Time for a swim

A few weeks ago I did my first swim meet in 8 years. This was inspired my by former swimming coach  Mr Thain who passed away in January this year. For those of you who didn't know him you can read the many tributes to him here as they really say it all.

I had looked for a club to swim with in Albany when I first arrived here but wasn't very successful but I did remember the Adirondack District Masters Swimming website that is the organisation for masters swimming in this area and runs all the local swim meets. So I found a local meet about 20 minutes away, reactivated my United States Masters Swimming membership (I was a member back in CO) and entered 4 events for the April meet.

Since I moved first came to Oklahoma in 2004 I've done 2 swimming events. One was for Worcester in the summer I was home in 2005 and one was a 2.4 mile open water swim in Horsetooth Reservoir in Fort Collins, CO in 2007. Ok, I'd played a lot of polo but I was definitely race rusty!

I swim in the UAlbany pool by myself, which is fine but it's not that easy to stay motivated for regular swimming or long practices. I've been swimming there twice a week before work and averaging about 2000 yards at a time - not a whole lot of swimming really.

So back to the meet.... I really enjoyed it!! It was pretty small (only about 30 swimmers) but it was in a nice new pool and ran very smoothly. My first swim was my longest (200 backstroke) and probably the one I was most nervous about - how do I pace a 200, it's been a long time!! I then did a 50 Fly, 100 Back and 50 back. Based on my sprint times I probably should have pushed my 100 and 200 a bit harder, but I have a better idea of what I can do now.

Were my times super fast, no. Were they as fast as I used to swim, no. But I did go faster than I expected/predicted on my entry times so that was nice. Did I win, surprisingly yes! Not only in my age group (thank goodness for age on day as I was in the 25-29 age group) but also overall in 3 of the 4 events. The 100 Back was the only one I didn't win but it was probably my favourite race as I was head to head with the winning guy for most of the race. That really helped get my racing juices flowing!

I'm not going to tell you my times, you can find them online if you are really interested but I will tell you my national 25-29 year age group rankings from the USMS website...

50 BK      #36
100 BK    #38
200 BK    #30
50 FLY    #81

Not too bad for someone who's only raced each event once this year and only swims 4000 yards a week! I can't make the next local meet but maybe I can do some other events over the summer and really start upping my racing for next season. I'm looking forward to racing again and it really isn't about winning, just doing the best I can :-)