Like 4am starts five days a week.
Four gym sessions a week.
Then a dip in the sea more often than not.
But that programme has paid off for Carina Doyle, who is off to the world surf life-saving championships in Adelaide in November.
Doyle (18) is one of 12 athletes selected to represent New Zealand in the junior championships which will take place in Adelaide as the same time as the open world championships.
Former Otago swimmer Andrew McMillan, who now lives in Australia, has been named in the New Zealand open team and will swim out of the St Clair club.
Like McMillan, Doyle is a member of the St Clair club, and took up the sport just over four years ago when she was not enjoying her pool swimming much.
"A friend of mine at water polo asked me to come along and have a go and I pretty much have loved it ever since," she said.
"I prefer surf swimming to being in the pool. It is a bit more exciting being out in the surf, with waves hitting you and then getting above them."
Unfortunately for Doyle, the Glenelg beach in Adelaide, where the majority of the surf events will happen, is not totally to her liking.
The junior and senior teams have just spent a week at Adelaide, getting used to the conditions and Doyle said it was far from great.
"The surf is quite small and it was quite windy. The sand was also quite coarse and grainy, which made it quite hard to run on.""When the surf is bigger then it comes more down to your technique. It is much different than the pool as in the surf you are quite close together and there is a bit of argy-bargy going on."
European countries are not used to big waves so a calmer swell was favoured.
She will be in swimming events in both the surf and the pool. The pool events will be at the Adelaide Aquatic Centre.
Pool events vary from rescuing a 50kg mannequin and diving under gates in the pool.
There are 12 athletes in the under-20 team, six male and six female, with two athletes from each country allowed in all events.
Competition is expected to be fierce, with the home country keen for a win although Doyle feels the New Zealand team will be very competitive.
She has been training hard and feels her fitness has improved in the past few months.
She is coached by Andy Adair at Moana Pool and, because she lives in Waikouaiti, she has to get up at 4am five days a week to start training at 5am.
She trains for 2 hours in the morning, covering about 8km in the pool.
"If you do it in the morning then you know you have got it out of the way."
She also has two swimming sessions a week in the afternoon and is in the gym four times a week.
All that hard work was worth it, she said.
"When I started out I had no idea of what I was doing. Four years ago I never would have dreamed that I would have made a team like this."
She paid credit to Adair and also the coaches at the St Clair club who had helped her along.
A first-year psychology student at the University of Otago, she has to find $1000 to get to the championships but has been helped out by the St Clair club.
Two St Clair crews will contest the world club IRB championships in Adelaide straight after the world championships.
Lining up in the women's division are sisters Stephanie and Carla Laughton, with patient Natasha Scott.
In the men's division, Michael Crombie and Isaac Davies will compete with Rachel Craythorne as the patient.
