Athletes go through a great deal to be successful. They practice every spare moment they have, and they seem to think about their sports night and day. But, in some sports, athletes have to go a little further to be successful.

Swimming is one of those sports.

The theories of going faster in the water basically center around two principles -- tapering and shaving. And, as almost all swimmers now do, the swimming contigent of the men's swimming and diving team uses these principles to get those extra few hundredths of a second out of a race.

Tapering boils down to this: Work hard, rest hard. Generally a coach will work his swimmers extra hard for a certain period of time, and then not long before a big meet, the swimmers will swim a little bit easier in practice, with a lot less yardage.

The theory goes that toward the end of that period of rest, your races will be faster, and in most cases there is improvement in time. The improvement will vary from swimmer to swimmer, based on the amount of work they did, the amount of rest they got, the swimmer's size and physical make-up and other factors.

"It's different for everybody," Coach Peter Brown said. "Your performance is a function of rest, and a function of the work you put in before the rest. Some guys need ten days to rest. Some need six or seven weeks."

"You go through so many months of work," junior co-captain Adam Carroll, "and your body's get so broken down. When you start to rest, it's a weird cycle. You might not feel good for a while, but hopefully by the end you feel excellent."

Then, usually the night before a big meet, the swimmers break out the razors and shave the hair off their bodies. Even their legs. And very often their heads.

"There's definitely less resistance in the water when you shave," Brown said. "The ability to cut through the water is going to be greatly enhanced, and then you're going to get the time drops you're looking for."

"When you shave down, you get sort of a torpedo effect," Carroll said.

Shaving seems kind of strange, maybe a little weird, but the swimmers usually get around that by shaving as a group, and fooling around with it.

"If you're going to do something that silly," Carroll said, "you might as well get into it."

But behind all this madness is a purpose, and that's to go faster. Brown says that the combination of the taper and the shave results in about a three percent drop in time in a particular race. Three percent in a 100-yard race is over a second in time, and at this level of competition, one second can be a huge difference.

It might seem pretty shocking, but it serves a purpose, and generally results in a certain amount of success.