Charlotte Bonnet Is Working on Her Mental Game During Quarantine

Arena is a SwimSwam Partner.

Charlotte Bonnet doing an at-home workout

25-year old French swimmer and Arena elite athlete Charlotte Bonnet won her first, and only, Olympic medal in 2012 when she was only 17 years old as a member of the French 800 free relay that won bronze. There she swam a 1:57.78 on a rolling start.

Over the last few years, Bonnet has risen into prominence as an individual star. In the inaugural season of the International Swimming League, she won the 200 free at the Las Vegas finale as part of the league champion Energy Standard team effort.

During the shutdown, Bonnet, the defending European Champion in the 200 free, has been going through an easier routine than many other elites with whom we’ve spoken, working out every other day.

“It’s either a yoga session, a cardio session, or a core and abs session,” Bonnet said of her workout routine. “I do these sessions with a friend of mine who is a physical trainer and who goes live on Instagram for people who want to stay fit during quarantine. It’s much more motivating than doing it on your own.”

Charlotte Bonnet cooking

As compared to another French swimmer we recently profiled, open water swimmer Marc-Antoine Olivier, who is doing two workouts every day, this is a much more relaxed pace.

So what is Bonnet doing with the rest of her time?

“The rest of the time, I read a lot. Mostly detective books or thrillers. I’ve always loved reading, but normally I have a little less time so I’m enjoying it right now.”

Bonnet has also taken up cooking, which is a skill she says that she hopes to carry forward even after the lockdown ends.

“I look at the recipes of top chefs on social networks and I draw inspiration from them,” Bonnet said. “Why not do cooking classes out of the lockdown? Coming out of this lockdown, I would like to continue cooking, because I really acquired the taste for it.”

Charlotte Bonnet cooking

Hailing from a dense suburb of Paris and now living in France’s 5th-largest city, Nice, Bonnet says that early on, the isolation was hard for her. “I was going around in circles the first week, I didn’t really know what to do and my days were very long!” she said of the beginning.

But since, after working with her psychologist, she’s settled into a routine. Bonnet says that this has given her an opportunity to talk to do a lot of work with her psychologist on topics that they don’t usually get the chance to discuss.

Bonnet is in quarantine with her boyfriend and fellow European Champion Jeremy Desplanches of Switzerland.

“The easiest thing I would say is to be in lockdown with my boyfriend, because it doesn’t change us too much from our everyday life. We live together, we swim in the same group etc. It’s a chance to be confined together, it would have been very hard to live this lockdown alone.

France has almost 160,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins University, which is the 4th-most of any country in the world. The 21,856 COVID-19 caused deaths are the 3rd-most in the world.