AMYMSA swim meet at Hollidaysburg

Race: AMYMSA master's swim meet
Date: October 19, 2014
Location: Hollidaysburg Senior High School
Results: http:

Most Master’s meets have between 60 and 120 swimmers. This one had around 40, for a variety of reasons, one being that it is on the eastern geographic edge of our league so a lot of people decide not to travel there. My usual carpool partners were absent, too, so I just drove myself and made it into a day trip that included a visit to the Horseshoe Curve National Historic Landmark near Altoona and a hike on the Ghost Town Trail near…well, nothing (hence the name).

The swim meet was at the local senior high school instead of the YMCA, and this was an excellent choice. The facility was clean and recently renovated, I liked the huge bank of windows on the side, and we even had touch-pads at both pool ends so I can now examine my split times to get a better understanding of how I performed during the longer events.

EVENT #4: 200 Individual Medley (2:50.95)
I swam this 1.35 seconds better than my old personal record. This was probably all due to my butterfly, which felt effortless. I was a second ahead of Nick in the adjacent lane. I fell half a second behind Nick on the backstroke, but that’s actually good. I usually slow way down during the backstroke to recover from a too-fast butterfly. Today I continued to feel strong and negative-split my backstroke segment (second 25 yards was faster than my first 25 yards). I pulled ahead of Nick again during the breaststroke, with my 49.46 second segment solidly beating his 53.03 second segment. I negative split here, too. I was burned out by the end of the breaststroke and had a weak showing in the first 25 yards of freestyle. I found new energy at the end and negative split once again (23.18 seconds vs. 20.17). Nick beat me by around 5 seconds. It appears I am still inexperienced with pacing myself during longer races. I can also improve with my turns, as most were poor today.

Following the race I was dizzy and lightheaded. I wonder if I might have hyperventilated during the breaststroke; this would have caused the fatigue I felt during the freestyle.

EVENT #8: 100 Breaststroke (1:23.99)
I had plenty of time to recover from the 200 IM and gave a good showing with my breaststroke. I finished about half a second slower than my personal best. My dive and initial pullout were expertly executed and I had very consistent splits over the next 75 yards. I was finishing much slower than others in my heat, though, so I decided to increase my stroke rate considerably at the end. This led to a negative split of around 0.93 second in the last 25 yards.

EVENT #9: 25 Backstroke (16.91)
This was just for fun. I thought this was a personal best, but after reviewing my records I see I missed my best time by 0.41 seconds. Given the short distance of this swim, I wasn’t even close! But I beat everyone in my heat (in fact, all the other heats, too) and I felt quite full of testosterone.

EVENT #11: 100 Freestyle (1:09.46)
I swam 3.5 seconds slower than my personal best—not real good! But oh well. By the fourth event of a meet I am usually fatigued and don’t set a personal best. The meet director greeted me at the end of my swim and apologized for hitting the start buzzer before I was ready. He definitely rushed me, but it didn’t affect my time. Instead, I think I just got ahead of myself. I have been working with my coach over the last two weeks on a shoulder-driven freestyle technique that is used during short distance events. My brain switched immediately into this fast-but-inefficient stroke during the first 25 yards of my swim. I felt strong and it was fun to power through it. But I still had 75 yards to go, so I switched to hip-driven freestyle for the middle 50 yards and then tried to return to shoulder-driven strokes in the last 25 yards. My turns were still sloppy and just like last meet, I don’t remember thinking much about swimming during this race, so my mind wasn’t in it. That’s ok. I had a lot of fun today and swam very well.