It is now over seven months since she propelled herself on to the world stage at the Tokyo Olympics.
Since then, swim meetings have been almost impossible to hold in New Zealand, due to Covid-19 restrictions.
She swam in one meeting in Dunedin late last year. But for the most part it has meant training, training and more training.
That has not been all bad, though. It has enabled her to do a solid block of preparation, which she hopes to benefit from later in the year.
She returns to competition at the South Island championships in Dunedin this weekend.
The national championships follow in a month’s time — and double as the qualifiers for her target event of the year, the Commonwealth Games.
She had not strayed too far from the successful formula she and coach Lars Humer have used previously, but she has been using the lack of competitions to her advantage.
"We’re not changing anything too big — we’ve just had a big period of work to do over summer," Fairweather (18) said.
"That’ll help us maintain fitness throughout the year. Apart from that, everything’s been quite similar.
"It’s been quite nice to do that big block of training and not have the interruption of training. But on the other hand, not having racing has been annoying, because obviously you train to race."
Fairweather had her efforts in Tokyo with the emerging sportswoman of the year award at the Halberg Awards last week.
Her performance to make the final of the 400m freestyle, and lift her world ranking to fourth, had been impressive in a star-studded field.
She said it was "pretty cool" to hear her name read out from her home living room, having been unable to attend.
"There’s some legends that got awards that night," she said.
"I was just pretty stoked to be among them, I guess."
Fairweather left Kavanagh College last year and has begun a Bachelor of Environmental Science by distance at Massey.
She said the distance programme fitted well with her training, as lectures were recorded and she could watch them at home in her own time.
That might become particularly valuable if she makes it to Birmingham later this year.
It would seem likely — the qualification times are similar to those she achieved to make it to the Olympics.
Medals may even come into the thinking this time around.
She acknowledged her times will put her in the mix, but did not want to speculate further.
"The times I’ve put down will put me in contention. I don’t want to jinx it or anything. I’m not going to say anything about it. But I guess it’s always in the back of the mind."