A couple of weeks ago my swim coach emailed us to say that the London Silver Dolphins decided to open their annual fall time trial (aka, unofficial swim meet) to Triathlon Club swimmers and other people at Western. I'd like to enter some meets in the spring, but I wanted to have a practice meet sometime beforehand, so I gladly signed up.
The goal of the meet is to come closest to your predicted time, though I was more interested in seeing what on earth my times would be. I haven't timed myself since I last did summer swimming in 2001, so I needed to establish some new baselines to work from. A few weeks ago at Triathlon practice we timed ourselves and I did a 50 free in 42 seconds, so I used that to guess some more times. Here's what I did:
100 IM
Predicted time: 1:40.
Actual time: 1:32.
Holy crap! I can't believe I swam that fast. It was hard. I rarely sprinted while running unless I was at the very end of a 5K where I was trying to PR. But I'm so glad I did it. I love 100 IM - it's just the right amount of IM. But that much hard butterfly made my abs REALLY sore.
100 Free
Predicted time: 1:30
Actual time: 1:19:51.
Again, I was so happy with this time. I thought it would be MUCH slower and I was pleasantly surprised. The photo below is just before the first turn (I'm the one with the blue head in lane 5).
50 Free
Predicted time: 00:41
Actual time: 00:37:52Wow, this was MUCH harder than I remembered (pretty much the theme of the day), but I also loved it. I breathed probably 4 times, which is more than I would have done years ago, but I was generally happy with how this went. Also, my swim coaches helped me figure out how to keep my goggles on when diving off the block by putting them under my cap and pulling the cap over the edge of the goggles. I have a lot of work to do if I really want to be able to sprint again and improve this time, but I also feel like a better time is completely within my reach.
I also managed to get into the lane on the end so that John could take pictures.
Now that I've done it again, I'm excited to enter some meets in the spring. I'm thinking of registering as an independent Silver Dolphin so that I can keep training with the tri-club but have some company with the team for meets.
John was kind enough to come with me (especially since I spent so many cold, rainy hours with him in Indy for the marathon), and I was reminded how many boring long stretches swim meets have. Unlike when I was a kid, no one seemed to have a deck of cards to play War and there was no snack bar where we could go get a Ring Pop. But the UWO Swim Team was there to volunteer as timers and other meet workers and they walked around with buckets of Halloween candy from time to time. From what I could tell, the Silver Dolphins are a nice bunch and I hope to swim with them again.
Now I have some times to beat!
No comments:
Post a Comment