While most 17-year-old girls are getting the ball rolling on their summer vacation, Chloé Isaac, who lives in Brossard, is just starting her only two weeks of relaxation.

Chloe is one of the 10 girls that train 35-plus hours a week, six days a week, 12 months a year, at Montreal Synchro, Montreal’s top-notch swimming club. Isaac and her nine teammates on the Junior National Team have just returned from the FINA World Cup Championships in St-Petersburg, Russia.

She came back with some major bragging rights, earning Canada second place in the solo competition and third place in her duet with Jo-Anne Fortin. Half of her team is local talent, where the rest of the swimmers are the best of the best from all over Canada.

PRACTISING FOR 2012: Chloé Isaac

When Isaac isn’t swimming in international waters, she calls a Montreal pool home and competes most of her regular season in Canada. It’s during her summer months that she travels abroad to compete.

Montreal swimmers have always been known in the synchro world as being extremely disciplined. They almost always hold the number one spot in all categories at the national level and their swimmers are always in multiples on our national teams. There must be something in the water here because this town has been producing unbelievable swimmers for the last 20 years.

Long days, strong muscles

It could have something to do with the extreme training.

The teenage girls finish up their regular season at the end of May, then pack their bags and move to Montreal for a whirlwind five weeks of training from 6 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. with a bunch of teammates they have never swum with before. They also learn a brand new routine in that time, and not just any routine, but the last Olympic routine that was swum in Athens in 2004. What a way to start a summer vacation.

Synchro may look pretty and girly, but under the smiles, the sparkly bathing suits and the 25 pounds of waterproof make-up, there are some very serious athletes. But to get to that point of endurance, they have to be in the most pristine physical condition. They are not only some of the most flexible athletes out there, but they are also some of the strongest. And it’s damn hard to stretch out those thick muscles to the point where they have to do the splits with one leg on a chair just to feel a stretch.

“You have to be really disciplined and ready to work hard,” Isaac says. “You will spend really long hours in the pool. The whole time is spent in the water, except for a break to eat.”

Like most sports, synchro has evolved in the past few years. Naturally, the bar for creativity rises every year, but even the rules and regulations have made some major changes as well.

Now, teams consist of strong soloists and pairs, or duets that swim and compete together with the team. The new concept, called “combo,” involves swimmers sneaking away to the side in the middle of a routine with one or two people still going. It’s pretty interesting to watch.

Eye on London

Another thing that has changed in the past decade is the male presence in the pool. Not leering, teenage lifeguards, but actual male competitors. They are more common in the less competitive levels, but they are out there.

When I asked Chloé about how she would feel trading in her duet partner Fortin for a male one, she says with a laugh, “That’d be an experience. There are no men swimming right now; it’s kind of impossible to imagine swimming with one. There is one male swimmer in the USA [that I can think of] but none in Canada at the elite level.”

What few men there are always seem to luck out at competitions: When hundreds of girls are sharing one single change room, the male swimmers always get a nice, clean and spacious shower room all to themselves.

The Olympics are in this teenager’s eyes, perhaps because synchro scholarships are few and far between in North America.

“I want to go for sure to the 2012 Olympics [in London] and also maybe the ones in 2016,” she says. No doubt she is working hard to get there, because after her two weeks of “vacation,” she returns to the pool for six hours a day, to train with the other young ladies shooting for 2012.