Poolside with Thailand's national finswimmers

The South East Asian Games  -- SEA Games for short -- started this week in Vientiane, with Thailand now fighting hard to stomp its regional counterparts into the loser history books. 

But rather than focus on those run of the mill SEA sporting events that are popular worldwide like petanque and pencak silat, we headed to Thammasat University’s Rangsit campus this week to see what the national finswimming team is up to right before they head to Laos.

Never heard of finswimming? Neither did we. That’s why we were curious. It’s actually just as it sounds. The swimmers wear specially designed racing fins, either monofins or regular ones, using their muscle strength to propel them the length of the pool. Race lengths vary from 50 to 800 meters and it's quite impressive to watch as they have to swim underwater for about 20 meters and then when they reach the end of the pool somehow manage to flip around with their fins still on. It sounds horribly awkward, but the Thai finswimmers manage to make it look easy.

Finswimming is a relatively new sport on the international stage, included in both the World Games and SEA Games. The Thai finswimming team took part in the last SEA Games too, and this year they’re looking forward to rocking Vientiane.

Russian coach Vladimir Kazmazin has been coaching the team since July, the starting point of this year’s training season. He told us that they have a great chance of snatching four gold medals from the current finswimming champion: Vietnam.

Vladimir says that the team, made up of 24 young university students, is really determined to win and have been training hard for themselves, their families and their nation.

“Back in July, the team started out with seven kilometer routines daily, just to build up stamina and vitality, and then they started cutting the distance and pumping up the speed,” he says. “In the last few weeks of their training, they’ve been swimming 3km daily but at the competition speed.”

There’s a consensus among the team members that they all love Bangkok’s current winter weather, but finswimming in a 24 degree Celsius pool at 5am to train for the SEA Games is a nightmare.

The SEA Games started December 2, but the finswimming competition doesn't kick off till December 14. Click here for full schedule details. Still not convinced it's an incredibly hard sport? Check out this YouTube video of the men's 200m final at the World Games in Kaohsiung earlier this year.