 250,000-plus youth athletes in USA Swimming, the competitive future is never certain. The Clippers sometimes produce an exceptional performer, but Spencer knows it will happen more often at more selective clubs such as the North Baltimore Aquatics Club.
Still, swimmers everywhere race against one, single standard: time.
It's the most challenging, inflexible measure of ability in sports. Practices consume hundreds of hours like those here; fractions of seconds often separate winners from losers.
"It's not like team sports, where you can get ahead because your team is good. That's why I like it," said Colin Ackerman, 13, an eighth-grader at St. Louis Catholic School in Clarksville.