Swim Meet - One and Done

500 yard freestyle- I was in the first heat and this was the first event.  I put 7:45 down for my seed time, which was the fastest in my heat...but I knew others had put down unrealistically slow times.  I was in the middle lane and to my right was a 28 y/o that I swim with in practice occasionally that is consistently faster than I am.  He put 8:30 down for his seed time :-/  The woman to my left had 8:15 for hers.  My guess was that a time of 7:5X was going to win the heat and that I would take 2nd place to the 28 y/o.  I did not have confidence that I could go 7:45.  When the horn sounded we left the blocks and I was relieved to get into the water and still have my goggles attached and my eyes dry.  The 28 y/o immediately started pulling away at a fast pace.  Oh well.  I consistently had 1 or 2 body lengths on the woman to my other side so I focused on just trying to hold her back and swim my own race knowing full well that there would be a big gap between 1st and 2nd.  About halfway through I was still holding off the woman, but then started seeing some occasional bubbles on the other side.  A couple of lengths later I started to see feet.  Hmmm, this might get interesting.  With 125 yards to go I made a conscious decision to start bearing down to see if I could make a play for 1st place.  With 50 to go, I was still about a half body length behind and just kept trying to make progress.  I had a really good last flip turn and now we were even.  I spent the last 25 yards looking away from my 28 y/o competitor just trying to go as hard as I could.  I found out from others afterward that when we came out of that last turn next to each other he must have gotten surprised and started a hard sprint but it was too early and he was running out of gas near the finish.  I stretched for the wall, hit it and then popped up to see the 28 y/o next to me.  I reached over and congratulated him.  I figured I didn't catch him since I wasn't looking the last 25.  Then I looked at the score board.  I got him :-)  My time - 7:31.97  His time - 7:32.04  Woohoo!!!  I guess it is a good thing that I am 2 inches taller than he is.  I got a ribbon for first place AG in this.  As it turns out with 85 swimmers at the meet I was the only one in my AG, but it is on the cube wall anyway.  This was a big deal for me.


100 yard freestyle- My seed time was 1:23.  This was my 'PR' from during practice last Spring.  This gave me the fastest seed in the event.  When I was walking over to the blocks, I saw a friend from the team.  Loise is a 71 y/o petitte woman who was regularly crushing me in workouts this time last year.  I've since gotten faster, but still remember being in awe.  I touched her on the shoulder and said, "Please try not to embarass me, OK?"  The response from this sweet lady in the nicest possible voice was, "Get ready then because embarassing or not I'm going to win this!"  She is awesome.  The horn sounded, I went in and to my surprise the goggles were still good.  About 1 out of every 4 times I dive from the blocks I forget to get my head down and I wind up with water in my eyes.  Fortunately, this didn't happen in any of the races.  I wound up in second place with 1:17.40.  I'm not sure what time Loise had, but someone else from another team had a seed time of 1:2X and wound up winning with a 1:07.  I was 3rd place in my AG and yep, you guessed it...there were exactly 3 in my AG.  The other 2 in my AG went 51:XX and 56:XX.  I've got work to do.


200 yard IM relay-  I was the final leg (freestyle) on a relay team.  I got drafted because someone else was sick.  Doing this event was a mistake because it was immediately before the 1000 yard which was pretty important to me.  The first person swam 50 yards backstroke, then the second was a 50 yard breastroke and the third was a 50 yard butterfly before I got in to do a 50 yard free.  I warned the guy before me that my #1 goal for the event was to not land on him when I jumped in but that I couldn't make any promises.  He laughed.  I was serious :-)  I swam as hard as I could but couldn't catch anyone.  I think we wound up 3rd out of 12 teams.


1000 yard free- I had about 3-4 minutes to recover from the 50 yard sprint.  My heart was pounding big time.  As I tried to calm down my lower back started to seize into one big cramp.  I got my back to release but my HR was probably still 140-something when it was time to get back in.  My internal drive was completely gone.  I had a seed time of 16 minutes which made me the slowest in a heat that included multiple people swimming 11:XX.  The guy who won swam 11:00.  When I was 1/4 done I looked up and saw 4:00 on the clock.  I figured it was time to start caring because I could actually break 16.  My previous 'PR' from a TT that I did on my own a year ago was 17:11.  I got about 10 yards into my decision to push and it was over.  For the last 3/4 of the race the only thought I had was, "Sorry everyone, but you are just going to have to wait for me.  I hope you don't mind watching me swim some practice laps becaue my race is done."  I finished in 16:16 which I'm pretty happy with given that this one turned out to be 'training' more than racing.  I've got a 3000 yard race coming up in a couple of weeks and my new goal for that is going to be to break 16:16 for each of the three 1,000 yard splits.