Stuff of Dreams

Insomnia hasn’t hurt Kaitlin Sandeno. Not yet.

Once the Olympic swim trials began, catching 40 winks became a challenge. Even after making the United States team in three events, Sandeno has found little time to rest, except for the occasional catnap.

“I’ve been up ever since the first day of the trials,” said Sandeno, 17, who will be a senior at El Toro High this fall. “I think it’s the excitement. I start thinking about stuff and my mind keeps going and going. I think about everything. Being with the team, getting all this stuff. Maybe when it’s all over, I can get some sleep.”

For now, though, there is too much stuff to do.

Her luggage has yet to arrive from Indianapolis, where the trials were held. She has laundry to do, a suitcase to pack and friends to visit. And then there are those 171 e-mails she has received since the trials ended.

Sunday, she joins the Olympic swim team in Pasadena for two weeks of training. They will go to Sea World and a Dodger game. Oh, and there’s the warehouse visit where they pick out their Olympic gear.

“We get soooo much stuff,” Sandeno said in a teenage girl voice straight out of any number of John Hughes movies.

Who has time to sleep?

Sandeno’s life has accelerated in the last two weeks. Her swim career has gained serious altitude. In only three years as a full-time swimmer, she has reached the Olympics and will swim the 400-meter individual medley, the 200 butterfly and 800 freestyle in Sydney next month.

Pretty heady stuff.

“I don’t want to think about Australia just yet,” she said. “I just hope I go down there and swim well and represent well. I want people to be glad I was on the team.”

Star-Gazing

People are glad. They are also curious.

Even before Sandeno won the 400 IM on the first day of the trials, she felt the stares . . . from other swimmers.

“They were constantly looking at me,” Sandeno said. “It was really weird because they acted like they weren’t, but I could see them staring at me. It made me feel really awkward.”

By the end of the trials, you couldn’t blame people for gazing.

Sandeno, wearing her lucky toe ring (second toe, right foot), followed her 400 IM victory by finishing second in the 200 butterfly, an event she only started swimming seriously in the last year. Then she surprised even those close to her with a second-place finish in the 800 freestyle, shaving five seconds off her career-best time.

That triple was topped only by 33-year-old Dara Torres, who will swim four individual events in Sydney.

“The 800 was the tough one to watch,” said Jill Sandeno, Kaitlin’s mother. “I was going, ‘What is she doing?’ My husband was the one who knew she was going to make it.”

She was racing against Brooke Bennett and Diana Munz, who had dominated the 800 in the last year. But Sandeno met the challenge, finishing second to qualify for her third event.

“You can dream about the trials, but it’s another thing to experience and witness it,” Sandeno said. “You’re rushed around, like you’re famous--come here, five seconds over here, interviews over here, medals. The first day was the longest of my life. It was also so fast. I don’t remember a lot of it. It’s a big blur.”

Things have not slowed down. When Sandeno got home, she found people were still staring, via e-mail.

“I managed to read 80 of them, but people started sending instant messages once they saw I was signed on,” Sandeno said. “The screen was going bling-bling-bling. My dad came in and said I should probably just go to bed.”

But she didn’t sleep much.

“I used to get about five e-mails a day and I would write back,” Sandeno said. “There is just no way now.”

There are a couple she might answer, but not with e-mail. A few Australian fans messaged Sandeno and, in a nice way, pointed out that she shouldn’t expect to go down under and come back up with a medal.

Not surprising, considering the nationalist fervor rallying behind the Australian swim team.

A challenge? Sandeno isn’t planning that far ahead, although she does have a post-Olympics tattoo on her itinerary.

“The Olympic rings on my back just above my tan line,” she said.

Hearing this, Jill Sandeno laughed and said: “The whole family is getting one.”

Family Values

After winning the 400 IM at the trials, Sandeno lost it.

“I was crying, ‘I want my mom, I want my mom,’ ” Sandeno said. “I had all these people running around looking for her.”

Said Jill Sandeno: “When she saw me, she ran up and almost knocked me down.”

The family is ever-present as a supporting cast. In fact, Sandeno is quick to point out that her father, Tom, is at almost every race.

“I feel bad because people always ask me about my mother,” Sandeno said. “I have a dad.

“When I get up at 5 a.m. to go to workouts, he gets up so I don’t have to walk to my car alone. He gets the cranky Kaitlin.”

Sandeno is the youngest of three sisters--Amy was 13 and Camlyn 10 when Kaitlin was born.

The wide age gap had a positive effect.

“When she came into the family, she had two big sisters who were into soccer and swimming and cheerleading and all this stuff,” Jill Sandeno said.

Kaitlin packed her life with stuff, too: soccer, cross-country, baseball.

She began swimming a couple days a week for Renee Riggs--she and her husband Vic still train Sandeno--in 1992. Even as a part-timer, her talent was obvious.

“It was apparent right away that she had extraordinary talent,” Renee Riggs said.

Sandeno became a full-time swimmer when she entered El Toro High in 1997. Two years later, she won the 400 and 800 freestyles at the Pan American Games, breaking the meet record in the 800.

“The Pan Am Games was when I started thinking I could make the Olympics,” Sandeno said. “It was my first international competition, my first time out of the country. It seemed like a big deal.”

From then to now has been a rapid ascent, barely slowed last winter by tendinitis in her left shoulder.

Young and Restless

Last fall, Jill Sandeno heard her daughter get out of bed about 10 p.m. and get in her car.

“I thought she was going to the garage to get a soda,” Sandeno said. “When she left, I was hysterical. We didn’t know where she had gone. We called the police and gave a description.”

An hour later, Sandeno returned.

“She said, ‘Mom, I got up and thought it was time to go to swimming,’ ” Jill Sandeno said. “She got to the pool and it was closed and only then did she look at the clock. That’s when you know your daughter has been in the pool too long.”

Insomnia, even then. But she has always had a lot of stuff on her mind.

“When I was younger, I was always at the top of the age group and everyone would go, ‘You’re going to the Olympics.’ ” Sandeno said. “I’d be like, ‘OK, I’m 5.’ ”

And now she is going.

Said Sandeno: “I was up thinking about all that stuff last night.”